Northern Faces
From the Vagabond Life to Ice Climbing Professionally
Angela Vanwiemeersch
Angela Vanwiemeersch wasn’t the adventure type – she grew up competitive iceskating in Detroit – when dropped out of society in summer 2009 at 19 while she was working two jobs. The final straw came when she was rejected for a college loan to study fashion design. One of her two jobs was working at an American restaurant chain. “I was serving at the Olive Garden and was wildly uninspired. I freaked out and got on a bike,” she says.
Despite having never seriously biked before, she decided to ride solo from Detroit to Halifax, a distance of 1,350 miles. In 2010, she solo paddled 430 miles – bailing out at a steep gorge that had killed people who’d attempted it – of the 1,100-mile Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. She eventually hitchhiked and sailed from the Yukon to Panama. Being a solo female hitchhiking comes with its dangers, but, she says, “People were so good to me it overshadowed the bad.” She was on the road from 2009 to 2013. One of these wild journeys in 2013 led to ice climbing. “I was hitchhiking in California and got picked up by a dirtbag dude named Courtney from Silverton, Colo.,” she tells me between teaching clinics at the Bozeman Ice Fest this December. “I had just gotten my first taste of big mountains in the Yukon and wanted more adventure. I wanted to go to Antarctica and ski traverse across the continent.”
She knew nothing about glacier travel, rock climbing or ice climbing, skills she knew she needed to know in order to cross Antarctica. Courtney suggested that she build her up ice climbing experience in Ouray, Colo., a town known for its farmed ice and surrounding natural ice routes. She put out her thumb. Her first stop was Salt Lake City to connect with a friend of a friend named Chris Nance who gave her a full ice kit in exchange for candy bars and beer. Then she headed southeast to Ouray. Two weeks after arriving in town she met her future boyfriend, professional alpinist Scott Adamson.
One day while Angela was soloing up and down the scrappy kiddie wall above Ouray’s ice park, a few guys asked her to join them on routes in the canyon proper, which they’d planned to access via rappel. The crew, after finding out she was a total n00b – she didn’t even know what a rappel was, much less how to set one up – rescinded their offer and decided against climbing with her. However, before sending her on her way, one of them saw Scott coming up and they put the task on him to teach her how to rappel.
Right away, Angela and Scott became regular climbing partners and even though
they shared his truck by night and climbed by day, they didn’t enter a relationship until months after meeting. “He is how I learned everything. My alpine values and principles come from him,” she says. “He took the task of teaching me everything very seriously.” They were climbing 600 feet a day, five days a week, enough that she felt ready for her first big alpine objective by that season’s end.
She moved into his truck and stayed for nine months before buying her own truck to live in, which she still resides out of today. After Ouray she and Scott visited Cody, Wyo., where they climbed long routes and he taught her how to winter camp. They equipped a long, unnamed route in a cave above the classic High on Boulder but they left before completing the first free ascent. (The route remains an open project.) Then they headed north to Alaska’s Ruth Gorge for two months. For the first half of the trip, Scott and Angela climbed with different partners and he put up new routes – including two in the same week – on the southeast face of the 5,000-foot southeast face of Moose’s Tooth. Meanwhile, she climbed alone on small objectives to learn her way around the mountains. After one month, Scott f lew home to Utah and she stayed in the range to continue climbing. Then she soloed the 3,000-foot M4 WI4 Ham and Eggs on the west face of Moose’s Tooth.
“After that route, many climbers on the Kahiltna glacier basecamp told me I was reckless,” she says. But in that case – her first big trip – ignorance to avalanche and rockfall worked to her advantage. All she had to do was climb ice, which she’d been doing all season. “I felt solid the whole time. Now I know all it takes is a rogue rock to knock you off your feet.” Angela and Scott climbed progressively harder routes together, culminating in first ascents in Zion where she led a demanding pitch of WI6, her hardest at the time.
Angela and Scott climbed from 2013 until his death. He and his climbing partner Kyle Dempster died in autumn 2016 while on an expedition to the Ogre II in Pakistan. They were never found. After his passing, Angela cried for months. To understand the places that were special to Scott and be close to him, she and Dempster’s partner Jewell Lund fat-biked the Karakoram, Pakistan following the path Scott and Kyle took on their last expedition. To reach Scott and Kyle’s final basecamp, she and Jewell rode from Skardu to Askole to reach the Choktoi Glacier at 15,000 feet. In the two years since her partner’s death, she’s continued to climb and push herself. This September, with funding from the Alpine Club of Canada’s John Lauchlan Memorial Award, Angela and Michelle Kadatz travelled to Baffin Island. They were met with constant storms that pinned the duo in basecamp for the whole trip. It rained 28 of the 30 days they were there. They didn’t make it up a single route, but she left happy and wanting more.
After Baffin, she rode her bike solo from Salt Lake City to Squamish via back roads and dirt roads, rock climbing (instead of ice climbing) the whole time. This year she’s worked her way up to 5.11 trad and is eying long free routes and big walls. To up her aid game, this autumn she rope-soloed a two-pitch C3 route on the Tombstone located outside Moab. She posted a selfie to Instagram, a shot of her smiling face and her thick wad of blonde hair tied in a ponytail tucked under her armpit. “‘Keswick Lads Day Out’ was my first desert C3 and it appears that I may have gotten the third ascent,” she wrote. “It was the most beautiful corner!”
This December marked her first time back in the Bozeman Ice Fest since Scott’s death, which she says is bittersweet. Though she enjoyed teaching clinics and getting out ice climbing with her friends, when the laughter quieted down she was surrounded in silence, she thought about Scott. On her last day at Bozeman she posted another shot of herself on Instagram, this time with tools in both hands, looking down at her belayer with a huge grin. In the caption she wrote a poem. I asked her about her writing, which she calls “my sub-mediocre poems.” She says she leaves a new poem on every desert tower she completes. They’re in the summit register – so go and find them.