Learning to ice climb with Canada as classroom

ICE, ner at the Chiniki Cultural Centre, a museum-cum-restaurant of the Chiniki First Nation people. As we chow down on some hearty fry bread “tacos” topped with elk meat, my classmate shows me a post she’s just put on Instagram. In it, I’m dangling off the ice wall with the kind of body posture people might assume if they were using a toilet. It seems my technique is crap. I rest my head for the night in a plush bed at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, a castlelike affair built in the 1880s to lure vacationers westward along the Canadian Pacific Railway, before heading out to the ice the following day, determined to right my wrongs.

Johnston Canyon is a sharply hewn river valley lined with quaking aspens and lanky lodgepole pines. To get back to the ice wall, I have to crunch snow for about 45 minutes, walking like a cowboy to avoid daggering my pant leg with the razor-sharp crampons on my boots.

Along the way, I ask Shiu what went wrong yesterday, explaining that I seem to be much more adept at rock climbing.

“Rock climbing is usually easier to pick up because you just use your feet and hands to grab and go,” he explains. “In ice climbing, you have to figure out how to swing your ax and kick your crampons into the ice, so there’s a bigger learning curve.”

Shiu suggests that I work on maintaining a perfect triangle on the ice, with my feet spread wide and my ice tool above my head in the center. “This is the most stable body position,” he says. “When you get the three points fixed, you have one more ice tool that is free to swing higher and build your next triangle.”

With that in mind, I harness up and give it a go. Instead of straining my Popeye muscles to race up the wall, as I did yesterday, I focus on slow, controlled movements. A few climbs in, I’m feeling much less crappy.

I realize after a successful second day that I’m so used to a city life that requires speed for efficiency that it was initially hard for me to slow down. But ice climbing isn’t about speed; it’s about carefully calculated moves. It’s this wonderfully meditative mind game where speed can be your enemy.

Ice climbing is also about trusting the unknown, another thing I’m not terribly great at. You have to trust that a tiny crampon spike will support your weight, and that a piece of frozen water isn’t minutes from melting in the afternoon sun.

If you can suspend your disbelief for a few hours, your reward is not only an intimate connection with nature, but also the chance to be a D-list superhero, at least for a while. Mark Johanson is a freelancer.