Valentine’s Day Ice

Sunday morning I carefully motored up I-70 through fresh snow and met John in Idaho Springs. Since he had 4wd, he agreed to drive and we were soon at the Montgomery Reservoir and gearing up for a morning at Lincoln Falls.

The gated road in was icier than I’d ever seen it before, but we eventually danced, slid and bypassed the ice to the climbers trail. New and blowing snow had partly obscured the beaten path and lax routefinding led into crotch deep snow.

The falls was in thicker than on my other visits and I thought about jumping right into some WI4 lines. The colder temperatures and accompanying brittle ice (at least at the start) convinced me to stick with some easier stuff.

I led up a traversing line from left (at the SAR cache) to right (large slung block) of just over 30m. John followed and got to figure out the process of cleaning screws on his third time on ice.

From our belay I climbed straight up easy ice bulges on the left side of the main flow on wet, plastic-y ice. One axe swing erupted in a shooting stream of water, resulting in a soaking glove and a soon to be soaking rope. I rushed through the steeper finish as my hands were rapidly numbing and reached a bolted boulder but had to suffer a bout of the screaming barfies before I could anchor in.

Anchor built, I tried to pull up the slack in the rope but found it was frozen to the ice. A couple good heaves broke it loose and the stiff rope eventually went into my belay device.

John began climbing while I worked out a system for forcing the iced rope through the belay. A two-handed tug on the brake strand seemed to work best and would fire a shower of ice crystals as the rope bent through the device.

With all our soaked and freezing gear, and a desire to avoid the worst of I-70′s afternoon traffic we decided it was time to depart and hiked around the west side of the falls to descend. A welcomed sun had finally come out and nicely cleared of the interstate as we returned to Idaho Springs for a late lunch at Tommyknocker’s.

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