Native Stones
Ice North of Lake Huron
With access to the American northeast still unavailable at time of writing, Ontario climbers who used to make their big ice climbing trips of the winter to New Hampshire, Vermont and New York’s Adirondacks may be wondering where to go this year. Thunder Bay’s amazing ice is about a twenty-hour drive from Southern Ontario. Of course, the best ice climbing in the world is in the Canadian Rockies, but that involves plane flight and a car rental. So both of these spots are out of the question for weekend trips for most climbers.
With average temperatures rising to the point that much of the southern ice in Ontario has become ephemeral, and some hasn’t been seen for several seasons, Ontario ice climbers are looking a little farther away for some of the best ice climbing Ontario has to offer. Enter ice climbing in southern Algoma.
Traditional Ontario ice spots like Eagle’s Nest in Bancroft, Diamond Lake near Maynooth and the rest of the Haliburton Highlands are about three hours away from major population centres in Southern Ontario. Admittedly, southern Algoma is about
twice as far, but it’s worth the trip, for a bunch of reasons, perhaps first discovered by Ontario ice pioneer Shaun Parent, and then explored to the fullest by guidebook author and relentless Northern Ontario new router Danylo Darewych.
“In mid-march 2011,” says Darewych, “I was driving back home to Toronto, alone, after a disappointing ice climbing trip to the Canadian Rockies. I had driven out west in February with high hopes of testing my abilities on Rockies classics, but things hadn’t gone as planned. First, my ice climbing partner got deported to Mexico, then temperatures hit the deep freeze for weeks on end. I climbed almost nothing I had set my sights on and departed Canmore with my tail firmly between my legs. Then, to add insult to injury, my crampons broke while making a brief stop in Orient Bay.”
He stopped to visit Shaun Parent, who made some suggestions of where there would be some ice in southern Algoma. “I was flabbergasted by what I saw,” says Darewych. “Ice lines all over the place…big cliffs. Lots of rock and ice climbing potential everywhere. Yet I’d never heard of the area before from any Ontario climbers. I couldn’t believe it. It was no further than the trips that Toronto area ice-climbers regularly make to the Adirondacks or Quebec. Clearly we were missing out on opportunities in our own back yard. I vowed to return.”
Randy Kielbasiewicz, who started ice climbing in 2009 started ice climbing in 2012 in Haliburton, Ont., after decades of rock climbing. After his second day, he maxed out his credit cards and bought his own equipment. Although he knew about the great ice in the Adirondacks, he was drawn to Algoma ice after just his first trip there. “There’s hardly any people around and I can climb routes that aren’t kicked out, or by drafting pick holes. On super popular routes, it can be just like walking up a staircase. I love the lack of a scene, and its really every time you climb feels like no one has done it yet, gives the sense of adventure, and it’s quiet. It’s a beautiful area that’s stunning in the winter,” Kielbasiewicz says.
Rainmaker, a 55-metre WI3 on Riverside Crag on Kynoch Road is one of Kielbasiewicz’s favourite climbs. It’s close to the road, aesthetic and fun, but a few years back, he went all-in and bought a snow machine to search for routes further afield. Since then, he says, “it’s just been five-star route after five-star route.”
Southern Algoma is just the beginning. Shaun Parent, who started climbing in the area in the early 1980s, now focusses on developing climbs a little further north, in the Montreal River area. He says it’s the “highest ice in the midcontinent, with routes to 240 metres. No crowds and plenty of new routes to develop.”
Most routes in Southern Algoma, however, are a single pitch long, albeit, often a rope-stretcher. The climbs are mostly on ice. Little mixed climbing in the modern, drytooling sense of the word has been done. But the quiet, snow laden pine trees, the awesome silence of frozen lakes, and the lack of other people in the landscape lends the climbs an eerie remoteness all their own.