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2008 Ouray Ice Festival

January 14, 2008 in Climbing, Travel by alalonde | No comments

Tons of ice climbing. World-class competition. All-you-can-drink craft beer. Cheap gear. Sound good? Then you should’ve been at the ice festival this past weekend in Ouray, CO. Ouray (rhymes with hooray!) is a fantastic little mountain town in the heart of the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Its annual festival features the premiere ice and mixed climbing competition on this side of the Atlantic. That means the best climbers in the world congregate there, some taking part in the comp and the others teaching clinics and giving slide shows.

The Competition

I rolled into town after a 4am departure from Salt Lake, plenty in time to catch the main competition. At around 10:00 I took the shuttle a half mile or so up to the Ice Park. The comp was in full swing by the time I arrived. Some highlights:

Will Mayo cruising up the mixed part only to drop an ice tool at the beginning of the suspended log section. He made some gnarly moves with one tool, though, somehow managing to make it to the bottom of the plywood board (a 42° incline mind you) before falling.
Jeff Mercier coming out of nowhere to set the bar for the rest of the comp, methodically making his way up the route before sending the final dyno to top out. Awesome stuff.
Ines Papert blazing the route only to get stuck on the last move of the board. She’s pretty short and made a couple of static attempts at the top, but fell soon afterwards. She won the women’s competition nonetheless.
Evgeny “Jack” Kryvosheytsev (that’s a mouthful) also crusing the route but popping a tool unexpectedly on the third to last hold on the route. He was a favorite to win and ended up taking second instead.

Hot Springs

Ouray has dozens of natural hot springs in town, all of them of course have been scarfed up by various hotels. After six hours of hanging out in the cold I decided to

wander around and see if any of them would let me hang out for awhile. After a bit of inquiring I found the Wiesbaden Hotel (as if it wasn’t similar enough to Austria) and promptly paid 15 bucks to soak for a bit. Holy crap was it awesome! The receptionist recommended the vapor cave so I went downstairs and opened a huge, heavy wooden door to reveal a steamy, slimy, slightly stinky room. Wtf is this? I thought before hearing some voices from beyond, deeper into the weirdest dungeon ever. Beyond another wooden door was the real deal, a 105° natural sauna with a small wading pool filled with blazingly hot spring water.

Now I have been to several hot springs both here out West and in Europe, and this took the case. I am a naturalist and the whole layout was perfect: a cave bore out of bedrock with only a few unassuming planks of wood around the outside to sit or lie on. I wish I would have taken a picture, it was so sweet.

So I hung out down there for twenty minutes or so, sweating and chatting it up with a climber couple from Denver about the comp and whatnot. Then I migrated outside to yet another natural hot spring, a swimming pool filled with the same refreshing water! It was here that I really soaked all the gloriousness in, chatting with a bunch of people from BC, Colorado and even a (preliminary) competitor from the comp.

An Orgy of Beer and Lasagna

Next up was something I had been looking forward to for awhile: An Ouray volunteer fire department benefit dinner consisting of Lasagna and all-you-can-drink beer! They even had New Belgium reps go around and fill up your cup as you waited in line for food!! Only $15 and you got all this, plus the added benefit of a room full of funny, friendly, genuinely awesome people. They are really what make the event, I had never before experienced such an awesome community.

Will Gadd, the First Class Badass

Any ice climber knows about Will Gadd, one of the preeminent luminaries in the sport and frequent dominator of the Ouray Ice competition. After the lasagna dinner he put on a slideshow chronicling his climbing life including numerous significant alpine, ice and mixed routes all over the world. He’s also apparently a prolific paraglider and had some amazing footage of gliding all over the Rockies, from Boulder to Banff. Oh and the slideshow was all-you-can-drink New Belgium beer also. The know their clientele.

I hadn’t gotten a hotel in time and didn’t feel like shelling out 90 bucks for one, so I passed out in the car for the night. Colorado mountain towns aren’t so toasty in mid-January; however I had planned for it with my dual-sleeping bag system, in which I was nice and toasty.

Sunday Clinics

Another big reason I came down to the festival was for the clinics. Climbing ice is substantially more dangerous than rock, and unlike most things I feel like I need some instruction before going at it full-on. And not only are the clinics in a great locale, but they’re all taught by the premiere, sponsored climbing badasses of the day. Sunday morning was my easy/intermediate ice clinic taught by Kelly Cordes, another ice and rock strongman sponsored by several companies. His ascent of the Great Trango Tower with Josh Wharton is one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever read.

The clinic went well, I’ve gotten so much stronger since the last time I went ice climbing it was almost comical. I still need to work on my footwork but I’m feeling better and better on ice. In the afternoon I took an avalanche clinic put on my one of the guides for San Juan Mountain Guides. I already knew about half the material but the other half has definitely beneficial. Avalanches really creep me out and I do enough backcountry skiing and climbing that I need to learn as much as I can to be safe from the biggest objective hazard in the mountains. Already this winter I have learned quite a bit; I find it fascinating and am already an almost religious follower of the postings by the Utah Avalanche Center.

So if it’s not already obvious, Ouray was a hell of a time and I will definitely be back next year, hopefully with people that don’t back out the day before the trip (no names there)! For now I’m pretty psyched to get back on the ice!

The Weather out West

October 4, 2007 in Climbing, Salt Lake, Skiing by alalonde | No comments

I haven’t even come close to understanding the weather out here. It was crazy hot all summer (upper 90s every day) and I was blasting the a/c all the time. Then, all of a sudden, it’s snowing in the mountains and freezing in the house. There wasn’t really a transition at all. Is there a spring and fall out here, or have we been reduced to two seasons?

