Blue Ice Choucas Light Review

The best of the new wave of mountaineering harnesses, the Choucas Light eliminates non-essential features like padding, a belay loop, gear loops, and adjustability in pursuit of the smallest possible weight. The result is a harness that excels on low-angle terrain and for routes when hanging is limited to the occasional rappel. It runs small, so if you are on the cusp between two sizes, choose the larger one.

Performance Comparison

Hanging Comfort

The Blue Ice Choucas Light is not very comfortable for extended sessions of hanging belays or continuous rappels. The waist belt and leg loops are narrow, and there is no padding. The absence of these features signals a departure from the usual ways harnesses deliver hanging comfort. Furthermore, the leg loops are not adjustable to fit the user's legs, putting most of the strain of hanging onto the back and kidneys.

While we don't like hanging in this harness any more than we have to, the weight savings gained by eliminating comfortable features are more than tolerable for objectives where we don't plan on hanging very much. Even for technical ski routes and mountaineering objectives where a couple of rappels are expected, we find the hanging comfort of this harness to be adequate for these short bouts of vertical exposure.

Standing Comfort and Mobility

The Choucas Light excels when you need to be highly mobile. The minimalist constriction and lack of padding keep the leg and waist loops thin and flexible. Compared to most climbing harnesses on the market, this harness will make you forget that you are even wearing one.

When you plan on spending all day slogging up a glacier, skinning to a high col, or cramponing up to the summit, you don't want your harness to limit your mobility and decrease the efficiency of your movement. This harness won't limit you at all, allowing you to don your harness earlier than you otherwise might. Some of our testers even put their harnesses on at the car before long ski mountaineering missions. One wore their harness under their ski pants, french-style, pulling the tie-in loops out of their pants fly when needed for rappelling late in the day.

Features

What features? The Choucas Light eliminates anything you don't need for the occasional rappel or belay, including gear loops, a continuous waist belt, adjustable leg loops, and a belay loop. Instead, you'll get two minimal loops of thin webbing for clipping gear on the sides of the harness, a slightly adjustable waist clip, and two rabbit ear tie-in/clip-in points that are used similarly to hard points on more traditional harnesses.

One nice touch is the ice screw holder on the side of one leg loop. This allows an ice screw to be clipped to the “gear loop” with a carabiner, then the tube of the screw inserts into this holder, preventing the screw from dangling around. The minimalist webbing loops on the sides are large enough to hold a light rack, a couple of slings, and a few lockers. If you need a larger rack for your objective, you might be encountering more vertical terrain than this harness is meant for.

Versatility

The Choucas Light is a highly specialized harness for ski touring on glaciers, ski alpinism, and mountaineering. It doesn't perform well for rock climbing, ice climbing, and gym climbing. While it is a certified type-C sit harness that will hold your weight in vertical terrain, we highly recommend against using it for these activities due to the extreme lack of comfort during long hanging sessions.

That said, our testers are big fans of light and efficient travel in the mountains, and we'll shave weight wherever we can. We use this harness while guiding easy rock climbing objectives on low-angle terrain and alpine ridges, even when a rappel or two is necessary. It might not be the best climbing harness out there for this kind of terrain, but it gets the job done at a low weight.

Adjustability

The Choucas Light offers a small amount of length adjustment in the waist, but not much, so it's important to select the right size before you make your purchase. The waist belt is adjustable only by a small cinch strap in the front of the harness that offers about five inches of length adjustment. The leg loops are not adjustable, but seem to be sized in a roomy diameter that will work for most users.

Every component of this harness is designed to save weight, so it's no surprise that key adjustability features like an adjustable waist belt with a self-locking buckle or adjustable leg loops are omitted. Most people looking for the lightest harness won't take offense to the lack of adjustability found here.

Should You Buy the Blue Ice Choucas Light?

If weight and mobility are the primary concerns on your mountaineering or skiing objective, there is no better choice than the Choucas Light. It is also a great choice for anyone who spends a lot of time climbing classic mountaineering routes on glaciers and snow slopes. This harness costs about as much as other high-performance harnesses, and the incredible weight savings make it a good value for niche users looking for a specialized harness. However, if you are looking for one harness that will be useful across many climbing disciplines, this isn't the one for you.

What Other Climbing Harnesses Should You Consider?

While this harness is great for mountaineering objectives, technical skiing, and glacier travel, it isn't versatile enough for more vertically oriented activities like ice and rock climbing. If you are looking for the lightest harness that can be used for any type of climbing, the excellent Blue Ice Choucas Pro is a similar harness with a mesh waistband and fixed-length leg loops. But it also comes with a self-locking buckle and full-sized gear loops, making it a great choice for more technical climbing. Also lightweight, the Petzl Sitta is our favorite all-around climbing harness on the market — but it's expensive. If you need a harness that can do anything in the mountains and doesn't cost much, the Black Diamond Technician is a decent choice. But unless you are planning to spend lots of time in hanging belays, we'd prefer climbing in the Choucas Pro.