Personally I would go with what Pronto mentioned about using rewriting the class but if you do not fancy a rewrite you can get the breadcrumb array from the block's cache key information. The cache key information contains as serialized base64 encoded version of the breadcrumbs array so the following code snippet will allow you to get the crumbs array and then you can do what you want with it.

$breadcrumbs = Mage::app()-&gt;getLayout()-&gt;getBlock('breadcrumbs');
$cacheKeyInfo = $breadcrumbs-&gt;getCacheKeyInfo();
$breadcrumb = unserialize(base64_decode($cacheKeyInfo['crumbs']));


On pages with breadcrumbs this will be an array and on other pages this will be NULL.

Check if page has breadcrumbs from template
Somebody told me that there is a difference in sharpness between a zoom lens vs. prime lens. A  58-200mm will give sharp focus in the center of the frame but blurry performance at the corners,  while in the meantime a prime 200mm will give a sharp definition to the whole frame of the photograph. Is this true? 
