My First Ice Climbing Season
My ice tool traced a curve against the sky and pounded into the ice, but there was little ice to accept it. Only thin layers of sugary slush. May as well be climbing frozen cotton candy. Over the previous weeks of my first ice season, I’d heard of many ways to describe ice, such as plastic dinner-plating, thin and wet. But, I’d never encountered sugary, the kind of texture that reminds you of the well-known and often repeated first rule of ice climbing: do not fall. While staring up at an imposing wall of sugar-ice, the rule transformed into a mantra.
I had been standing on a fragile platform of ice, halfway up Malignant Mushroom WI5, in the Ghost River Valley, a remote part of the Canadian Rockies. The climb is aptly named. Huge mushroom shapes loomed around me like brittle chandeliers, daring me to weave a path higher. As I contemplated my next move, long threads of ice melt nuzzled their way down the sleeves and the back of my jacket. I could feel the deluge in my socks, my fingertips, my underwear.
Above the mushrooms, the ice turned to thin layers of sugary slush. Each swing of the ice tool, each kick of the crampons, had all of my force behind it to penetrate as deeply as possible. And then, suddenly, my steps collapsed from under my feet. I instinctively clung to my tools as my boots dragged me down. A shelf of ice caught my footing, but only for a moment, before crumbling and sending another surge of fear through my hollow stomach.
My hands gripped tighter as my feet fell to the next shelf. This one held, mercifully. It was over in a f lash and I was still clinging to the wall, left to ponder how my tools managed to stay embedded in slush-land, how an ice-screw would be of any use in such conditions and, halfway up the most challenging climb I’d ever been on, how I was going to navigate my way out of this in one piece.
The whole idea of climbing a frozen waterfall with a set of sharp tools seems farcical, but intoxicatingly attractive. Just holding the gear makes you feel like an adventurer of the highest order. An aggressive, serrated blade extends from each wrist. Knives jut out from your feet. You are a walking weapon of the most deadly variety. And then there are the falls themselves, frozen snapshots of a moment in time. The Canadian Rockies around Canmore – covering several national and provincial parks – are an endless source of esthetic ice lines. Thin or fat, wide or narrow. Ruggedly remote or a short stroll from the road. Short and punchy or majestically long, weaving a textured line up a long gully.
There’s the enormous, free-hanging icicles that cling to the mouth of the cave halfway up Lake Louise Falls, the mesmerizing curtains of petrified ice-ripples that decorate the upper tier of Polar Circus, the frozen melancholy tears that leave their delicate trails down