A Grossly Inadequate (and Possibly Erroneous) Introduction to Ice Climbing

photo: Moon. Walking up to a route known as "Deadbolt" in Joe's Valley, UT. Probably my best lead this season.

WHAT/HOW

Ice climbing is a growing but still esoteric branch of climbing (though global warming may halt future growth of the sport - already ice seasons are quite a bit shorter than they were ten years ago in the mid-west). Equipment and methods in ice climbing are pretty radically different than those used in rock climbing. In some ways the movement is not as nuanced or specialized as rock climbing, but because the medium, ice, is so much more volatile, unpredictable, and impetuous than stone the engagement required to climb hard is just as high. In general ice is considered to be more dangerous, with a fall usually producing darker shades of consequence than a fall onto a bolt or traditional protection.

My ice tools

A lot of the enjoyment of ice climbing comes from wielding the tools that, like a "tool" used by a scientist, increase your ability to read your subject. The ice climber is equipped with two "ice tools," shorter, more aggressive permutations of the mountaineers ice ax (which is somewhat of a misnomer  as ice axes are used more in snow than ice) whose picks are designed to bite hard ice and support a lot of weight. Crampons are donned on the feet. Ice climbing crampons differ from your general mountaineering-use crampons; for one, the front points extend forward at a more horizontal angle, and many are a thin blade designed to penetrate ice, as opposed to the front points of crampons intended for hard snow, which are wider. Secondly, the secondary points on ice climbing crampons have a much more aggressive angle than standard crampons. Once the climber has kicked at the ice to get a solid foot placement, if her form is good she'll drop her heels to engage the secondary points which create a far more stable platform for the foot than if just the two front points are engaged in the ice.

Climbing boot with ice-climbing crampon.

Movement up an ice flow is somewhat repetitive, generally speaking. The goal is to maintain as stable a stance as possible; general wisdom has settled into promoting the "triangle." The climber will reach up with one tool and swing until getting a solid "pick." The climber will then center her weight around that point, trying to keep her feet on the same level, creating a triangle (from the planted ice tool to her two feet below). Once in this position, the climber reaches with her second tool above the first and swings again until getting a stable pick.Trying to keep her arm gripping the tool straight instead of flexing and prematurely fatiguing her bicep and forearms, she'll move her feet up until she's in a squatting position, again, aiming to have both feet on an even plane and centered around the higher tool, forming a triangle with her body. Once getting her crampon points engaged into the ice she'll stand up, removing the lower tool and swinging as she stands. This is the basic and most effective movement up ice. Of course, it's not always possible or really comfortable to maintain this depending on the contours of the flow, but maintaining balance around one high tool and keeping your two tools staggered is pretty basic form. (Sometimes it feels safer to always be hanging on two tools that are placed next to each other, especially on steep ice; the problem with this is that ice fractures horizontally, so if with one tool you are trying to get a placement close to the other, and you swing and blow out the section of ice your other tool is planted in you will fall, and you don't fall on ice. If, however, you're swinging above and to the side of the other tool you should be okay if a slab of ice fractures and falls.)

An ice screw

Protecting an ice climb is also quite different from rock climbing; instead of fixed bolts or "pro," the ice climber employs screws designed specifically for ice. These screws range in length from 10 cm (called a "stubby") to 22 cm; the length of screw used will depend on how thick the ice is. General wisdom is that the longer the screw you can use, the better. While climbing, when getting ready to place a screw, the climber will get one tool planted  very stably above herself and make sure her feet are as comfortable as possible. Placing the other tool off to the side or above the area a screw will be placed in, the climber reaches down to her harness to retrieve a screw. The best place to place a screw is somewhere between your navel and your chest as you can generate the most force pushing the screw into the ice as you turn it from this area. Then, palming the head of the screw while maintaining your grip on the tool above you with your other hand, you rotate the screw (while pushing hard against it) back and forth until you feel the teeth "bite" and can let go without the screw falling. From there, depending on the model of screw being used, you take the head and swivel it into the ice. If the ice is good and dense, ice shavings will funnel out the hollow center of the screw. Once the head is flush with the ice you clip into the end with a draw and then clip your rope and continue climbing up. One of the great cruelties of ice climbing is that placing a screw to insure yourself in the event of a fall has the potential to be very tiring, though with modern screw designs it's a cakewalk compared to what the pioneers of the sport were up against.

