Create the end-all, be-all, badass ice climbing machine.

That was the brief.

For the past three years, the engineers, developers, and athletes of BD have coalesced under the cover of winter to iterate and innovate a new revolutionary ice climbing tool

Through that in-depth testing process, the team came to a head. An aluminum head, to be exact. Shifting the paradigm from steel to aluminum in the heads of our ice tools allowed us to design a component exchange system of cast-tungsten head-weights, forged picks and hammer configurations that all seamlessly integrate into the head of the Hydra. This Integrated Component Exchange (I.C.E.) system allows climbers to optimize the Hydra for any winter climbing pursuit. From pure water ice, mixed climbing, dry-tooling, all the way to the peaks of the Himalaya, the Hydra is a many-headed beast that can send it all.

“I worked more on these tools with Black Diamond than anything else I ever had,” says BD Athlete Will Gadd.

“The final version has me more stoked on BD tools than anything I’ve had for the last 15 years. I’ve climbed huge ice routes with them, M-Hard, alpine stuff … they just swing incredibly well into ice and are stable on mixed.”