So I’m BACK and although I was only gone for a few days, I feel like everything is scattered all over the place! My apartment is a mess with all of the gear I threw on the floor last night, Tally really needs a run, and I don’t want to get out of my pajamas! It’s always so hard to come back from a vacation, mini or not….you know?
Anyway, the good stuff….. the ice festival was awesome! After packing up out super full car, we hit the road!
We ended up arriving in Ouray late Friday night with just enough time to go out for dinner and head back to our room for a good night’s sleep. We did get to check out downtown Ouray just a bit, and I think the town is super cute. It’s an old mining town, like so many of the mountain towns in Colorado, and the main street reflects that history.
We woke up early Saturday morning in order to eat a good breakfast before heading up to the ice park. Turns out, many climbing companies like Black Diamond, Petzl, and La Sportiva had set up demo tents in order for festival participants to demo any gear they may need. This included ice tools, crampons, clothing, boots, everything! The best part? They were allowing everyone to demo the gear for free! As I’m sure you can imagine, this led to a mad rush on any and all gear, but we were still able to sneak in and grab a few items that we needed.
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| Gear tents |
Number one on the list? A harness for me! Seriously, duh. If you’ll notice in my prep post from last Thursday, I outlined all of the gear I was bringing….but what you won’t notice anywhere is a climbing harness. A somehow managed to completely forget my harness, the single most important piece of gear when you are going to attempt to climb up anything! No harness, no climb. Double duh. Luckily, Petzl was demo’ing some awesome harnesses and I got the opportunity to test a few out. Is it too early to ask for a new one for Christmas?!
We had signed up for a full day “Intro to Ice Climbing” clinic on Saturday, so after gathering out gear, we met up with our instructor and the rest of our class. We packed up our stuff, put on our crampons, and headed into the canyon.
The Uncompahgre Gorge is the location for all of the ice climbs that constitute the Ouray Ice Park. Although the approach was only a few minutes, it was a bit hairy as we had to descend down a very steep trail into the gorge. In fact, crampons and a helmet were required simply to descend due to the steepness and slickness of the trail combined with the ice crashing from above. I have to admit, I was already getting excited when we were descending and I hadn’t even climbed anything yet!
Angela, our instructor, and her two helpers had set up four roped routes for our clinic of 10 people. Since one person had to belay each climber, only two people had to sit out at a time. This was an awesome way to learn because you could take as many laps as your muscles allowed!
I really appreciated Angela’s style of teaching because she realized that ice climbing isn’t something you can tell people how to do: you just need to give them the basics and let them loose on the ice. In her words, learning to ice climb is all about the “mileage” you put in and the amount of time you spend actually climbing. Having said that, all four of us realized very quickly that ice climbing is not like rock climbing at all! On my first climb, I found myself continually looking for foot holds like you would when you are climbing on rock. However, I heard Brad yell at me, “Heather, don’t look, just kick one out!” When he said that, I realized how silly I was being! I was wearing crampons with massive spikes on the bottom: I didn’t need a foot hold! I just needed solid ice to kick myself a foot hold!
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| I’m the one climbing in the black jacket with the white snowpants 🙂 |
I also had an eye-opening realization in regard to my upper body strength…. or lack thereof! I strength train and am strong enough on a day-to-day basis, but I had nowhere near as much strength as these instructors and climbers! When you are ice climbing, your arms are always over your head. You use your legs as much as possible in order to step up, but there is still a fair amount of arm muscle required and that was definitely my weakness! After doing a handful of climbs on day #1, I was completely pumped out and exhausted!! I also learned that I am so right-handed that my left ice axe swings completely sucked! When I got tired, my left arm would swing towards the ice and the pick would pretty much bounce right off. It was really pathetic, but it also made me laugh. Guess that’s something I’ll just have to work on!
My favorite part of the day came about an hour before the end of the clinic. Like the rest of Colorado, Ouray has not gotten a lot of snow thus far this season (the gorge is in the shade and is fed by purposely leaking water pipes down the side of the gorge. It just stays frozen cause it’s in deep shade). However, a mini snowstorm blew in when we were down in the gorge and we got to enjoy the quiet beauty of the snow dumping down during our last hour of climbing. Sure, it covered all of the ice which made finding solid stuff a bit trickier, but it also made everything so pretty!
After wrapping up our first clinic, we headed into town to grab some food. We were starving and cold, so we didn’t even bother to change out of our snow clothes. We had known we were taking a full day class, but the schedule had been deceiving and stated that lunch was from 12-1. We assumed that meant we’d take an hour break to climb out of the canyon and eat our lunch. WRONG. Turns out, we didn’t leave the gorge all day which was great for climbing but really bad for the four us who didn’t bring any food! I think we had 2 Cliff bars, a bag of peanuts, and one Camelbak full of water to get us through the day. #Fail! Needless to say, we started to get a little cranky when all the restaurants were coming up full. However, we saw this sign in one of the windows, and it made us all laugh:
Only in Ouray, right???!!!!