National Geographic Adventure Magazine | February 2006
When Heaven Freezes Over
Colorado’s Ouray Ice Park is single-handedly transforming the sport of ice climbing (and saving a town in the process)
By Cliff Ransom | Photography By Steve Casimiro
THE HIKE DOWN INTO THE UNCOMPAHGRE GORGE IS STEEP. Ahead of me, my guide, Matt Wade, picks his way over dead, snow-covered logs and across a trickling creek. As we press deeper, I can hear the Uncompahgre River below, coursing around boulders, and something else: the rhythmic crunch of ice tools and crampons echoing off the surrounding walls. At the bottom, a handful of climbers roped up and decked out in gear and helmets are scaling the glacial-blue ice that coats the sides of the gorge. The frozen slabs drape down from above in a curtain of pillars and icicle-fanged caves that glitters in the early morning sun. Matt drops his pack unceremoniously at the base of the crag and hands me an ice tool. "If you’re going to learn to ice climb, you’re going to need this.”
For years I’ve been a devoted rock climber, and for years ice climbing has always been high on my list of sports to try - but never high enough. It seemed like there was always a barrier to entry: long, cold hikes, expensive gear, or a scarcity of consistent conditions. But then a friend told me about Ouray, Colorado.
In the past decade, the tiny town of Ouray (pop. 800) has become the center for ice climbing in the United States. Perched on the edge of the ragged San Juan Mountains a hundred miles south of Grand Junction, it’s home to Ouray Ice Park, a man-made ice climbing area built within the winding Uncompahgre Gorge. What officially started in 1994 as a homegrown operation has become the single greatest repository of ice routes in the world. Unlike remote backcountry sites, the park is built to be climber-friendly, with top-rope anchors already set up, access five minutes from town, and ice conditions no longer dependent on the whims of Mother Nature (other than suitable cold).
The ice park is going gangbusters. Each January it hosts the Ouray Ice Fest - four days of competitions, free clinics, and general revelry - which is considered the largest ice climbing festival in North America. And on any given weekend between December and mid-March, the park draws everyone from the sport’s top climbers to rank beginners like myself. The estimated 15,000 annual visitors come from across the United States and around the globe, and their presence has created a winter economy in a town that previously had little to recommend it. Because of its growing popularity and alluring economics, many see the park in Ouray as a tipping point, a model that’s quickly bringing ice climbing from fringe to fore.
Down in the gorge, a veritable crowd is on hand. Climbing parties to either side of Matt and me are busy chipping away at ice-covered walls. Above us, at the lip of the gorge, a handful of other folks are tying off a top rope to a big Engelmann spruce. “There’s no shortage of company here at the park,” Matt says through a perpetual grin. A 29-year-old Minnesotan with sharp, almost elfin features, Matt will be my teacher for the next two days. “Still,” he says, “company or not, a few days here and you’ll pack in as many climbs as you would in a season at other places.”
“The trick to swinging an ice tool well,” Matt tells me, “is to not force it.” We’ve spread out at the base of a 90-foot, off-angle slab named, appropriately, Teacher’s Pet. Standing arm’s length from the climb, Matt cocks his tool back to his ear for a demonstration. “It’s not much more than a flick of the wrist,” he says. “Then you just let the momentum carry it.” Effortlessly he lodges his pick in the dense blue ice.
Generally small and light with business end of drop-forged steel hewed into a sharpened point, ice tools are the single most important items in a climber’s arsenal. In hand they feel dangerous, and my first swing confirms this. Instead of biting into the ice, my pick clatters off to the side with surprising ferocity. I recompose, aim for a golf ball-size divot, and swing again - a very primal feeling in a chopping wood sort of way. Thwack! The tool shivers, planted in good ice.
I repeat the process with the other tool. Thwack! Another good stick. Then, at Matt’s prompting, I kick my crampons into the ice with a crunch and stand on their sharpened front points. It’s a weird sensation, hanging by only picks and spikes, but it’s a remarkably stable one.
