Ice Climbing in Colorado!

The Ouray Ice Festival is a yearly gathering for true thrill seekers. For 3 days ice climbers from around the world gather to celebrate the sport and climb some amazingly fun and terrifying ice falls. One of my best friends who is a fellow adventure traveler went to the festival in 2018 as an amateur, so I decided to tag along this year and check it out.

A little history on the Ouray Ice Park

Legend has it that back in the 1980s a mountaineer by the name of James Burwick was visiting the Uncompahgre River Gorge and in the distance saw a massive icicle attached to a large pipe. A hydroelectric pipe ran through the gorge from a dam upstream, and everywhere the old pipe leaked there was an ice fall. Burwick and friends rappelled into the gorge and climbed up the ice fall. Upon reaching the top their ice picks punctured the pipe, resulting in more ice falls in the coming days and weeks.

In the early 1990s a pair of local hotel owners were looking for a way to drum up business. Over a six-pack of beer they were able to convince the owner of the hydroelectric plant to let them tap into the water line running through the park and voilà the Ouray Ice Park was born. After much trial and error through a process dubbed “ice farming” the pair were able to perfect the process of creating ice falls, and the park has been attracting climbers from across the world ever since. What’s super awesome is that it’s remained completely free and open for the public to visit.

F*** it let’s go climbing

As I mentioned a good friend of mine went to the festival in 2018 with a few of his friends and he hasn’t really shut up about it since then. Even though I am absolutely terrible at indoor rock climbing I figured it would be a really fun and unique thing to try. My sister happens to rock climb and when I told her that I was going she asked to tag along.

Ouray is in southwest Colorado and quite frankly there isn’t really a good way to get there from anywhere. We ended up with a group of 8 coming from different cities at different times, but after finding out that it was a 16 hour drive from Dallas my sister and I decided to fly into Denver and rent a car. From the airport it’s a 6 hour drive depending on the route. We weren’t in a hurry so we decided to take the slower route that would take us through a few national forests. I think the drive ended up being around 6 hours for us. The roads were surprisingly good and even with a 2 lane highway most of the drive I was able to keep it around 80 mph. I happen to have a fantastic streak with rental agency people so we got upgraded to a Toyota Sequoia SUV from a full sized car that I had only paid $80 total for 4 days. Thanks Hotwire and Advantage Rent a Car!

What a cute little town!

Ouray is small. Like really small. The 2010 census pegged the population right around 1000 people. It reminded me a lot of Breckenridge, Colorado though it’s about 1/4 the size. It pretty much consists of one main street through the town and a few offshoots for hotels and other businesses.

We arrived in Ouray at kind of a magical time. The city exists in this little canyon with high mountain cliffs around it and the perfect amount of snow was coming down. Our group had booked a few rooms at the Twin Peaks Lodge and Hot Springs which was a rustic brown wood place that definitely had a european mountain town feel. Sprawled across the side of the hotel is “Switzerland of America” – which with the scenery and the snow really kinda fit. I should mention that one of the other attractions that Ouray has are its hot springs. Our hotel happened to have 2 of them built into the pool area. And they are AWESOME!

Ice Fest

What’s really cool about Ice Fest is that it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever climbed or not, it’s open to everyone. And it’s cheap! If you have all the gear you need attending the festival is completely free. If you’re like me and don’t have a harness, ice picks, boots, crampons or a helmet – basically anything other than warm clothes (and they rent that too!) – not to worry, you can rent them all for $5.

The way the festival works for people with or without gear is that you can pay $5 online ahead of time to purchase a “gear card.” What that allows you to do is to go up to any of the vendor tents and ask to borrow any necessary gear for the day. The idea is that if you need gear you can try various products and see what’s comfortable and you like, or maybe you discover you like ice climbing so much you’ll start buying gear. If you decide to go check it out one year I recommend getting there right at the start time (8am) so that there aren’t any lines. I was able to get gear from 5 different vendors in about 15 minutes. They were ALL super friendly and accommodating for someone like me who hasn’t climbed before.

