(all pictures are high res, for low res click here)
The end of January brought my annual trip to Ouray, Colorado, home of the Ouray Ice Festival and the Chicks With Picks Festival. Last year, I climbed with George Dunn, however after the fiasco I experienced in the Alps, I decided to climb with a company I was more comfortable with, Skyward Mountaineering. I was looking forward to climbing with Vince Anderson, a well established ice climber, but he took a nasty fall earlier in the year and had broken his foot. Vince hooked us up with a great replacement, Sven Krebs.
Day 1, Sven
took us
to South Park, a relatively new area of the
ice park. Joining me on this trip was
my girlfriend Ellen
, who had
never been ice climbing before. To begin, Sven taught Ellen the basics of ice
climbing, which became a great refresher course for me. Our first pitches were
quite easy and required us to climb without tools, so that we could work on our
footwork.
Ellen
picked this up really, well, so we quickly progressed to adding one tool.
Remarkably, Ellen picked up the toolwork fairly well too, even though
the
tools were leashless! I had always heard that it was easier to
learn ice climbing with leashless tools, but I never believed it.
After
climbing this week with
Grivel
Top Wing w/ trigger finger and the
Charlet
Moser Ergo I became a true believer. I'll never climb with leashed tools
again. Anyway, we stopped for some lunch
, after
which we moved to a slightly harder route.
. Elle
really seemed to be doing good on this route, so it was time for me to take a
whack at it.
(video)
. All videos take a long time to download - be patient! - and you'll need either
WindowsXP or QuickTime to watch them. After doing a couple fun laps on this
route, Sven took us up one final route so that he could show Ellen how to repel.
After
doing a couple repels, day 1 was complete. Elle and I went back to the
Vic for a well deserved soak in a hot
tub and a couple beers.
The next day we found ourselves
climbing in the sun of the
higher gorge
(video).
It was an absolutely perfect day, and Elle and I took a couple laps on an easy
route.
,
meanwhile there were a couple climbers doing harder routes
next to us (video)
. Once we
had dialed in the easy route, we took a crack at the harder route to our right.
This route had some vertical ice (Class 4/5- ) which became our first real test
of the trip.
You'll
see me here (video) getting ready to tackle the
vertical section. I successfully topped out, then Ellen took a stab. This was by
far the hardest climb she had so far.
. This
became a real tester for her, as she took her first fall of the week (video),
but she hung in there and topped out. All in all, this was a great morning of
climbing - here's a final picture of the 2 routes we climbed
.
One of the perks of climbing in Ouray, is that you can leave the park at anytime
and grab lunch which is
what we did on the second day.
After a
nice big burger, we repelled
into to
the schoolroom area to
practice multipitch climbing.
Here's a
couple shots I took from the belay station halfway up the route.
After
topping out on this route, we called it a day.
The last day we headed to
Skylights to do some climbing on real waterfalls. The first route, Skylight,
was a multipitch route - probably around 4 pitches, but because of the ice
conditions, we chose to only climb the first two pitches. Here's the view from
the top of the first pitch
(video)
. Elle had a challenge going up the chimney
, but at
least she didn't get hit in the head by falling ice
(OUCH!).
After we both topped out (and I had blood dripping from my face), we repelled to
the bottom, ate some lunch and prepared for another route. At this point, we
were both pretty tired from 3 days of climbing, so we picked an easier pitch
that gave
us plenty of options. For my final pitch, I thought I'd take everything I had
learned over the three days and try some mixed climbing
. This
forced me to drytool part of the pitch and really concentrate on my technique. I
successfully topped out on this pitch (video) and
was extremely happy. That became the final pitch for both of us, and we called
it a day. We both learned a ton on this trip and improved immensely.
We both can't wait to do this trip again next year! Kudos to Sven and Skyward Mountaineering. If you plan on going climbing anytime soon, I'd highly recommend going with them!