Climbing frozen waterfall breaks how to#

“More often than not, it was about being lucky enough to develop friendships with someone who would take you.”

“You basically had to be adopted by someone who was an experienced mentor,” recalls Dave Karl, an avid life-long ice climber and sales representative for equipment manufacturer Petzl. Throughout the 1980s, climbers in Europe and North America answered their call to action, significantly raising the standards and breadth for documented ice climbing in hotbeds such as the Canadian Rockies, the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, the Adirondacks Mountains of New York, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “We couldn’t imagine three or four hundred people coming out for a single weekend.” “We’d have 12, 18 people in a class, but those gatherings felt pretty isolated,” Barber recalls.

Climbing frozen waterfall breaks how to#

Henry Barber, another noted climber of the era, gave seminars with Chouinard around the country teaching the basics of how to use the new equipment. In 1978, MacInnes’ American pal Yvon Chouinard, who also tinkered with early ice axe designs, distilled the lessons and modern techniques they had experimented with using the new equipment into an influential book, Climbing Ice. With the latest rigid crampon designs, climbers were able to transition from laboriously chopping steps into the mountain to literally swinging and kicking their way up frozen waterfalls. A sport with deep roots revolutionized by technologyĪlthough mountaineers had been climbing steep ice terrain in the Alps since the early 20th century, the sport of ice climbing didn’t catalyze until the early 1970s, when Scotsman Hamish MacInnes invented a radically new, drop-curved axe featuring a short-handled axe with a steeply angled pick designed specifically for to be swung above one’s head versus carried as a cane. “You can’t just go into a store, buy the gear, and go out on your own,” Thompson says. The breathless enthusiasm of new comers and veterans alike belies the fact that for the outdoor industry, events like this are critical to growing the customer base and driving business to backwater mountain towns. It takes you to unique environments–here on the Upper Peninsula above Lake Superior, it feels like you’re on a different planet.” “There are unique sounds: water dripping, the ice fracturing. “It’s just such a different sport,” explains Bill Thompson, owner of Michigan-based Downwind Sports and organizer of the Michigan Ice Festival, one of the biggest and oldest ice-climbing events in the country. You come down and you’re like holy crap-I just climbed that.” “It’s really hard, and really frustrating when you’re doing it, but then you get the top, and you’re like–I did that. “It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush,” says Mary Scallion, a molecular biologist from Boston and second time participant in the New Hampshire event. But to a growing legion of enthusiasts, the niche sport of ice climbing is the perfect way to step outside the nine-to-five comfort zone of everyday life.

The group grew from a few small clusters of people to a few dozen, then to more than a hundred, standing like a gigantic mismatched quilt of Gore-Tex, down, and ripstop nylon outside of the local outdoor shop and outfitter International Mountain Equipment.Īt 8 a.m., the doors open, and the 26 th Mount Washington Valley Ice Festival was underway.įor many, the idea of swinging and kicking one’s way up a frozen waterfall sounds as crazy as cliff diving or traveling into low Earth orbit. on Friday on the sidewalk of Main Street in North Conway, New Hampshire. Despite the polar vortex swirling overhead, leaving temperatures in the single digits, a crowd of people began to form around 7:30 a.m.