They Laugh at Death and Dodge Jagged Ice Chards. They Test the Mind and Body While . . . : Climbing Frozen Waterfalls

A frozen waterfall is a slick seductress, fragile and breathtaking. To climb the face of one--to shinny up all 600 feet of Colorado’s Ames Ice Hose, for example--is to skate on the razor edge of disaster.

The ice is fickle, sometimes weakened by sunlight, or corroded by trapped air. Or frozen so brittle it shatters in face-stinging shards under the force of an ice ax.

Halfway up elegant glassy pillars and overhanging chandeliers, any number of things can go wrong, from mind-numbing fatigue and cramps to high winds and avalanches. A broken prong on a boot once sent Alex Lowe free-falling 170 feet before his safety rope slammed him into the cliff, knocking him unconscious and driving a pick into his hand. Michael O’Donnell was overtaken one year by a winter storm; he surrendered four toes to frostbite and lost his climbing partner, who died of exhaustion and hypothermia.

There are icicles 50 feet long, weighing thousands of pounds apiece. Ice climber John Bouchard remembers scaling the crest of one just as the whole formation gave way; he ended up dangling over a 2,800-foot chasm with two broken ribs.

“If you do it hard for 15 years, you’ve got a 50% chance of dying . . . maybe 30%,” Bouchard, 45, said of the sport, carefully examining his estimate in light of a dozen or so friends killed while climbing and mountaineering over the years. “But not me,” he added, laughing defiantly. “Not me!”

He mocks death, laughs in its face, and others of his ilk laugh in a chorus all around him. Bouchard and the multiplying legions of ice climbers are part of an expanding universe of extreme athletes: men and women who embrace great risk and sometimes excruciating pain to satisfy a craving for thrills, glory or the quiet satisfaction that comes of struggle and triumph.

In every era there are daredevils--jungle explorers and mountain trekkers, tightrope walkers who bridge the gulf between skyscrapers, solo sailors who point themselves over Niagara in a barrel--but today the cultural landscape has changed. Technology and market forces have squeezed the sporting world into a high-action, hard-wired video loop. So overwhelming is the multichanneled deluge of events and images that the only way to create a flash, to capture the restless eye of notoriety, is to somehow exceed the boundaries of normal human achievement.

To some that means jumping from an airplane on a surfboard, surfing a few thousand feet of open sky before pulling the rip cord. Or it means skiing off mountain ledges onto 70-degree slopes, or mashing the gas to send a 1,400-horsepower monster truck careening through midair. Or it means pushing the flesh to the furthest limits of endurance in 100-mile ultra-marathons and 300-mile “adventure races” across the rutted mountains and rivers of Patagonia and South Africa.

Whole subcultures have evolved: hugely muscled arena gladiators, speed-freak mountain-bike racers and asphalt lugers, nomadic competitors who earn fleeting moments of cable television fame on the lumberjack and demolition derby circuits.

The sport of waterfall ice climbing, a winter spinoff of rock climbing, did not even exist until the late ‘60s, when alpinist Yvon Chouinard began experimenting with curved ax picks that could grip a sheer ice surface. From a few thousand early devotees, ice climbing has spiraled into a worldwide passion practiced anywhere that freezing rivers, rain and glaciers pour off cliffs and down through craggy ravines.

Thousands of known routes are now assaulted every winter by hard-core climbers who number upward of 100,000, said Jeff Lowe (no relation to Alex), a pioneer who was part of a seminal moment 23 years ago when he and Mike Weis trudged into a snowy, white-peaked valley near Telluride, Colo. What they did was struggle up the face of frozen Bridal Veil Falls, a stunning, 330-foot stream of dripping candle wax, a feat so riveting that it inspired the first wave of big-time ice climbers.

The real boom, however, has come in the last five years, as evidenced by the extensive coverage in Rock & Ice and Climbing magazines, by men’s and women’s ice-climbing events at ESPN’s new Winter Extreme Games, and the advent of the nation’s first ice-climbing recreational park: a half-mile-long, artificially irrigated gorge in Ouray, Colo.

“For people in the industry, there’s been a surge of prosperity they never expected or really even hoped for,” said Terry Hersher, a former ice climber who owns a shop called Telluride Mountaineer in the Colorado Rockies, one of the hubs of waterfall climbing in America.

“Going back a couple of years, ice climbers were a very small, easily identifiable group. Today, there are a lot more urban people . . . people from Los Angeles, Seattle. Typically, they’re very capable, competent individuals . . . in general very intelligent.”

