New Articles: Keep Your Hands Warm for Winter Climbing

If you're ice climbing or mountaineering in winter, it's easy to get cold hands and even frostbite on your fingers. It's important to keep your hands warm and fingers flexible on frigid outings. When you're in the high mountains like Mount Whitney, Denali, Mont Blanc, and Mount Everest, it's a given fact that your hands are going to get cold. How you deal with that chill makes a difference. You can come home with finger frostbite or finger freedom, depending on what kind of gloves and mittens you use.

To find out more about keeping your hands toasty and digits frostbite-free, I've posted a couple new articles--Keep Your Hands Warm and The Best Mountaineering Glove System by winter mountaineer and contributing writer Susan Paul. A three-part glove system, with glove liners, good gloves or mittens, and taped mittens, is the best system. Susan gives you her thoughts on creating a glove system as well as suggestions on which products to buy.

Next week, I'll be adding a couple more articles that Susan is working on, including Warm Hands with Proper Gear and What to Do if Your Hands Get Cold. This winter, she's also going to be testing some of new battery-operated gloves and posting her thoughts and reviews of these products, while I'm working on an article about keeping your hands warm on winter rock climbs. See ya out there on the rock and snow!

Photograph above: A climber near the summit of Denali needs good gloves for warm hands. Photograph © Mike Powell/Getty Images.