Shopping sesh – gearing up

They say you can’t have too many carabiners.

They’re wrong.

The REI annual anniversary sale is in full swing, with of course me taking to exploit it accordingly the first day, Friday evening. I forced myself to the register thirty minutes in, as the rate at which I was grabbing things had begun to alarm me, only to learn that the total was less than I’d expected. I rushed back to the climbing section to grab some more.

I don’t really know how many carabiners I bought (why, yes, I can attest to SALE being the most dangerous word in the English language). All I know is it was too many.

The initial high of PURCHASE was followed by the standard GUILT…

…which fortunately gave way to ELATION an hour later as I unpacked the most recent prized additions to my climbing cache on my bedroom floor:

30 ft black stretch of webbing.

A few purple slings.

Set of 6 *glistening* silver and gold Black Diamond quickdraws, and two (matching) longer ones.

And, as mentioned, too many biners.

The newly-acquired beauties amongst some older items.

As you can see I’ve held off on the helmet as I’ve yet to locate a purple one that does not clash with those hues of my purple harness and shoes.

(May I point out that I have been utilizing my white snowboarding helmet on my climbing adventures thus far as, contrary to appearances, I do value my life more than panache at the crag…most of the time…)

Near misfortunes

The approach.

How do hiking boots fare on snow?

Barely adequately, it seems.

We were plodding up a boulder-speckled snowfield on the approach to Lincoln Falls. I had chosen to do as my two climbing partners and go crampon-commando. But the fundamental difference between me and them was that I was in hiking boots, and them, the serious, hard-core footwear that meant business on mountains: mountaineering boots. Ice climbing and mountaineering gear had unfortunately been pushed to the back of the expenses pecking order, behind an imminent trip to Ireland (jaunts in Europe without fail require copious amount of money) and a climbing rope (a not-in-the-strict-sense essential, but for someone at my ability level and clear tendency for clumsiness, absolutely vital). So I was stuck with what I had, which, while impressively water-resistant, were clearly not—judging by their clear susceptibility to the combined effects of gravity and snow—intended for much of anything but dry dirt and rock.

Which was obviously not what we were dealing with here.

Lincoln Falls on the center-left, Mt. Lincoln (elev. 14,293 ft) on the far right.

After we had returned from our adventure, I was surprised and delighted to learn that the frozen waterfalls we had climbed up lay by the looks of it around two thousand feet below the summit of a fourteener by the name of Mt. Lincoln (‘fourteener’ is an appellation assigned to mountains exceeding 14,000 feet in height—Colorado boasts 54 of these beauties) A real fourteener!

Which meant that we were hiking at about 12,000 feet, which accounted for the snow-draped landscape and the wild look about the place. And the tree line we crossed on our ascent. And my labored gasping, which, while nothing new as I’m out of shape and very much aware of this, I’m okay with at 12,000 feet. That’s higher than some mountains after all.

The first pitch.

When we reached the base of the falls, we affixed our crampons, readied our ice axes and sorted out our gear. The most experienced member of the group led up the first pitch, placing (really, securing) ice screws as he went. It was a short and easy climb, with a rating of probably around WI 2+. The other member of our group followed on top-rope, carefully twirling out the ice screws as she went.

After she was up I followed. It was a great warm-up after almost two months of not being on the ice. When I reached the top, our senior ice climbing member had assembled a dizzyingly complex anchor mechanism involving an 10-inch-diameter ice column under a small ice chandelier, webbing attaching all three of us to it, and a means for belaying for the next pitch. With the help of the other two I attached myself to the frozen column, and couldn’t help but ponder its solidity while, still attached to it, I belayed our seasoned member as he set the next arrangement of ice screws above us.

Behold, the ice chandelier.