Screw with a draw attached and the rope clipped into the draw.

photo: Moon - placing a screw on the final pitch of a route known as "CCC
Falls," in Joe's Valley, UT.

WHY

Ice climbing is amazing. Just as couples must eventually work to learn how to deal with each other's shifting personalities and moods when no longer doped up on fey romantic idealizations, the vertical world presents shifting terrain as mercurial and complex as a long-term partner. I became enamored with stone this past year and lamented the close of the rock climbing season. When friends began to talk excitedly about ice climbing, however, I realized the climbing season didn't have to be over. It is exhilarating to learn how to respond to these changes in environment, which, when equipped with the right tools, become invitations. What was once impassable terrain becomes a beautifully improbable playground.

There is something of kinship between person and stone-hard water. It is impetuous. It changes from hour to hour with subtle shifts in temperature. It deceives and lies -- more than one climber has started up a massive pillar that appeared to be stable only to have it collapse. While it can be difficult to read it will often leaves clues as to its true temperament. If water is running behind the ice, beware - the ice is not securely bonded to the stone it overlays. If it is well below freezing the cold will literally suck the moisture from the ice, causing it to become bulletproof-hard and brittle, exponentially increasing the physical exertion it will take to climb it (when ice is soft you can often get a good "stick" on the first swing with a tool, when it is hard and brittle it tends to fracture creating unsafe placements, and sometimes you might swing four or five times before getting a trustworthy placement). However, this chaotic medium rewards the cautious and the respectful. Ice climbing is like nothing I've ever done, and pushing myself on this medium past my comfort zone, taking fear as a partner rather than an enemy, has been a richly rewarding emotional and physical experience.

Ice is explosive, volatile, and a passing specter. Thus, when you climb ice there is no thought of conserving the inviolate and pristine flow of calcified water that you are picking your way up as there is with mountains or classic rock routes. You literally destroy it. You swing and kick, fully weaponized from your feet to your hands, showering shards and clusters of ice that can reach the size of a basketball or a boulder. Climbers know the ice will start to heal overnight as more water is slowly frozen over the existing flow, and that in a few months the ice will completely melt away and be back after fall has fallen (though the same flows of ice rarely form the same from year to year; sometimes entire routes will disappear for years at a time, only to mysteriously form again after several seasons of hiatus). The ethic of "leave no trace" is left behind (within reason). I exaggerate a little: in tricky or thin conditions, or when the ice is especially steep and sustained in difficulty, oftentimes the movements required and the swings will be very delicate and deliberate, though even then fracturing and breaking the ice is unavoidable.

Ice presents, along a scale of time much more accessible, the truth about stone.

A beautifully sculpted mountain, ostensibly unchanged through the life of a woman or man and generations of their offspring, seems to assert its agelessness. The arches of Southern Utah, fixed preposterously mid-acrobatic, fool the romantic into visions of dinosaurs marching beneath exactly the same formations, unaltered by interminable eons of time. By touch stone convinces you it is durable and resistant to change, the way the word is used in language reveals our belief in its constancy. The truth is that these formations are relatively young and in a geologically or cosmically short period of time will be gone or dramatically altered and that stone rots and is reborn the same as ice. Grains of ground stone and shattered talus are the toppled memories of former titans. To such all shall be reduced. Soon, however, often after a seemingly total disintegration  they will be reconstituted, perhaps in layers of sediment that wind, water, ice, and deep tectonic power will temper into new constellations, only to eventually again be lost in time, bound to that "ancient pulse of germ and birth." Ice does not hide this process in the prodigious folds of centuries passing. It prefigures the decay and rebirth of the very stone it clings to and sculpts.

Is any activity so heavily determined by the transience of all things, or serve as such a powerful reminder of one's own imminent re-absorption? When I get introspective about ice, I almost always think about the pulse of matter, its coming and going, and by association, my own. This is not unpleasant.

Though ice is a revelation of mortality, it is a simultaneous and triumphant proclamation of reincarnation and the immortality of matter (I'm way over my education here, guys, don't fault me for such effusions of naive whimsy).