Just this past weekend I went for a hike, and had to turn back because I ran into five inches of snow! It’s September, man, wtf?! Well, yeah, it was at 11,000 feet, but still! I guess the hiking season in the higher peaks consists of July and August.

I’ve gotten lazy the past couple of weeks and have started driving to work more and more. All summer I biked to work 70% of the time, but since it’s gotten colder I’ve stopped. Maybe I can get in the habit of riding Trax this winter. An extra half-hour of time dedicated to reading daily would be pretty sweet…

In other news, I’ve been climbing 3-4 times a week in the gym and at various crags in the Wasatch. I’m trying to beef up my endurance so I can stay on harder routes for longer. I am a member of Momentum so I have been lead climbing and bouldering quite a bit: I still need to rest once on the long overhanging 5.10 routes, but look forward to sending them with ease (and more!) by the spring.

I’ve picked up a new set of skis (fat twin-tips for the park and powder from a local company) and bindings, and am looking at an Alpine Touring setup next. Hopefully I can afford to pick everything up by the beginning of the backcountry ski season in early November…

Ice Climbing

March 22, 2006 in Climbing by alalonde | No comments

Ice climbing to me was always one of those sports that seemed out of reach. I’m not sure if it was the stigma, the price of equipment, or the simple idea of climbing up a sheer wall of ice up to thousands of feet tall. Either way, experiencing it pretty much shattered any preconceptions I had previously had.

When registering for courses for the Spring I realized I needed another ‘activity’ in order to graduate. I was pleasantly surprised that Ice Climbing was being offered, and was the first to sign up. After a brief meeting in the Red Barn (our on-campus climbing gym) we met on friday afternoon to head to the Adirondaks. Only four souls were brave enough to embark on this journey, which was very nice. Along with our instructor and a TA (my age), there were six of us total.

I was pretty psyched the whole way up, about five hours from Rochester. We stayed at a ski shop in their bunks downstairs and got up early on Saturday for a day’s climbing. Our first wall was down into a canyon from the outlet of Chapel Pond. Anybody familiar with my pics from hiking Giant will remember seeing this pond, very visible for most of the hike.

We briefly reviewed tying knots and belaying basics, and George (the TA) scrambled up around the wall to set up the top rope. We waited (im)patiently for them to come back so we could start.
I was naturally the first to volunteer to go, and started making my way up the choppy middle section of the wall on the right. I progressed pretty well about 2/3 of the way up (guess I’m a natural) before my hands started getting really sore from gripping the ice axe so hard. Then I decided to go up the right side of the uppermost central rock face, and ended up falling after an axe placement slipped. After a 50 foot fall or so I brushed myself off and went back at it. Good ol’ combat roll at the bottom saved me from injury.

Haha, ok so of course when you fall the rope simply tightens and your belayer (the person controlling the rope at the bottom, see my pics) catches you. Falling was still unacceptable to me and I went about 9-10 times before doing it again (incidentally on my last climb of the weekend). The next few climbs I made it to the top, taking just about every route I could.

The beauty of ice climbing is that you’re not restricted to finding holds in the wall like in rock climbing. You just pound your ice axes into the ice for handholds and kick your crampons (spikes sticking off your boots, they’re pretty badass) into the ice for footholds. This allows you to take just about any route to the top. Usually I just want to get to my destination when i’m in the woods (in the case the top of the wall) so I usually just head straight up. Either way, it’s extremely taxing on your upper body, especially your hands and arms. Come to think of it, it’d be a really fun yet effective method of working out. Sweet.

I had taken an outdoor rock climbing class a couple summers ago, long before this blog detailed my life’s story, and was quite unimpressed with my classmates. It was a similar trip, we went to Rattlesnake point to the west of Niagara Falls in Canada to do some climbing. They seemed mostly uninterested in climbing and I ended up doing by far the most. This time was different, though. There were only four of us and it was clear that we all enjoyed the outdoors and a challenge, not to mention handling standing around for hours at a time in sub-freezing temperatures. We all gave it a shot time and time again, which was admirable, especially at a nerd-filled school of engineers and techies like RIT.

The next day we spent climbing on Pitchoff Rock. Anybody who has driven into Keene from Lake Placid will have probably noticed this wall, it’s on the left side opposite of Cascade Lake. According
to Tony it’s one of, if not the most climbed wall in the Northeast. This is because of it’s accessibility and approachable dimensions. The ice here was even more beautiful than on saturday, esepcially because the sun was shining. However, the sun has a very dramatic and fast effect on ice, and after about a half-hour it was dripping pretty badly. The column especially was dripping pretty badly, and we joked (well half-joked) about kicking it right over when climbing. A column is simply a free-standing pillar of ice formed from a giant icicle, like at left. Here it was difficult to maintain your lateral balance on since it was so thin, and I ended up flailing my axe a few times to keep my balance. Overall it was pretty easy though. After a few climbs the ice started getting really soft and difficult to manage, and eventually I started pulling my axe right through the ice. This led to my second and last fall of the weekend, and I decided to call it a day due to fatigue and some serious soreness.

Afterwards we headed to the Noonmark diner for lunch and pie and then headed home to the sounds of NPR.

I’ve decided that ice climbing isn’t something I’m going to jump right into yet, as it’s still not as much fun as simply climbing mountains and is incredibly inexpensive. Rope, boots, carabiners, ice screws, ice axes, crampons, and belay devices will make you self-sufficient, to the cost of $1000+. However, I figure that once I start climbing peaks tall enough to be glaciated I’ll need this stuff anyway. All in due time.

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