More than rock climbing, good ice climbing should be almost metronomic in its rhythm: Tool. Tool. Foot. Foot. Thwack. Thwack. Crunch. Crunch. And I try to keep the mantra running through my head as I plod my way up Teacher’s Pet. The route is easy - a Water Ice 2 (grades run WI 1 to WI 6) - and is a jumble of different textures. In one section, I pick my way over delicate tangles of icicles that tinkle when I step on them. In another, the ice is so dense and clean, I could be crawling on a skating rink.
LIKE MANY BIG IDEAS, the Ouray Ice Park started with a small coincidence. Running atop the Uncompahgre Gorge is a thick, steel pipe about four feet across that was installed to shuttle water from a reservoir in the mountains down to a nearby hydroelectric plant. The pipe is old and riveted, made before the time of adequate welds, and it leaks excessively.
“There was some runoff right above what we call the School Room Area,” says Bill Whitt, one of the ice park’s founders. “So we began to channel the water to make better climbs.”
After a slew of false starts and experimental ice-making procedures by volunteers in the mid and late 1990s, the park grew to a point where it needed a full-time employee, Rob Holmes - probably the only man on the planet who can claim the title of high-altitude creative irrigation specialist or, as he prefers, HACIS. “Ice farming is not so much different than greenskeeping, really,” says Holmes, 52, a former groundskeeper at a golf course in Springfield, Missouri. “You just add water, and watch it grow.” Today he and two assistants preside over 132 showerhead-capped spigots, the lifeblood of the park’s 156 climbs. In 2004 Holmes opened a new area, Graduate School, and has plans to further refine his ice-farming aparatus through 2006. “We’ve got to keep innovating out here,” he tells me. “The world is looking to Ouray.”
“The world” might be a bit of an overstatement, but “the world of ice climbing” is not. My first day in the gorge, I ran into the expected assembly of Colorado and Utah climbers, but also groups from Scotland, Mexico, and Ecuador. Walking along the steel catwalk that lines a portion of the upper gorge and acts as a staging ground for many routes, I met a climber from Florida partnered with one from North Carolina on their way to meet a buddy from Georgia. Go figure.
THE DAY AFTER my successful conquest of Teacher’s Pet, Matt and I are walking across the gorge on the Lower Bridge to access some more challenging climbs. Ahead, we see a truck, a big dual-wheel F-250, hauling something up from the depths. Standing around it is a group of grim-faced men in Albuquerque Mountain Rescue jackets. My throat goes tight and Matt and I race to the railing of the bridge. Dangling below is a body, contorted from a terrible fall. I turn away in horror and one of the AMR guys looks over at me and cracks up. “Hey guys,” he says, “I think I broke my dummy!”
Turns out, the 170-pound dummy is just up for the weekend with the guys from New Mexico to test ice screws, the primary protection when leading up ice. Apparently, a screw blew and the dummy went for a ride. As soon as my heart stops pounding, I ask Matt a question that’s been plaguing me: Just how safe is ice climbing?
Safer than you think, he tells me. In the past 12 years, the ice park has had two deaths, both attributed to climber error. Ouray has two distinct advantages when it comes to learning to ice climb safely: First, it is a controlled environment, so learning in the park is skin to picking up the basics of rock climbing at a gym. Second, it is served by two high-quality outfitters. San Juan Mountain Guides (the company I chose) and Skyward Mountaineering, both of which have exceptional instructors; Matt was formerly a guide for the American Alpine Institute, one of the most elite climbing outfitters in the U.S., and Vince Anderson, the lead guide for Skyward, put up one of the most remarkable lines in the Himalaya this past fall, a direct ascent of Nanga Parbat’s Rupal Face.
“The key to safety,” Matt says, “is learning the correct technique in the first place. Take Patrick, for instance,” he says, referring to a climber whom I’d met the day before. “He wanted to learn a lot in a short period of time, so he came to the park and took a few courses from us. He just went and did Aconcagua (the 22,835-foot peak in Argentina) last summer.”