Men far outnumber women, but the sport’s growth has occurred along a wide age range--from teenagers to men in their 40s and 50s, many of them rock-climbing veterans out to fill the winter months. Some are regular working stiffs, exploiting weekends and vacations to climb, while a good number are devoted outdoorsmen who make a living as wilderness guides, owners of mountaineering shops, even designers of name-brand climbing gear.

What they share is often an obsession with the ice and its astonishing beauty.

Climbers talk at length about the gelid wonders they see: crystal castles, great fairylands of icicles, pools, fluted glass figurines, undulating masses that vary in size and color: frosty white, transparent, tinted with the rusty brown of leeching iron, the luminous blue of flowing water.

“Six inches from your face you can just marvel at the way the icicles have formed. [The ice] is different depending on the amount of air that froze into it and the speed of the water as it was frozen,” said Scott Ayers, who traveled to well known climbing spots in Colorado, the Canadian Rockies and the Andes to produce a video, “On Ice,” which he markets in climbing magazines.

“There are vertical things that look like the tentacles of a squid or octopus. You’re climbing up into those and they’re as beautiful as they are terrifying. To me, it’s like walking into an art gallery and looking at the most beautiful paintings in the world.”

Bridal Veil is one such showcase, its waxy tumble of ice featuring one milky blue column that is especially compelling. Clinging to its writhing surface 200 feet up, a climber can see through to the water still flowing inside.

“It’s like climbing up to a window or a television screen and looking in,” marveled Greg Child, 39, who traveled to Bridal Veil this month to climb in a place where winter ice is still abundant. “What you can see, a few feet back, is . . . the waterfall actually rushing inside the ice. It’s a bizarre thing.”

The water pipe is not only surreal but a frightful bit of plumbing this time of year, when the ice is growing thinner. Crack it with an ax and freezing water gushes out. Climber Antoine Savelli, who has done just that, has a nightmare that the entire column will collapse beneath him.

“The fear,” he said, “is that the ice will break away and you’ll fall [inside the pipe] and drown.”

As yet, no one has suffered that misfortune, but danger is integral to the experience, wrapping itself around the beauty in a yin-yang way that climbers find mesmerizing. They are moved to poetry; they speak of attaining extraordinary focus while suspended on 1,000-foot limestone cliffs, becoming locked in Zen-like states of consciousness.

“It’s a mystical experience,” said Savelli, 40, a lithe climber who has scaled mountain peaks throughout Europe and the United States. “The actual act of climbing is so immediate . . . addicting. It never fades.”

In the teeth of great risk, the cares of past and future disengage and slip away, leaving only a present so vivid it fairly shimmers before the eyes--a “hyper-reality” comparable to an out-of-body experience, according to some psychologists. Skydivers get the same mental clarity, said James H. Frey, a sports sociologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who studied the mind-set in the late 1980s.

Far from being crazy or out of control, the daredevils of extreme sports are often relatively conservative thinkers motivated by mankind’s eternal desire to conquer obstacles, to win recognition, Frey said. In the skies or on the ice, they may push their limits further and further, but at home and on the job they tend to minimize risks. They spend frugally. They wear seat belts. They seldom smoke. The Zeitgeist is one of well exercised control.

“Even in the most extremely dangerous situations . . . the [thrill-seeker] feels that he or she is in control,” Frey said. “They have the proper equipment, the proper training, they’ve prepared themselves mentally and physically, and they feel they should be able to accomplish the feat--to jump out of an airplane or climb the waterfall or whatever they happen to be doing.”

That notion is partly delusional. One characteristic of ice climbing, in particular, is the existence of objective hazards--situations beyond the borders of a climber’s skill. Savelli’s latest brush with an objective hazard happened in February on the Ice Hose, a great downward blast of ice that dominates a pine-covered cliff a few miles from Bridal Veil. He was about a third of the way up--200 feet off the canyon floor--when an avalanche began.

Avalanches follow the same natural contours as running water; this one came straight down the Hose.

“I heard a roar at first and looked up and saw this white thing fanning out above me,” Savelli said. He pulled himself against the cliff, hoping that anything hard or heavy would fly over his head. It did, but enough light powder got him to nearly knock him off.

Telling the story, Savelli grinned, basking in the jittery afterglow of it. That is the other pole that draws climbers to frozen waterfalls: During the times in between the Zen states, during those idle night hours spent sipping brandy in the firelight, there are stories to tell--commonalities of experience that solidify friendships, hoary ascents that scrape the shine off a man, earning him passage into an elite fraternity.

