In reply to gethin_allen:
> I had a good day out on Sunday with plenty of solid plunging in soft deep snow and was wondering a bit how others nearby were getting on with their fancy leashless tools. Surely someone must be able to come up with a design for a leashless technical tool that isn't so compromised for general stuff.
It's not like I've exhaustive experience of various snow conditions, or axes, but the only time I can think of where I found plungability a problem was when trying to make a stomper belay in fairly hard snow with Taakoons (they probably don't really count as fancy leashless tools these days, but the hand rest is quite broad) - couldn't come close to pushing the shaft down, so I just dug it in horizontally and stood on the handle and head.
Which surely is the lesson; if the snow's soft enough, you'll manage with plunging even with funky tools*, if not, you'll think of something else.
I've got Nomics now, and the thing I miss most is being able to reliably use one as a point of balance when wobbling around in rocks when traversing or descending, since they don't have a point at the end of the shaft (I've got the old ones). I just have to be a bit more careful, and accept that I'll be even slower through such terrain.
*Instead of holding the head and plunging the shaft for balance, the bend in the shaft of the Nomics etc is such that you can just keep holding the shaft and plunge the head when moving up snow slopes - Dave MacLeod demonstrates at one point in The Pinnacle, I think. Or it might have been Ueli Steck on the Eiger