To test my limits, Matt wants me to try a steep WI 5 called Stone Free. It’s an evil and beautiful route, all chandeliered ice for 80 feet, and Matt preps me in his usual thorough way. “Just like rock climbing, ice is all footwork,” he says. “You need balance and you need technique.”
Stone Free, it turns out, is far more demanding than Teacher’s Pet, and as I make my way up the route, no amount of technique can alleviate the mounting exhaustion in my arms. At one point I wedge myself under a small dome of ice and grab a quick breather, but that’s hardly enough. Eventually I find myself in an intractable position, an ice climbing approximation of the Iron Cross, and there is not getting out of it. As I squirm and wiggle, scanning the face for a solution, I feel my crampons start to slip. A gritty, scraping sound erupts underneath me as the spikes begin to tear from the ice, and I call to Matt. He pulls the rope tight just as I release from the wall. Hanging there, I scan Stone Free, tracing my new sequence - a tool here, a foot there - and planning my ascent. My focus is so intense, only later do I realize that, for the first time, I’m beginning to think like an ice climber.
TWO HOT TUBS ARE SET SIDE BY SIDE at the Ouray Victorian Inn, and they’re both packed when I walk up. It’s a perfect Colorado evening: cold, a light snow falling, lots of steam rising from the tubs, and the distant gleam of the mountains - the big, rugged San Juans that fence in the town - just beyond the darkness. As hot tub etiquette dictates, I abandon any and all self-consciousness and squeeze in between four climbers down for the weekend from Colorado’s Front Range.
The scene is lively. At one point, a body streaks from the adjacent tub, full of climbers from California and New Mexico, and does an Eskimo roll in a nearby snowbank. Both tubs roar with approval, and beer bottles clank.
“It’s remarkable,” says Steve Gosselin, a veteran climber who visits Ouray a few times a year. “Six years ago, this town was so dead in winter that if you rolled in late, you didn’t eat.”
“You’d have to break trail to get to the post office,” someone else chimes in. Since I’d arrived in town, I’d heard nonstop commentary on winters here “before the park.”
Founded in 1875, Ouray once bustled year-round, thanks to the silver and gold deposits in the surrounding mountains. (One of the largest gold mines in history, Camp Bird, was just up the road.) But as with a lot of Colorado mining communities, the mines closed, leaving behind a slow bleed. During summers, locals did a decent business with hikers and off-roaders, but in the winters, the town hibernated; many shops on Main, Ouray’s only paved street, shuttered for the season, and visitors had but one choice of restaurant, a basic diner whose business hours changed at the whim of its owner.
Then the climbers started coming. Today, even in darkest winter, there are 15 restaurants, and along Main every shop is open for business. Most sport a sign with the town’s unofficial slogan, “Have an Ice Day.”
The economics of the ice park are so attractive that would-be competitors have started taking notice. Jeff Lowe, who along with his brother Greg all but developed modern ice climbing in the early 1970s, is working on a park in Ogden, Utah, that should be operational later this year. Climbers are pushing to farm ice in Boulder Canyon, Colorado, where, similar to Ouray, there is a leaky pipe atop a giant gorge. Provo, Utah, is rumored to be considering a park, as is Canmore, Alberta. And though the economics are slightly different, indoor ice climbing is on the map: An indoor ice park, basically a giant refrigerator, recently opened in Glencoe, Scotland.
At the hot tub, the snow is falling harder, and about a quarter-inch above my steaming skin, it melts into a soothing raindrop. The conversation has shifted to knots, a hot topic of debate: the overhand versus the grapevine, the figure eight versus the double bowline with a Yosemite finish. While the arguments unfold, the evening grows darker, and the beer runs dangerously low. A call is made and someone arrives with a fresh-baked chocolate pie from a restaurant down the road. Someone else rolls up with a fresh 12-pack. In Ouray, it seems, the party is in full swing.