The New York Times | February 2007
American Journeys
Winter Revels in Ice and Steam in Ouray, Colo.
By Helen Olsson
IN the 1870s, miners around Ouray, Colo., wielded pickaxes in search of gold and silver. Today people are still swinging axes in Ouray, but instead of following veins of ore, they blaze their way up vertical curtains of ice. Even novices can join in, and after the ice climbing, everyone can thaw out in Ouray’s simmering hot springs.
Perched at 7,760 feet in a box canyon in southwest Colorado, tidy little Ouray (pronounced you-RAY) is impossibly beautiful. An amphitheater of glacier-carved rose-colored rock rises up 4,000 feet and cradles the town, 50 square blocks studded with bright Victorians and converted saloons.
In summer, Ouray draws four-wheelers who head into the San Juan Mountains past sleepy ghost towns and high-alpine meadows brimming with wildflowers. Winter has traditionally been quieter, but that is changing. When my husband, Jeff, and I took a trip to Ouray last month, we found a sizable faction of cold-weather enthusiasts reveling in water in its various forms: Besides the ice and the muscle-loosening contrast of the hot springs, there’s snow for skiing and snowshoeing.
In 1995, using a clever plumbing system of pipes and sprayers, a group of locals created the Ouray Ice Park at the south edge of town. At night, water spurts from 150 shower heads over the lip of the Uncompahgre Gorge, dribbling down and freezing across a mile-long stretch of cliffs. Rob Holmes, who calls himself a “high-altitude, low-temperature creative irrigation specialist,” makes the ice. Local climbers call him the ice farmer. In the morning, he and an assistant hand-crank 340 valves to stem the flow. “It’s not rocket surgery,” he said, “but it is a complex system.” A nonprofit corporation owns the park, and the climbing is free.
Ice climbing in its purest form takes place in the backcountry. To find a suitable frozen waterfall, climbers slog for miles to remote spots — and in a sport where hazards include free-falling 400-pound ice chunks, being so far from help can be daunting. The Ice Park makes the sport more accessible and less life-threatening.
Newcomers like JoAnn Fleming, a 52-year-old accountant from Brooklyn, can come to Ouray and give it a whirl.
In January, Ms. Fleming joined Jayson Stewart, 35, an Air Force intelligence officer from Pensacola, Fla., and Matt Sims, 43, a Homeland Security Department employee in Dallas, in a two-day ice-climbing course run by a company called San Juan Mountain Guides. A newspaper clipping on Ouray had been pinned next to Ms. Fleming’s desk for months before her trip. “I don’t go to places where the tourists go,” she said. “And I love winter sports more than anything — except baseball.”
The class met in a basement room with a fraying red velvet couch, a clanking furnace and walls hung with supplies of climbing rope, ice axes and harnesses. The students were fitted with plastic helmets, stiff climbing boots and metal-pronged crampons sharp enough to slice through ski pants.
Their guide led them to an area called South Park, where routes are named for episodes of the snarky TV series. (Probably best not to know you are climbing a route called Kenny Dies.) Climbers hung from ropes slung every 20 feet or so, looking like a SWAT team of miners in Gore-Tex. Aside from echoes of cascading snow and ice and staccato calls of “On belay!” it was eerily quiet. “It’s a silent sport,” Ms. Fleming said. “But I am not.”
By day two, she was scaling a 70-foot veil of blue ice, swinging the serrated axes and kicking her crampons with gusto. She and her classmates learned to belay — a climbing maneuver using ropes and anchors — and to summit a seven-story frozen waterfall and rappel back down.
The vertiginous thrill of ice climbing isn’t for everyone. Many come as spectators, viewing the Ice Park from one of two bridges that span the gorge or from a series of metal stands built into the rock walls. On our way to Box Canyon Falls, Ouray’s next-biggest attraction, Jeff and I stopped to watch a climber scale a 200-foot chimney of ice like a spider. Next we were awed by geology as we followed a metal catwalk hugging the canyon walls leading to the falls. In spring, water plummets a spectacular 285 feet. In winter, it recedes behind rock and ice, squirting out lower down, but the roar is still ear-splitting.
