In reply to George Ormerod:
That's interesting, although I'm not hugely convinced of the difference between dual vertical points and dual horizontal points. What do you think? Do you think penetration (stop sniggering at the back! ) is noticeably better with vertical points? I agree that dual points are (or can be in many situations) more stable than monos, but don't see why the points being vertical is really any different from horizontal.
I remember thinking a lot about just how different ice can be from other bits of ice! I've never climbed in Canada, short of a summery scramble up some minor Rockies peak, but notice from reports and a lot of social media people seem to climb a lot in really low temperatures, around -20 or colder. I have wondered if many of those areas being quite a lot further south than where I climbed means the sun is stronger and makes that a bit more bearable? But anyway, my experience of -20 is the ice is incredibly hard to climb well and even harder to protect https://lightfromthenorth.blogspot.com/2010/01/things-that-we-forgot-when-i... but I could imagine if you were climbing on the ice like it was the weekend of the blog post often, you'd be pretty obsessed about your crampon front points!
I've climbed in quite cold conditions a lot further north than southern Finland too - but up in the Norwegian arctic first of all just the vast amounts of ice seem to make a difference (weird microclimates around massive icefalls, particularly as water is freezing on them early season - I guess the heat energy has to go somewhere?) along with the maritime environment - most of the ice I've climbed around Lyngen is never more than a few hundred metres away from open sea water.
Right, I should do some work - I'm falling down my favourite ice/crampon points rabbit hole again!