“There’s a social dimension to risk,” as Frey pointed out. “The group is very important to them, and the group sets the norms . . . for performance. Status in the group is defined by your success as a climber . . . and as you climb key climbs, your status in the group goes up.”

Spectators are seldom seen; ice climbing is a notoriously solitary act, a retreat in which even two climbing partners are separated on the face of the falls. But within the subculture, personal achievements are well chronicled, and stars enjoy a fame spread via magazine layouts and Internet gossip.

Important routes are often christened by the first to conquer them; hence, a Tolkienesque geography of ice sheets whose names conjure both awe and dread: Wowie-Zowie in Valdez, Alaska; Casket Quarry outside Duluth, Minn.; the Fang in Vail, Colo.; Wicked Wanda and the Weeping Wall in the immense climbing cathedrals of the Canadian Rockies; Gorillas in the Mist in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

Unlike a rock cliff, an ice route is ever-changing and ephemeral, forming up fat one year, thin the next, wriggling and shedding even day to day under the onslaught of rain and snow, wind and sun.

Subzero temperatures in December and January can turn the ice as brittle as bone china. An ax will tend to shatter it into flat fragments, “dinner plates” that rattle a climber’s helmet and mark his face with cuts and bruises.

Toward the season’s end--March and April in much of North America--conditions are more hospitable: The cold is not so bitter and the ice becomes “plastic,” an ideal state easy to penetrate with the ax. Paradoxically, the danger often escalates during this time. Immense ice spears and anvils loosen; meltwater drives an insidious wedge between the face of a cliff and tons of frozen water that wait to come crashing down.

“You can almost do a mental countdown of how long you can hang on before the ice starts to melt and disintegrate,” said Child, an Australian who has scaled Everest.

Ice climbing is accomplished with two axes--one in each hand--and a rack of metal prongs, crampons affixed to each boot. A climber literally crawls, hand over hand, up a vertical face, sinking the ax with every step. A good climber travels a 150-foot rope length in half an hour or less, but glassy chandeliers and overhanging ice can make progress infinitely tedious. A hard climb can take hours, even most of a day.

It is arduous work. The forearms burn. The hands become numb and frozen--”like clubs,” one climber said. An exhausted climber, stuck in the middle of a 200-foot falls, may fear dropping an ax and so tighten his wrist leashes, worsening the numbness in his hands. His technique may deteriorate, costing more energy to make only the most meager progress.

“You’ll find yourself too weak to pull out your ax, and then too weak to hold it over your head, let alone put it back in the ice,” said Dan Michalec, 40, a Chicago dental technician who began ice climbing just a year ago. “I see people . . . hitting anything, just throwing their ax up there hoping it hits and sticks. And usually it won’t.”

Climbers call it thrashing. It is a sign of poor judgment at a time when good decisions are critical.

The question that always confronts the leader on a climb is where and when to install protection. Tubular metal ice screws, placed at strategic points on the waterfall, are the only real safeguard against tragedy. They must hold securely to the safety rope if a climber’s axes pull out and he falls.

The trouble is, no single act is quite so likely to cause a slip as stopping to install such a screw. The climber must first let go an ax. Then, with a gloved, frozen hand, he must align the screw without dropping it--each one costs $40 to $65--and twist it into the ice even while he clings like an insect to the sheer waterfall surface on two pairs of toe prongs and his remaining ax.

As Michalec points out, the very fact that he is installing a screw means the climber is probably far above the last screw he placed; a mistake, therefore, might send him plummeting 100 feet or more before his rope saves him--assuming he put in the last screw properly.

Into the calculation about where screws should be placed goes the time factor: The longer it takes to ascend to the top, the greater the odds that sections of the falls may collapse.

“Speed is sometimes safer than more protection,” Michalec said.

Those who excel at the sport are often in peerless shape, relishing the test of strength and willpower.

“Ice climbing is retrospectively pleasurable,” said Alex Lowe, 38, one of the world’s best, a man his peers call “The Mutant” because of his uncanny endurance. “It’s not necessarily a good time every minute you’re doing it. It’s cold and you’re scared and all that. It’s not a sport of the masses. Most people don’t want to suffer.

“But to me, that [suffering] increases the satisfaction of doing it. When you stand back and look at the collective event, it’s good.”

