Writing about my accident, I noticed I had not written a post in almost a year! Ridiculous.
So instead of the drama of things going wrong, let’s revisit a couple successes. And this winter was quite the success.
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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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I keep getting asked questions about my gloves at the crag, so I’m writing this article to share my opinions on the Showa gloves for ice climbing. If you aren’t an ice climber you can fully ignore this article, as we’re about to get pretty nerdy on these gloves.
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Information about this peak is a little scarce or outdated online, so I thought I would provide a 2023 update.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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When I wrote my Ice Season wrapup post in late April this year, I commented that I probably wasn’t done climbing ice. And here we are, mid-June, still finding solid water ice in Colorado. I logged Day 47 of my ice season this past Sunday on Mount Evans (a.k.a. Mount Blue Sky), a 14er near Denver.
Evans boasts one unique feature: a road to the 14,267′ (4,350m) summit.
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