Actually, strictly speaking, around us would probably be a more accurate description. My other female companion and I had been busy chatting when a muffled shout came from above us to our right. This confused us because he had started on our left. Alas, he had started on the left side of the chandelier, traversed above it, and ended up fifteen feet to the right of it, where he set our next (and last) top-rope anchor of the day (it was already 3:00 in the afternoon). It dawned on me that the reason for this seemingly strange path was that there was no safe direct way to the bolted chains he was aiming for—no route he was comfortable leading, anyway.

So it was that my climb (as it was my turn to “clean” the screws) wasn’t going to be straight up—it was going to be up and across.
What this meant for my protection didn’t overly concern me until five minutes later, when in fact, I don’t believe anything has ever concerned me to such a degree.

As I made my way up the first fifteen feet of the smooth ice slope and raised my head to the first screw, I realized that for the first time since I’ve begun climbing, I was not top-roped, at least not in the strict sense. If I fell, it would be on what was above me, a four inch-long piece of metal winded into a sheet of frozen water. This anchor was no metal ring bored into solid rock, which had always been my climbing protection before. A pang of fear charged through me, but began to wane almost immediately. From what I’d heard, ice screws hold the vast majority of time. Besides, relying on ice screws made this real ice climbing. Which I was totally up for. This is what we’d come here for, right?

By the time I reached the next ice screw two minutes later, though, any morsel of comfort my reasoning had provided had evaporated into the still, cool air. To my right lay the last two ice screws, the line of protection directed almost precisely horizontally towards the bolted top-rope anchor forty feet to my right. A fall here would result in fairly substantial strain on the ice screw at hand. The way I saw it, the force from a rope pulled taught downwards whose origin is from the side just can’t be the ideal “falling” circumstance, if there ever was one.

View from the base of the falls.

Immediately I went to work on the screw in front of me, keen on reaching the top-rope anchor and thereby extracting myself from my dependence on the screws as soon as possible. But the awkward angle of balancing necessary for maneuvering the ice screw handle made the process more difficult than anticipated. The tautness of the rope was preventing me from by turns rotating the handle of the ice screw and unclipping its caribiner from the rope. Meanwhile, my fervent wish to keep my crampon points glued to the ice had yielded aching foot muscles, and the realization that what I was trying to do wasn’t working added a sick feeling of dread to the mix. I was stuck.

A minute of misery passed where I considered giving up, lowering off the ice screw back down to the safety of the ice column. But where would that leave us? Someone would have to clean the protection. And besides, the last thing I wanted to do was to test these things. I realized just how little I trusted ice screws. And that I had to do something, because just standing here, despondent and petrified and clutching my ice axes, wasn’t doing me any good.

There was only one way out of this very sour pickle I’d found myself in.

My thoughts and the irritating tune that had been repeating in my head for the last five minutes ebbed away, and in their place complete silence took over. For the first time that I can remember, I wasn’t thinking about anything. My mind went totally blank.

Then I acted. It was, truly, the very last word I wanted to utter at that moment, but it also happened to be the only way out of this funk.

“Slack!” I yelled.

“What?” someone called from down to my right.

“I need some slack!” I could hear the panicked desperation in my voice. I tried to dispel from my thoughts a mental scene of myself swinging down ten or fifteen feet, followed by each of the three ice screws popping out in orderly succession. It wasn’t working.

When the rope had loosened, I went to work on the screw. Thirty seconds, some teeth-gripping of the rope, and a bit of less-than-graceful body maneuvering later, the little bugger was mine.

By some stroke of luck, or karma, or a favorable word from the mountain gods, I mercifully touched down on solid snow again, ten minutes later.

“Sorry I took an age.” I said immediately, going about untying my figure eight knot. “You were probably bored to tears.”

One can only hope upon setting eyes on these items left by climbers past that the need to make use of them doesn’t present itself.

“Don’t worry about it.” I immediately christened my belayer as the most patient person in the world.

The truth of it, I told him, was that I had had a moment. Probably the most terrifying moment of my life, in fact. He just smiled. I couldn’t stop grinning.

In response to my incessant probing, our experienced member claimed repeatedly that the ice screws would have held in the event of a fall. He maintained his stance on the descent to the car, as well as on the drive back and later that night over drinks. But the temperature that day had been above freezing, and I wasn’t so sure.

Four nights later I dreamt that I was back on that frozen waterfall, in that same precarious spot. Curiosity had apparently gotten the better of me, and I set to punching the ice around all three ice screws to test their reliability (I tend to take greater climbing risks in the dream world because I am conscious of the knowledge that I can’t get hurt. It is convenient.).

Fractures cracked out from the first screw like lightning.

“Well, that one’s not gonna hold…”

I woke an indeterminate time later to a hollow thud and a searing burning in my knee, which I’d fortuitously slammed into the wall next to my bed mid-slumber.

While it still holds that I climbed a third of the way up a fourteener, in winter, in HIKING BOOTS.

Children, snowboards and mayhem

I spotted the red-jacketed instructor just ahead, with his cohort of budding snowboard pros in tow, and reckoned we had a little time. I had stopped to assist the youngest member of the class, a seven-year-old boy who reached to about my waist, to reposition his snowboard goggles. They had escaped from their home wrapped around his globe-sized helmet, and were now hanging haphazardly off the clip mechanism in the back. The juxtaposition of child size and helmet size produced an appearance akin to miniature space cadet.

“These goggles smell like…” he paused to collect his thoughts, while I gently pulled off his massive headpiece and its dangling appendage, “…a fishing village I know of.”

Five minutes into admittedly my first experience with children and I knew with certainty that this job was going to be nothing if not awash with surprises.

A couple months ago I landed a snowboard instructor gig at Eldora Mountain Resort, twenty-five miles west of Boulder, Colorado. I was positively ecstatic; being bestowed the honor to introduce budding snowboarders to the sport, coupled with a gorgeous location, seemed fitting justification to spend (a lot) of time in the mountains this winter, which was where I wanted to be, really. Thankfully, this day, I was merely shadowing this class of ten seven to eleven-year-olds, my last shadowing session before I’d (in theory) be prepared to teach my own class.

In typical Eldo style...

The next five hours proved to be nothing short of eventful. Chaos became the theme of the day. The same little boy who uttered the cultured comment beyond his years at the beginning of the lesson (but it’s Boulder country, a friend of mine pointedly indicated later, so no surprise there) consistently split from the group, via his thirty inch-long new vehicle. He and his new accessory could be seen again and again whizzing off at break-neck speeds away from the group, followed by the inevitable tumble and accompanying plume of snow particles spewing into the air. Defeat by the mountain didn’t seem to phase this boy, however, as the worse the fall, the more daring the next effort proved to be. I wondered to myself what great things could be accomplished by us all if we only possessed the fortitude this little boy did. I predicted that he would be a pro snowboarder, as well as pro at virtually anything that involves risk, by the time he reaches the age of ten.

The boys in the group were fiercely competitive, and as a result, some regarded their own escapades down the hill more pertinent than the instructor’s directions. Admittedly, they improved faster than the others, one of which spent half the lesson laying spread-eagle on the snow, with an air of utter abandonment. I felt sorry for her, and reflected on my own frustration at learning how to snowboard back at age fourteen.

It’s true that snowboarding is likely one of the most difficult pursuits to learn, probably because of the frequency and inevitability of falling when learning, as well as the accompanying colossal mental hindrances that come with every fall. And it seemed sometimes considerably more difficult for the kids to maneuver their snowboards than the adults in the lesson I’d shadowed a few days prior. For much of the five hours of that lesson, the kids were engaged in a futile battle with the massive oval board inextricably attached to their feet, and it was painful to watch them flail around, trying to balance themselves or move their snowboard to no avail. Should children this young, young enough to have clear trouble lifting their snowboard with one foot strapped in, be snowboarding? I couldn’t help but wonder.

A couple weeks later I taught my first kids’ lesson, something I was understandably anxious about after the chaos of my previous experience with the younger generation. I was given seven budding boarders (a lot, but when it comes to children in your care, seven becomes but a fraction of ten). Maybe it was the timing of the lesson, evading the hectic jumble of the week between Christmas and New Year’s, but the day went unexpectedly not-so-bad.

View of the Continental Divide from the top.

Instead of focusing on the wild risk-taking and lack of control as compared to the adults, I instead began to discern their remarkable perseverance. Even though the kids fell more, the falling didn’t seem to have the same discouraging effect as with the adults—even after a calamitous-sounding wailing session, they would get right back up, eager to try again. It may sound cliché, but it is the persistent that end up excelling in snowboarding, the ones that can conjure up the willpower to give it another try, and another, despite the setbacks. We all topple over, and a lot, in this sport.

I was amazed at little girl who, through tears and sobs, replicated the encouraging words I articulated to her after a rather gnarly tumble near the end of the lesson. She had been having a blast all day, and I was worried this bad fall would make her forget all of the positive facets of snowboarding. I asked her to promise she wouldn’t quit.

She promised, adding, “I hate falling.”

But don’t we all.

Ice is nice

Fueled by tales of mountaineering and adventure poured over incessantly for the last year and a half, a few months ago I signed up for a trip to Ouray, Colorado, an ice climbing mecca of sorts nestled in the craggy depths of southwestern Colorado. I spent three days learning how to ice climb with the outdoor adventure club from my university, and by my third lap up the “Kids Wall,” was hooked (pun intended).

Upon my return to civilization I promptly joined an online ice climbing meet-up group and signed up for their first outing, whose destination was originally Vail, though later was changed to a closer-by locale due to not entirely unanticipated standstill ski traffic on I-70 the morning of.

I was admittedly slightly nervous about the upcoming endeavor, not so much because I’m that particularly afraid of the actual activity of ice climbing (we’d be toproping anyway, which is, in the best of circumstances, actually quite safe), but because I felt that, for some outlandish, out-there reason, I should be afraid.

After all, this would be my first real ice climbing foray of sorts with an authentic “approach,” and without an instructor. New people, new place, new outrageous, thrilling outdoor undertaking; who knew what would befall (and exactly that is the beauty of it all, really).

And so naturally, as far as preparation purposes were concerned, there was only one thing to do.

Scare myself senseless.

Vertical Limit, the Ouray group’s choice of form of entertainment for the eve of our first day on the ice, had put me to sleep (the consensus was that the enduring messages of the movie were to place dreadful anchors, and that if in doubt, always cut the rope).

To get the desired effect this time (which was, at the very least to manage to stay awake throughout), I reasoned I should perhaps choose something more realistic. Something that had actually happened for real, and so could conceivably happen again.

After all, watching an episode the television show, Air Crash Investigation, before setting off on international flights had always done the trick when I was younger. So I managed to convince two outdoorsy friends of mine to watch Touching the Void with me the night before my proposed foray. I even managed to stay awake through this one (not that hard this time, I have to admit).

The desired effect (being scared senseless, of course) was even achieved. And not on myself only—I assured my worried friends after the film that there was absolutely no need for concern as I would be safe on a rope the whole time.

As it turned out, my adventures the following morning were fortunately not of such a calamitous nature. Still there were some hiccups worth mentioning, I think:

• I experienced several major-but-fortunately-not-catastrophic rented crampon malfunction moments on the approach. Crampons are cool. Cool enough that I’m quite up to spending some money on my own fabulous pair as soon as I can afford them.
  

  Our playground for the day, Silverplume Falls, rating of WI2+/3. The majority of the exposed rock to the right is admittedly my doing—if nothing else, rather capable at kicking off ice chunks, I'm afraid.

• A chunk of ice the size of a tire rolled to a stop few feet behind me at one point. I’d seen the other members of the group scurrying to intermittent cavernous booms, and was really hoping to make it to another day on the ice. I was therefore quite relieved when the booming ceased to nervous chuckling all around).
• I was, quite spontaneously, having just ascended to within ten feet of the top (admittedly not a difficult climb as far as ice goes, but still), presented with the daunting challenge of untangling the rope from its position wrapped around a rock. Which probably wouldn’t even have been something worth writing about but for the fact that with the slack needed to set the rope straight, a fall would have swung me down ten or fifteen feet. No, I didn’t fall—if I did, I would have either had quite a bit more to write about here, or would have written nothing at all. With ice, if you’re leading, or in any situation where you’re not affixed to a taut rope, you don’t fall. You just don’t.
• And I was too occupied to notice at the time, but was made aware later that the bolts we were toproping off were so battered and bent from rock fall that one of them wouldn’t even accommodate a carabiner.

Unwinding at the local watering hole after our day of pleasing adventure, we took humor in the fortuitous manner in which we had managed to evade calamity.

As for myself, I was pleased that, unlike in Ouray, I hadn’t fallen, and had sustained no notable injuries other than a couple of rather becoming bruises. I’d even given a bit of mixed climbing a go (supplementing the medium of ice with rock, of course still with crampons and ice axes), and quite enjoyed it. I resolved that day to stick around for one more year, for another season of partaking in this outrageously strange, risky and fun sport of ice climbing.

And I was still grinning at the fantastic outrageousness of it all when I stepped out of my car outside my residence later that afternoon and promptly ate it on the ice.

Peril on (and off) the slopes

The sneaky bastard.

Last Christmas Eve, I managed to sustain two injuries, neither acquired while actually snowboarding, the principal activity of the day.

The first one was caused by an assault of the chairlift, which smacked me square in the bicep on its steady swing round via its journey back down the mountain.

The second injury of the day was self-inflicted: I cut my finger whilst slicing tomatoes for Christmas Eve dinner.

This is how mishaps in my life tend to occur: brief lapses in concentration performing everyday activities, such as preparing dinner (I don’t cook—probably therein lies that problem), making my way off chairlifts, and operating moving vehicles (cars and bicycles, more specifically), lead to calamity. Conversely, driving through blizzards or kayaking rapids I seem to be able to handle. Go figure.

Unlike skis, whose utility lends itself relatively easily to moving forward downhill, snowboards are not so simple to maneuver while disembarking a chairlift. You must place your non-dominant foot up against its respective binding, with your dominant boot stuck in its own binding like glue, push off the lift, and keep the board as straight as possible whilst using every muscle and ounce of willpower you can manage to keep from falling flat on your face. The success rate in this endeavor is not consistent by any means, as I still fall occasionally while trying to glide off the chair, despite nine years of slope experience behind me. There’s nothing like the getting off the chairlift part as a snowboarder to keep you humble.

Spotting Santa helped get my mind off the pain, if only temporarily.

An experience from my first (or second, I don’t remember) year learning how to snowboard comes to mind. I fell getting off the chairlift, the arm of the lift smacking me in the head immediately after (I was, fortunately, wearing a helmet, and for obvious reasons, still do). I lay sprawled on the snow, seconds later serving as an unanticipated speed bump to a pair of bewildered older skiers to whom, undoubtedly, my presence in that location at that moment was less than welcome. The outcome is not hard to visualize, I think.

Reflection on this experience brings into question my theory on impending injury, that lack of concentration is the culprit. No doubt, my concentration level was high immediately before disembarking the chairlift (not to mention the likelihood that I prayed, which I did often during those first tumultuous years, and of course still do). That same year I boarded straight into a neon orange sign with the letters, S L O W, printed on it, because I was thinking too much, unable to decide if I wanted to pass it on the left or the right. Maybe the reason for these accidents early on was just being a beginner snowboarder, a truly difficult thing to be. I do feel the need to indicate, though, that to this day I have immense difficulty making decisions, but musings on that matter are for another post.