Mental toughness is essential. Lowe, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., with his ice-climbing wife and three young boys, is known for doing 400 pull-ups a day and rigging a bungee cord to a door handle in his car to give his arms a workout while he drives. After an ice fragment fell in his eye during a climb in Cody, Wyo., slicing his cornea and ruining his once-perfect vision, he had difficulty understanding why a writer found it worth noting in Climbing magazine.

“That’s sort of incidental,” he said, downplaying the dangers with a bit of philosophy. “I’m not a risk-taker, I’m a risk-controller. I don’t have a death wish. I have a life wish.”

Ice-climbing deaths are rare--only one or two a year in North America, according to the American Alpine Club--but injuries are common. They usually occur during falls that might be far worse except for ropes and safety screws. Climbers tend to slam into the sides of cliffs, getting stabbed with their own axes or catching their crampons in the ice while free-falling, a misstep guaranteed to twist or break an ankle.

Medical help is usually miles away. In its annual report on mountaineering accidents, a terse, matter-of-fact publication that in spite of itself tends to read like a synopsis of Wile E. Coyote misadventures, the American Alpine Club noted one case of a climber who slipped last year while 45 feet up icy Cannon Cliff in New Hampshire.

Two safety screws gave way and the climber crashed to the ground, breaking two bones in his right leg and another in his left shoulder. His only immediate assistance came from two partners who put a splint on his leg and tied his helmet to his foot so he could more easily drag his broken leg over the snow.

In that fashion the climber “crawled feet-first down the snow-covered talus slope and then at times head-first through the trees,” the report said. “The crawl to the road took four hours.”

Horror stories like that have made some agencies and private property owners wary of ice climbers. At Denali National Park in Alaska, climbers are now being charged a $150 usage fee--the original plan was $500--to help offset the cost of the many mountain rescues performed by volunteer rangers. The money is a sore point to many climbers, who point out that campers, hunters and fishermen pay no such fees in spite of the burden they place on rescuers.

“Hunters get lost all the time,” Jeff Lowe said. “There’s just an outcry against climbers because a lot of people don’t understand climbers and they think they’re crazy.”

A nonprofit climbers group called the Access Fund, founded in 1991, has struggled to smooth out the inevitable conflicts that occur as climbers sally forth into remote lands controlled by the government or private owners. The group’s biggest triumph occurred this winter with the reopening of Bridal Veil, a falls closed off for many years because of private property holdings. After Jeff Lowe’s first ascent, climbing there virtually ceased except for the occasional zealots who, according to legend, sneaked up it at night like thieves.

Climbers have gained a greater degree of legitimacy in recent years, and growing ranks of beginners have nudged it toward the mainstream, but its hard-core factions are still pushing the limits.

Bouchard is one. He suggests that there is a powerful satisfaction in confronting danger and hardship and performing well, the way he was forced to rally after that 50-foot icicle collapsed beneath him in the Andes. With two broken ribs, he climbed several hundred feet before reaching an overnight camp.

He experienced a similar kind of duress during his historic first ascent of the 600-foot Black Dike in New Hampshire in 1971, when his rope tangled and he was forced to drop it.

“For four hours I climbed about 200 feet where every move I made was the hardest move I ever made,” Bouchard said. “I didn’t climb for about a month afterward.”

But that was long ago. Now, he is planning his next big trip: A summer excursion to the North Pillar of Latok, an 8,000-foot ascent that ends at an elevation of 24,000 feet in the Pakistani Himalayas.

Top-echelon ice climbers see the Himalayas as the final frontier: the world’s greatest mountains, immense, frozen places where the ice and rock chase each other into the sky for miles, uncharted territory far and wide. Child pictures himself there someday, no rope, no protection, the whole world spinning beneath him.

“Maybe . . . reaching out with your ice tools and chipping in by a couple of millimeters into a goatee of ice . . . 25,000 feet . . . and you swing around on that ice ax and you look down and all you can see are your crampons swinging around in the breeze. That really excites me,” he said. “That kind of climbing is what I dream of being able to do.”

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Out of Bounds

Far from jam-packed stadiums and the media glare, they pursue sport with a zealous abandon. Some are adrenaline junkies, chasing thrills at break-neck speed; others are tough-as-nails masochists, enduring the torture of 100-mile foot races across the burning desert. They clash in bone-jarring physical combat and they create harrowing wrecks from behind the wheels of souped-up machines of mayhem.

In this occasional series, the Times examines their world--the bold new frontier of extreme sports: the performers and the entrepreneurs, the social forces and market trends that have generated whole new pastimes, the way these sports of great pain and risk fit into the fabric of our culture.