Blue Ice - Harfang Tour hardboot crampon
Harfang Tour
What we liked …
The colour! Very light, and foldable and compact for storage. The heavy-duty strap seems super robust. Great adjustability. Anti-balling plates.
What we didn’t
A bit pricey.
The Verdict
OUR RATING
4.5 out of 5
THE SHORT READ…
They are light, super compact for storage, and have good adjustability. Oh and are a gorgeous colour. At £140 quid they are pricier (and the only reason not to give 5/5) and slightly heavier than the equivalent Petzl Leopards, but do feel more rugged have a bit more fine adjustability. With anti-balling plates too, these are a great piece of kit.
THE LONG READ …
Design
Very similar to the Petzl Leopard LLF crampons, but with a heavy-duty strap joining the metal parts instead of strings. The same number of points as the Leopard but one of the pairs of teeth, in the middle, is adjustable in position, or entirely removable to save a little more weight.
The Tour with it’s all-aluminium teeth is not the cheapest variant in the Harfang range, but it is one of the lightest - and aluminium teeth are fine for those of us where front-pointing up cliff-faces is only incidental in a tour (and even then, something has probably gone wrong) and not the main point of it!
Crucially, they are foldable and fit pretty well together teeth-to-teeth for carrying in your pack. And just look at the size difference to my old Grivel full-metal crampons!
Adjustability
Plenty of this:
Primarily, the main strap length is adjustable for boot sizing.
The plastic rear heel lock has an adjustment-nut to allowing you to really fine-tune the tension a bit more than the Leopard allows.
The front toe bail has a choice of two positions.
The middle pair of teeth can be moved back and forth along the strap to give the right positioning under different sized boot forefoot.
The heel strap is first secured by hooking one end of it over a very simple and robust metal hook on the other end. Then simply pulled tight. It holds really well. To undo this, the small rope ‘handle’ is pulled forward which loosens it all off.
In use
Having adjusted these in the apartment to what I thought was a perfect tension, they of course fell off after just a few steps on the mountain. So, do take your time getting these right, on your boots, and allow some time on your first outing to check and adjust it all as you go.
I’d recommend getting them set up inside so it’s as tight as you can get it - the heel lock should realy go click! That should get the big adjustments right, like the length of the main strap, since you ideally don’t want to be adjusting that on the hill - so that out there you should only need to use the barrel-adjuster on the heel to do fine-tuning.
Also do check the position of the middle teeth, if you kept them on so it’s in a good position under your forefoot.
The heavy duty strap looks very tough and shows no sign of wear despite my walking over quite a few sharp rocks with them.
Storage
Individually, the 3 sets of teeth on each foot kind of jam together well, with several ways to position the mid-teeth during that folding. You’ll find your own preferred style for that.
The heel piece doesn’t ‘click’ into place anywhere and does tend to spring up a bit. But, it’s all so small when you bring the two sets of folder teeth together, that you can reasonably hold it all together in one hand while you stick it in a storage pouch. Or, as I’m doing - I love how compact these are - carry them sandwiched between your ski-crampons, and keep both in the same pouch! There’s a ton of just air between two ski-crampons when teeth-to-teeth, so this saves even more room in my backpack - and they can share the same carry-bag.
Other features
Anti-balling plates - The Harfang Tour comes with kind of silicon anti-balling plates under each set of teeth:
Anti-balling plates
Other Harfang models
The Tour is just one of 5 different variations on the overal Harfang design - Three of these are actually the same design as the Tour, just with options for having steel instead of aluminium for some or all of the three sets of teeth - giving you the ability to tune the weight you are carrying but also, if you are anticipating doing a fair amount of real mountaineering, steel is the way to go.
The remaining two variations are on the Harfang Alpine crampon, very similar but where the Tour’s removable middle set of teeth has been built back into the front set of teeth, which are steel. For rear teeth you have the option of steel or aluminium.
Technical details - Harfang Tour hardboot crampon
Weight: 360g per pair, as tested
Shoe sizes: 35EU - 47EU
Harfang Tour hardboot crampon
SUMMARY…
A really nice set of hardboot crampons - a bit heavier than the Petzl Leopard LLF’s but you might feel that’s worth it to get a bit more fine-adjustment ability, anti-balling plates and potentially a bit more robustness with the heavy-duty strap compared to strings - though you will also pay a bit more for them .
First time round, it can take a bit of incremental adjustment to get them to really lock onto your boot, but once that’s done, you are away.
I’m looking forward to getting these out on these again this coming season. I absolutely love it when I get to put on my bootcrampons, usually because I’m crapping myself either about the steepness or the icy-ness of the slope I’m on and I always just feel so secure once I have a pair of crampons on.