Abseiling is the friction technique of descending a steep face on a rope.
Bivouac means passing a night or waiting out a storm in the open without the protection of a tent. A bivvy bag or a snow hole can provide a valuable shelter. But using a tent (including a so-called bivvy tent) is not bivouacking, and a mobile lightweight camp should not be confused with a bivouac.
Blacklight: geologists and prospectors use this device when searching for certain minerals in the night, which in daylight would hardly be noticed because of their insignificant appearance (for instance Scheelite, a valuable Wolfram ore, which under the ultraviolet rays of the prospector’s lamp gives an extraordinary reflected glow).
Nuts are made of metal (threaded with wire or rope) and, inserted into cracks, can be used to protect a leader against a fall. An important environmental and sporting factor is that they are removed by the second climber thus leaving no permanent, tell-tale fixture in the cliff.
Friends are camming devices used for protection in the same way as nuts.
‘Penitentes’: a Spanish term for penitents. Refers to peculiar pointed forms of ice on the glacier surface in the Andes, the Hindu Kush and other high places where, during the melting process of ice, a combination of temperature factors create hundreds of pin-sharp and often slightly bent figures, sometimes so close together that they become an almost impenetrable obstacle.
Prusik slings are loops of thin cord fixed by a special sliding knot on to the main rope (under weight, the knot tightens and you can stand in the sling; without weight it can be easily pushed upwards on the rope – thus using two Prusik loops you can ascend vertically through the air on the main rope).
A Sérac is an ice tower or ice cliff.
Westalpenstil/West Alpine Style was a new way for climbing an 8,000-metre peak, which Hermann Buhl devised in 1957. This approach was without the help of high-altitude porters and without using oxygen apparatus. Fixed camps and a limited number of fixed ropes were permissible. Broad Peak became the first 8,000-metre peak to be climbed in this ‘alpine-style’, which was a true pioneering achievement and still remains the only first ascent of an eight-thousander by this technique. Today what climbers call alpine-style implies also a refusal to use fixed camps and ropes. In fact, Buhl and Diemberger attempted Chogolisa in modern alpine-style, and Wintersteller and Schmuck climbed Skilbrum that way immediately after the first ascent of Broad Peak in 1957, without inventing a separate label for a method which they saw as simply a lightweight version of Westalpenstil.