With ice climbing, you cant be picky. The ice forms when it wants to and melts when it wants to. You have to be able to be sporadic/spontaneous. Kyler spied a line over the weekend that had never been climbed before and the forecast was not good for maintaining it so skip work on a Tuesday we did! I did not know what we were going for until we got there. Even leaving on time, it was sunny and warm by the time we reached the climb. Everything looked awesome, albeit wet and drippy. Drippy ice is normal but drippy ice in the direct sunshine is a red flag. I hated the look of all those hanging daggers above our approach pitch/ the standard first pitch to Cleos Needle and had a bad feeling in my gut. I didnt want to stand beneath them let alone climb directly up their fall line! I voiced my opinion but did not heed my own advice. Climbing something for the very first time is incredibly special so sometimes you take a little more risk to make it happen. We risked the daggers falling because we had to get on the ledge that traversed over to the climb. I racked up and anxiously started climbing the first pitch, hyper aware of what was above me. When I got about 2/3 of the way up, one of the daggers broke loose and exploded like a bomb directly above me on some snow. I didnt hear it break but I heard it falling and had a split second to visualize the trajectory of the debris. I had time to step to my right and hero swing with my right axe in to the ice. I felt the axe grab so I released my other axe, gave up my feet and rolled from my stomach to my back, allowing all the debris to sail by me while dangling from one axe. I couldnt believe I missed the ice but my head and eyes told me that some of the large ice chunks were going to catch my rope and rip me off my one axe. Thank god they didnt! That would have been a very serious fall (my last screw was a long ways below me and you just dont fall while ice climbing. Period.) Kyler was able to duck and curl behind a rock while the debris sailed past and over him, bracing himself to catch what he thought was an inevitable fall. But alas, no tension on the rope. I rolled back to my stomach and sprinted up the last bit of the climb without placing any protection for fear of more falling death blocks. Kyler briskly followed after giving me the option to bail because he didnt want to climb under the daggers anymore either. He survived and we moved over to the base of the new route. Kyler added a bolt to the anchor before stepping out and sending the new route. It took him over two hours to reach the top which is a marathon of time to be on the sharp end so extreme congrats to Kyler for climbing it without resting on the rope. If it takes a world class climber that long to climb a pitch, you can assume its difficult. I assumed it was more than I could do with any style; I dont like pulling on gear or hanging on the rope. I would rather wait until I have the strength, experience and confidence to climb it all on my own. It was still fun to be part of the climb though.
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| The traverse ledge. |
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| Adding a bolt. Its dirty work. |
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| On his way down post send. |
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| We did not climb this lower direct pitch. You can barely see Kyler's blue jacket/white pack rapping off the traverse ledge. |
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| There is more dirt than hair on your face! |
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| The left side of the photo is Cleos. See where there are two hanging daggers just to the right of Cleo's main flow? Can you see where the third one used to be? Kind of a half moon shaped fracture. It landed in the upper snow ledge, I was standing on the next snow ledge down. Kyler nooked behind the rocks just left of the trees. |
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| The route! Upper pitch is brand new! |
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