A route near Price known as the Dirtcicle, aka Pricecicle, September of 2012

The very same route several months later, January 2013

Witness another dramatic transformation that occurred in just one month's time:

photo: Moon  - "Donorcicle," Joe's Valley, December 2012

photo: Moon - "Donorcicle," January 2013

Took some ice to the nose that shot at me after swinging
my tool into some brittle ice.

When I climb ice and the waterfall I'm kicking and punching is flying around me in bits and pieces,  spraying my face and belayer with adamantine missiles just as dangerous as falling stone, and think that this is the same stuff surfers ride just exposed to different conditions, on a basic level of wonder I get the nature worshipers and the old-world shamans that danced at seasons turn and lay prostrate before the sun, invoking the favor of gods they perceived in the natural powers, strong enough to sunder stone and raise forests in swift strokes of fire or avalanche. Standing below a two-hundred foot flow of near-vertical ice, then ascending it, awakens that prehistoric sense of awe before the terrible finite fragility of flesh, confronted with such forces.

Thomas Hardy, poet, wrote about the "ancient pulse of germ and birth," and that's where my brain goes when I think of ice. Things start getting archetypal and I get all misty-eyed and pompously ponder my own mortality and the beauty of decomposition -- that is, until I'm pumped stupid partway up a steep pitch with bad ice and trying desperately to get a screw to bite because any moment now my arms are just going to give like a tower of jello and man oh man I don't know how solid that last screw was.....

photo: Marauder - just such a situation. I was really freaked out here. "The Fang," Provo Canyon.

WHERE 

Primarily in Utah. This is my first season climbing ice. Now that I have a solid foundation, however, I hope to expand the horizons of my experience and climb in Wyoming, in other parts of Colorado (I spent three days climbing in Ouray), Idaho, and maybe even back east in New Hampshire. The ice season is not over, though it is past its zenith (at least in Utah), and I'm beginning to look eagerly to rock climbing. I doubt any out-of-state trips are lurking in the next month, unless another really good cold snap firms everything up and breathes some new life into the ice.

I've climbed in Salt Lake:

photo: Scott Cooney - "Scruffy Band,"  leading the final crux column at the top of the route

Provo:

View of a route known as "Stairway to Heaven," one of the most recognizable and iconic of UT's ice routes, as seen from the top of the first pitch.

Santaquin:

A route known as "Squash Head" in Santaquin Canyon

Joe's Valley:

photo: Moon - "CCC Falls"

and Ouray, Colorado:

photo: Moon - "Pick 'O the Vick," Ouray Ice Park

I hope to cover each area and my experiences at each in individual blog posts that I'll try to have done and "published" over the course of the next two to three weeks.

As always, Moon has been a great partner and we've both seen a lot of progress in what we can climb on lead.

Moon after a successful lead of the great, steep route known as "Deadbolt," Joe's Valley. 

BEYOND ICE CLIMBING...?

Mountaineering, rock climbing, ice climbing - all of these skill sets can be applied (sometimes all on the same route) in alpine situations. Alpinism, or technical climbing in the mountains, is the goal. Frequently, ice routes in the mountains contain sections of rock interspersed with ice in the same pitch. This gets into mixed climbing, which is another beast entirely, and at the moment beyond what I've done. Besides mixed climbing it's getting close to the time where I want to take these skill sets to the mountains and knock out some classic routes, such as Dreamweaver Couloir and Notch Couloir on Long's Peak in Colorado.

Then there's finishing school, starting a family, leaving my 20s, getting a career more substantial than waiting tables (especially as I've moved about as far up that ladder as it goes in Utah), you know, death and taxes type stuff.

Before that though there is...

THIS SUMMER

The big trip this summer will be a month long climbing bender in Europe. Moon and I (along with Marauder for the first two weeks) will be climbing in the Dolomites in Italy, the Matterhorn and Eiger (weather permitting) in Switzerland, and the French Alps in Chamonix. We leave beginning of August - it should be a phenomenal trip, and with two incredible photographers the pictures will doubtless be better than my memories.

There are quite a few other interesting more local objectives we'll be hitting as well, and I look forward to documenting those.