By Trevor Bockstahler
The wind had seemed to sweep up all of the available dust in the White River floodplain as the Spring sunlight filtered through the sky and whipping treetops as a soft amber. I was somewhat sheltered on a small island beside sand-buried abandoned cabins and sickly trees as I stared at the roof of my tent that morning near the border of Southwest Alaska and the Yukon Territory. My train of thought jumped independently between the tracks of the challenges from the previous weeks, the challenges of the months ahead, and the biggest question of all… Why?
The answer had come just a few days before in the form of a beautiful breakdown while knee deep in moss on a steep Kluane mountainside. It still didn’t all make sense yet, but sometimes the mind needs to be put on the shelf when the heart is speaking. Dreams of blue skies, brilliant clouds, gray limestone, ice, and cliffs filled my need for a seemingly unattainable longing. So I made a trade with the Universe, this once in a lifetime multi-month mission in the far North for the chance to take this foggy, out-of-focus, abstraction of a dream and make it reality. But this came with steps, below was one of them.
I found myself setting up the back of my covered truck bed to sleep in during a midnight January snowstorm that had already dumped over a foot of snow in the quaint little town of Ouray, Colorado. Ouray, I was told by a friend months before, is home to a world renowned ice park and ice climbing festival during which they offer introductions into the sport via relatively cheap and accessible classes and clinics. Having no experience in ice climbing and only a few gym sessions of rock climbing, I decided back then that I would go! I convinced a friend from work to join me on the trip and to take one of the clinics with me. Although, it could hardly be considered convincing as their level of excitement was arguably higher than mine! We set off late after our work shifts that evening and found a remote snowy pull off on a dead end road to park and sleep just outside of town. Morning was coming soon and the back of the truck was ready for slumber, so we crawled in the back and fell asleep with anticipation.
We met a small crowd of other climbers of mixed experience levels at the Ouray Mountain Guides shop, the guides passed out required gear and sorted us into our proper groups. Soon we were in the back of a large off-roading truck with a bunch of happy strangers on our way to the ice park! Marcus Garcia and his assistant instructor Jesse showed us down the path to the bottom of the canyon that held dozens of ice routes and to the start of ours as we all got to know each other.
A wonderfully friendly group who all seemed to have an affinity for the outdoors in a handful of different forms, but none who had ice climbed before. We learned tons of technique on how to hold the ice tools (called tools, not axes when made for ice climbing), what is a good stick, how to kick in your crampons, leveraging the tools and crampons, and lots of body position tweaking from Marcus which granted him the nickname of Marcus ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ Garcia. But possibly more important to my goals was that I was able to ask what would normally be an annoying amount of questions about equipment to buy, how to find routes to climb, solo climbing techniques, and other miscellaneous things! It was a great time and I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out, but wow does ice climbing destroy the forearms! That night we went to one of the many local hot springs with new friends from the clinic. The next day I ventured out on my own to climb with a friend from Boulder who was the catalyst for the trip to the ice fest, providing me the wonderful recommendation. Then that night we drove back to Vail for the next morning's work, but as short as the trip was it was just the beginning of my journey on the ice!