Beyond the waterfalls, frozen and fluid, the area has more to offer. After her climbing experience, Ms. Fleming planned to spend a few days snowmobiling and downhill skiing in Telluride, an hour’s drive west. (More aggressive skiers head to nearby Silverton, a lift-served guided backcountry ski area.) But first she decompressed by nosing around Ouray’s pretty main street, lined with century-old Victorian buildings from the restored Beaumont Hotel to the unrestored but quaint 1883 Livery Barn. With 1880s charm oozing from every pressed-metal ceiling, the entire town has been designated a National Historic District.
Ouray is named for Chief Ouray, a diplomatic Ute Indian remembered for keeping the peace between whites and natives. The Utes had long come to this spot to soak in the hot springs, which they considered sacred and curative. Now Ouray has a huge open-air Hot Springs Pool, first opened in 1927 — a 150-by-250-foot oval reservoir holding nearly a million gallons of low-sulfur mineralized water. It’s divided into sections ranging from 60 to 106 degrees, for soaking, diving and lap swimming.
During our visit, on a wintry weekend, the pool was awash in humanity as tattooed backcountry snowboarders mixed with toddlers in inflatable doughnuts. The setting was ethereal, with pink and orange canyon walls scraping the sky overhead and vapors rising and rolling over the water’s surface.
For a more private experience, soakers head for the clothing-optional Orvis Hot Springs just north of Ouray, which has four outdoor hot pools, including a 104-degree pond rimmed by boulders and waterfalls.
In the bowels of the Wiesbaden Hot Springs Spa and Lodgings in Ouray is a vapor cave with a shallow soaking pool. The cave was discovered in the 1800s by miners tunneling for gold. Today Roland McCook, Chief Ouray’s great-great-grandson, comes to soak, chant and burn sage. Other visitors come in hopes of curing what ails them, from arthritis to cancer. The owner of the Wiesbaden, Linda Wright-Minter, 69, who visits the cave daily, makes no promises. But with her big energy and seamless skin, she makes you wonder: “Nobody thinks I’m 69,” she said. “And I don’t feel over 30.”
Ouray seems to attract an eclectic mix of people. While browsing the rainbow of ornaments in Ouray Glassworks, we met the owner and artist, Sam Rushing, 54, an ice climber with graying hair swept back in a ponytail. A 10th-generation Mississippian, he left the heat and mosquitoes of the Delta, where he owned a vineyard, and settled in Colorado 16 years ago. He makes a living selling his hand-blown glass, but he is also a connoisseur of ice. Ouray, he said, has a perfect microclimate for ice making — cold enough so that the waterfalls freeze, warm enough so that the water pipes don’t.
In the mountains near town, the driving is epic. With a death-grip on the wheel, we followed the Million Dollar Highway, a paved-over wagon road that connects Ouray to Silverton, about 20 miles to the south. The narrow ribbon of asphalt clings to the mountainside in a series of S-curves around sheer drop-offs. If you dare avert eyes from road, the views span a crush of peaks and snow-choked bowls reminiscent of the Alps.
At Red Mountain Pass, telemark skiers scribed lazy arcs through fresh powder and snowmobilers high-marked through the trees. We snowshoed alongside century-old skeletons of mining camps. Snowshoers and cross-country skiers also flock to Ironton Park Nordic center nine miles south of Ouray, built on the site of an 1883 mining town. The ski trails cross piles of tailings and wind past old trestles and mine shafts.
By trip’s end, we were invigorated by the cycle of hot and cold, ice and steam. We met up for dinner with Ms. Fleming, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Sims at the Bon Ton, a fixture in Ouray. They rehashed their ice-climbing adventures: “We really did it ourselves,” said Ms. Fleming, whose knees were black and blue from hammering the ice. “I’m glad it’s over, but I’m very glad I did it.”
They toasted: “To ice!” Mr. Sims peered into his water glass and said, “I’ll never look at ice the same way again.”