Climbing on Ice

by Jak Kintner

There’s no doubt about the challenge involved in this esoteric climbing specialty. Rather than dealing with ice as one more obstacle to a goal, it focuses on what can be little more than a giant icicle, a vertical, cold and hard surface that can only be negotiated with various adaptations of wearable ice picks and that often ends not on a summit but just a ridge or the top of a hill.

Like rock climbing, it’s truly a sport where the journey itself is the destination. If you see the photos of climbers spread-eagled like Spiderman on a wall of ice that may be hanging over an abyss as being about as crazy as walking a tightrope over a snake pit, then you don’t get it: a new situation that challenges a climber’s skill and demands that new ones to be learned is, to those dedicated to the sport, irresistible.

Alpine style climbing on Mt. Baker began 140 years ago with Edmund Coleman’s attempted first ascent in 1866. Though unsuccessful – he and his partner John Bennett were stopped 200 feet below the summit by what he described as a perpendicular wall of ice, probably at what is now known as the Roman Wall – his successful attempt two years later was made possible in part by technical innovations Coleman had learned to use in Switzerland. All four climbers on the successful 1868 attempt wore crampons, and Coleman himself brought along the first alpine ice ax ever seen in the northwest.

A growing number of climbers these days see ice not as an obstacle so much as a climbing goal in itself thanks in part to technical innovations that, like the ice ax, come from Europe. Across the high saddle from the Roman Wall on 9440-foot Colfax Peak, the easternmost of the Black Buttes, there’s a 600-foot vertical gully filled with ice that alpine guide Jason Martin says is “Phenomenal. It’s a great winter and spring ice climb and always comes in every year.” The route is named the Cosley-Houston route for Kathy Cosley and Mark Houston who together made the first ascent in 1982.

Ice climbing’s growing popularity in the Mt. Baker area is also due to easy access to a few reliable routes, not to mention the well-known spirit of the local climbing fraternity. Climbers have always faced problems with alpine and glacial ice in the normal course of ascending mountains, of course, and this is especially true of Mt. Baker, the most heavily glaciated peak in the cascades after Mt. Rainier. In fact, aside from Rainier it has more glacial ice than the rest of the Cascade volcanoes combined, with 10 different glaciers that together comprise about a half cubic mile of compressed and, at the bottom, very old ice. The largest, about two square miles, is named after Coleman and is the primary source for Glacier Creek.
What’s new is that there’s a growing number of local climbers who have begun climbing “water ice.” Normally produced by a cold snap measured in days instead of eons, it’s ice that’s made when running water freezes and the desirable climbs are quite steep, usually vertical or close to it, requiring special tools and techniques.

The first local guidebook to focus on locally available water ice climbing routes, Washington Ice, also serves as an excellent introduction to the sport. Martin, a climbing guide and Seattle native, wrote it with New York transplant (and Microsoft engineer) Alex Krawarik, and published it in 2003 with the Seattle-based Mountaineers Press.

Though long popular in Europe, one can see why climbing ice has taken a while to catch on here, because once one has been to the easily accessed climbs then finding others can involve lengthy approaches on roads that are unplowed in the winter or areas that are covered with deep, avalanche-prone snow. Besides all the regular gear, some trips require equipment as varied as hundred-dollar gloves, snowmobiles, several shovels, a “come-along” hand winch and a chainsaw. Some of Martin and Krawarik’s difficulty ratings include an “X” to indicate the likelihood of death for the lead climber if he or she falls.
In addition to all that, our west-side winters are often not cold enough for good ice to form, or even if it does the favored sites are often buried under snow that can and does hit Baker in biblical proportions, like the November 2006 storm that put eight feet on the hill in four days a month before the official beginning of winter.
However, the exceptions to this rule are especially useful for those wanting to learn how to climb ice. “Every few years we have a good freeze thaw period down low,” Martin said in a recent interview, “and when this happens we get good ice close to the road on the west side. The Mt. Baker Ski area is a great ice venue – it’s where I learned to ice climb.  In addition to this, the ice found up higher on Mt. Shuksan, Table Mountain, the Twin Sisters, and on Mt. Baker is quite good.  The Cosley-Houston Route on Colfax Peak is an absolute classic.”

Martin pointed out that people have been climbing in the Mt. Baker Ski area for years, saying that they “were some of the few that had a previous record of publication in the entire state when we were researching the book. The Mt. Baker Ski area is far more tolerant than some other areas of this kind of activity because the primary climb, on Pan Dome Falls near the hairpin turn on the Austin Pass Road, is far enough away from the ski trails that it doesn’t put any skiers at risk. There are no regulations, yet, although there probably have been more accidents on Pan Dome Falls than on any other climb in the state probably due to its convenient location.”
Climbers, waiting for the right combination of temperature and weather that will freeze a favorite climb, speak of a particular area “coming in,” and to predict this for climbs where access is an issue they’ll pay close attention to coming weather conditions. For this reason Martin included a comprehensive description of the basics in reading northwest weather patterns written by TV meteorologist Jeff Renner as an early chapter.

Equipment
One essential piece of equipment is an ice tool. It looks like a shrunken ice ax with a badly warped shaft and runs about $200. They’re often used without leashes or cords on them for retrieval if dropped. I asked local ice climber Richard Riquelme about that. Like Martin he works for the American Alpine Institute in Bellingham and has extensive experience both here and in his native Chile. His sage advice, after some reflection: “Well, then, don’t drop it.”
The warped handle is to extend the climber’s grip much like you curl your fingers around a stair railing. On climbs steeper than 50 degrees you’d use two, one in each hand. Climbers also use crampons, of course, but often will substitute a single point in front instead of the usual two when climbing ice to allow their feet to be rolled one way or the other and still maintain a safe anchor.

Ice screws, first developed in the 1960s but improved greatly since then, are hollow tubes about the size of hot dogs (their length varies) made of chrome-moly steel that have sharp teeth to tunnel through the ice. They’re threaded on the outside and, once a suitable pilot hole has been prepared, are cranked in with a separate tool or an integral handle. If you put two in at roughly the same angle that your hands meet when hugging a corpulent friend, and they’d touch if you screwed them in all the way, you’ve just made a V-thread, something invented in the 1930s by Soviet climber Vitaly Abaloakov as a way of creating a strong anchor on a wall. It makes a hole that goes half a foot deep into the ice and back out again a short distance away, and when rigged with a sling makes for a reliable anchor – in reliable ice, at least.

Ice hooks are like the business end of an ice tool without the shaft and can come in handy as a back-up. V-thread tools are like crochet hooks, designed to help thread a sling (a strap that resembles a very strong oversized flat shoelace) through the V-thread hole. In many situations climbers use carabiners (metal rings used to attach or fasten climbing ropes together in various ways) with wire gates (the hinged part) because they don’t freeze and become difficult to unfasten as do carabiners that lock with a threaded nut.

This is in addition to all the other gear a climber normally carries, plus at least 60 meters of climbing rope (leaders often carry two) plus the 10 essentials and all your other gear, and partners to share the experience.

Well, you get the idea. Ice climbing is one of many ways to spend time mountaineering, all of which demand competent instruction, good equipment and focused dedication to be done safely. Martin’s employer, the American Alpine Institute based in Bellingham, Washington, is a good place to start. They also have a rental and retail shop next door to their Bellingham office at 1515 12th street.
The photos that accompany this story are by Coley Gentzel, coordinator of domestic programs for the American Alpine Institute.