Gotta walk before you climb

What I did not expect was how much effort it would take to get in to the climbing area. Our hotel happened to be right by the entrance of the park, but the entrance is about a 15-20 minute walk to the vendor area. All uphill. At 7800 ft above sea level. Suffice to say it’s a pretty good cardio/quad workout even before you get to where you can start climbing. If you’re like our group and aren’t even remotely close to the pros that climb the deepest parts of the gorge (near the entrance) you can also look forward to a solid 15 minute walk to the first available area – a lot of which is uphill. Ooof.

Eventually we did trek to an area known as South Park, which has the most amount of climbing routes available. What does that mean?

There are places along the top of the falls that have been deemed beforehand as good places to scale the wall. There could be too many rocks, possibly trees in the way, not enough ice or possibly a horrible angle to climb at. You can tell those places because someone has gone to the trouble of placing climbing mounts into the ground at the top that you can hook into. The mount points are important because someone on the ground needs to be able to safely hold you with the opposite end of the rope in the event that you fall. More info on “belaying”.

Hello gorge, ice to meet you!

First things first, you have to get down into the canyon. You can do that by hooking your rope up to a mount and rappelling down, but in our case with quite a few new people the safer way was to walk down. That in and of itself can be a little challenge. The paths down are usually pretty steep and have guide ropes to help you down. The day before in another part of the canyon I took the path down and it was so squirrelly that I would have preferred to try and ice climb back but I didn’t have a harness.

The next part was a little frustrating. The festival offers “clinics” or training classes for beginning to advanced level climbers, which is awesome. The problem is that the South Park area has 32 different established climbs and I’m guessing 2/3rds of that area already had ropes for those classes, making those climbs completely unavailable. The classes hadn’t arrived yet so we found a staff member who was super cool and gave lots of tips and advice for the new people – namely tying your own harness knot, belaying other climbers and advice for both climber and spotter on how the climber gets down. He was kind enough to let us use some of the runs on the condition that we would have to climb down immediately once the classes started to show up. After all that waiting I finally got to climb and right as I was almost at the halfway point I had to rappel down…the class had shown up.

I have to say, it was awesome. AND EXHAUSTING!

Ice suck at climbing

Since we were getting kicked out of that area we walked further into the canyon to see if we could find any open runs, which we did not. Our fearless leader and resident climbing expert Martin said that’s pretty much what it was going to be like everywhere so our best bet to climb would be to just ask people that already have their own lines run if we could jump in after them.

At first glance this seemed like a pretty intruding concept but it turns out everyone down there is super fucking cool. Everyone shares equipment, water, snacks, you name it. Even if you have your own rope set up, once you climb it you’re not going back up immediately as it takes a lot of energy to climb and belay a partner. With everyone sharing it allows you to do multiple climbs without having to set your equipment up each time. Not to mention everyone is really encouraging as you’re scaling the ice. At first it seemed a little cheesy to hear people cheering others on like they’re 8 years old and just made their first soccer goal, but I must say it’s really reassuring to have people giving you affirmation and giving advice.

Our entire group was able to get multiple climbs in during the day, with most everyone making it to the top each time. It was probably around 3 when we packed up and headed back. It only took a few minutes to return the equipment and then our group split off in a few ways for a little bit. I headed straight to the bar.

Ice Fest advice

Do:

Go! If this sounds even remotely fun it was a great experience and really really cheap.
Bring a small backpack that you can keep some snacks and water in. Bring A LOT of water!
Layer! When the sun isn’t shining into the canyon it gets pretty chilly and there is a lot of just standing around and waiting. When you climb you can take maybe half of it off so you don’t overheat.
If you aren’t going with someone who knows what they are doing sign up early for one of the clinics.
It’s probably not a bad idea to work out a little leading up to the trip.

Don’t: