Ice Climbing

Ice Climbs to Side of Martha, RMNP

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Lacee Ankeney and I went up to Chasm Lake in the Spring of 2024, planning to make a spring climb of Alexander’s Chimney. When we reached the lake, we spied two ice flows on the cliffs of Mount Lady Washington which we had never seen before. It was a cloudy day, the perfect chance to climb these south-facing lines. We changed our plans and popped over to take a look. This was fortuitous for us, as RMNP SAR was searching for a lost hiker, and they ended up locating his body at the foot of Lamb’s Slide that day. We would have been the party to discover the body if we had continued with our original plan.

The ambiance in the cirque was moody that day, both due to the unusual grey weather and the repeated sweeping turns from the search helicopter.

There were two distinct lines formed. We climbed the right-side line for one 30-meter pitch, finding it around M5+. The second pitch looked yummy, but we passed due to extremely poorly-bonded ice, warming temps, and disappearing protection. We wrapped a cordalette around a boulder and rappelled from there. We saw no other fixed gear. I was not able to track down firsthand accounts from anyone who had climbed this before, but probably some old-timers have. It’s not mentioned in any printed guidebooks or online sources.

Some pics:

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Colorado Ice Climbing Guide Books

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Colorado’s ice climbing scene is a little secretive. Numerically, we probably have the most ice climbers out of any state in the USA. As an informal way of controlling those crowds, information about where the ice is located is pretty hard to come by. Conditions, too, are often hoarded.

Facebook groups exist, and are probably the best source of current info (as well as drama). If you know where to look and what the names of the climbs are, Mountain Project can be an ok resource. But there’s plenty which is not online or is intentionally obscured.

This post is just intended as a primer for the guidebooks which exist for Colorado ice. It points you towards a few resources, if you care to track them down. I’ll link to Amazon where possible, but keep in mind that the prices on these things change algorithmically according to supply and demand, so it’s hard for me to know what type of price you’ll see.

If you don’t want to buy these books, the regional Colorado libraries have some copies, and the American Alpine Club has a spectacular guidebook library, located in Golden, which AAC members can take advantage of. I have also personally installed a few of these books at the Ice Coop in Boulder. Don’t steal ’em.

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Climbing Huarapasca, Cordillera Blanca.

Daniel Leave a comment

Information about this peak is a little scarce or outdated online, so I thought I would provide a 2023 update. (2024 update: the glacier tongue shrank and technical ice section is now subject to bad rock/icefall. Guided groups are attacking it in the middle of the night to mitigate risk. As you’ll see if you read this post, that was not at all the case last year, we climbed in full daylight. For more on this topic, see my 2024 post, Climate Change in the Cordillera Blanca.)

Huarapasca is a mountain at the southern end of the Cordillera Blanca, in Peru. It is notable for an extremely short approach, by Cordillera Blanca standards, as well as a 100-140 meter section of AI3/WI3 – legitimate ice climbing. It is one of only a handful of peaks in the area which you can do in a day and back from Huaraz.

Although once considered an obscurity, it saw quite a bit of traffic this season (2023), with several agencies in Huaraz promoting the mountain as a guided offering. People who have climbed it in years past say the mountain is becoming icier.

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