Waterfall ice climbing is a strangely addictive pastime. It arouses in me a host of conflicting emotions giving rise to questions to which I have no answer. The most prominent of these questions is 'Why are you doing this, you idiot?' This usually panicked thought normally howls through my mind as I reach a horrifying point of no return on some monstrous icy crumbling edifice.
Perched like a demented stick insect hundreds of feet up an exfoliating, melting, honeycombed, rotten piece of vertical ice is not the place to start contemplating the meaning of life. An imminent and violent connection with the ground tends to distract you from the balanced philosophical arguments you would otherwise have been considering. When the huge hanging cigar of ice begins to tremble and the impacts of your axes sound as if someone is hacking away at the base of the cigar with a felling axe, rational thought tends to become a little scrambled.
Unfortunately, having survived such an experience, the mind performs a bizarre memory dump and, as you sit in the bar supping on a much needed beer, the nightmare climb gradually becomes a memory of ecstatic delights - an ascent of such aesthetic beauty it will live with you forever, an experience so deeply life enhancing that you are utterly changed.
Hence, the moment your climbing partner thrusts a guide book under your nose and points excitedly at an even bigger icicle, an even more fragile teetering curtain of death potential, you do not leap to your feet and rush screaming from the bar squirting urine in every direction. No, you grin with measured insanity and say,
'Hey, that looks brilliant. Let's do it.'
If you are wise and experienced you then head to the bar and order a large whisky chaser just to ensure that your dementia remains pleasantly deranged.
Technology
Crampons, have evolved into technological wonders with ferocious toothed picks protruding from the toes, a sharp spike sticking horizontally from the heel, and ten razor points bristling from beneath the sole of the boot. It is a simple task to press your boot into the step-in bindings and click the crampons to ones feet. Armed with these and modern axes sporting picks that hook steeply downwards, step cutting is no more. Vertical ice is the way to go.
Modern ice tools come branded with fiendishly exciting and aggressive names. Rambos, Footfangs, Pit Bulls and Terminators are in fact, crampons. Black Prophets, Aliens, The Machine, Piranhas, and Venom, are axes, when once they were called Alpenstocks.
These are names to conjure up visions of bold derring-do, mythic battles against monstrous forces to be won fearlessly against all the odds. They also happen to appeal to the helplessly gullible and slightly desperate ice climbers looking for an edge in their war with wet verticality. If you don't feel brave waving these things around then you never will. I use Terminator crampons and Predator ice axes and I know I could whip Dante's demons if I so chose until, that is, I leave the ground. Then I just feel scared and a little silly.
When previously the only protection came from hammering iron spikes into the ice or screwing in glorified cork-screws that had as much chance of holding your fall as a wet cigarette, today we have ice screws &endash; ten inches of titanium that bite into hard ice like a hot knife through butter. Unlike their predecessors they can hold quite substantial falls, if the ice is good, and they no longer require enough energy expenditure to light up a small city to you place them. As a consequence the days of horrendously long run-outs above feeble points of protection are long gone.
One would have thought that these welcome developments would have made the sport considerably safer and it has to a degree. Unfortunately it has also prompted climbers to throw themselves onto ice climbs that would have been unheard of only a decade ago. It is a vicious circle and quite an amusing one - if you do not happen to be a climber.
Ship Of Falls
Remarkably, fatalities are not that common in waterfall ice climbing. Of course some poor individuals do get swept away by avalanches, sometimes columns of ice collapse squashing the unfortunate parties attached to them, and some take short falls which inexplicably become very long ones abruptly interrupted by the ground - but that is only to be expected.
Such falls have acquired an imaginative series of descriptions. A 'peeler', or a 'lob', suggests a scary but survivable short fall. A 'zipper', when all you gear rips out, and the aptly named 'screamer', are altogether more serious and if you are unfortunate enough to 'crater' as a consequence then your ice climbing adventures tend to be abruptly terminated. Climbs with plenty of DP, or Death Potential, are self explanatory and best avoided.
So, 'Bombing off', an uncontrolled free fall, can rapidly escalate into a 'screamer' particularly if zipping occurs. In the worst case scenario it may become a 'birdman', a prolonged free fall with much flapping of arms and wild ice tool spinning, before the inevitable 'crater' and consequent realised 'death potential'.
Death Rates
A stranger first viewing waterfall ice climbing could hardly be blamed for thinking the death rate must be somewhere in the region of ninety percent of all participants. Not so...
Perhaps it is because it is such a bizarre looking sport, because the dangers are so manifestly obvious - even to someone whose testosterone levels far exceed his intelligence - that only a handful of people are dumb enough to try it. And when they do, they are very, very careful.
In the early nineties it was estimated that of 150,000 Americans who took climbing seriously only one percent chose to climb steep ice on a regular basis. Yvon Chouinard, one of the pre-eminent exponents of ice climbing over the last three decades and the man responsible for many of the huge advances in modern ice climbing equipment, once said, 'Pretty much the only people who ice-climb are a bunch of maladjusted geeks.' The description sounded about right to me.
Climbing vertical ice cascades the size of skyscrapers requires a certain lack of imagination. It can be physically exhausting, technically extremely difficult, demanding of immense concentration and cool headed decision making, at the same time as being mind numbingly frightening. It is an idiotic thing to do and therein lies the fascination. It can also be such an exhilarating and absorbing experience that it transcends all previously known pleasures experienced during a hectic climbing life. It is a paradox. It can be at once idiotic to the point of insanity and one of the coolest, calmest, most lucidly controlled and vivid things you will ever do. It is so stupid as to be wonderful.
Postscript: Leon Trotsky
'Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky,
He got an ice pick that made his ears burn.' - The Stranglers.
Well if old Leon ever saw the viciousness of a modern ice axe he would probably be glad that he died when he did. Attached to the climbers wrist with leashes, in the event of a fall they tend to have the disconcerting habit of spinning wildly through the air from the falling climber's semaphoring arms. Most of the time falling is not the problem. Hitting the ground is. Hitting the ground feet first with crampons on your boots tends to splinter leg bones with alarming efficiency. I know. I've done this twice now. This is painful enough without then having to contend with disembowelling yourself with the very tools and screws that are supposed to save your life.