On Saturday (the last day of 2005) I had the amazing opportunity to go ice climbing. We went to a place called The Ice Factor. They have the biggest indoor ice climbing facility in the world! They have all kinds of technology that keeps the room like a giant fridge with lots of real ice on the walls!It's quite strange after doing rock climbing. The things that hold you to the wall are the ice axes and the crampons. (sharp pointy bits on your boots) At first it feels quite clumsy, swinging these big pointy axes around but it started to feel a bit more natural after a while. I found that as I got more tired, it got harder and harder to actually lift an axe and swing it at the wall. My left arm got so tired that sometimes I'd swing and it'd deflect off the surface because I was unable to hold it straight. Other times it was tricky to get it OUT of the wall when I wanted to climb higher.
The funnest moment was when I was about a third of the way up the wall. I had one axe free because I was about to reach higher to stick it in there. Just as I moved a bit, though, the other axe slipped out of the crack in the ice that it was lodged into. Slowly, I started to rotate backwards, my feet still gripping the ice with the crampons. Instinctively, I swung at the wall with my right axe and it stuck in, immediately stopping the fall. It was a pretty cool moment, kinda like something out of a cheezy film.
It's all good fun, really. Doing something like that indoors is so much safer than out there in the REAL world. Man, it's a crazy sport, I tell you! We had the ropes anchored to metal girders which made up part of the structure of the ice room. (If you click on the picture you can see this more clearly in the big version.) When people ice climb "for real" they put big screws into the ice. Yes, THE ICE! The only thing holding them up is water. OK, frozen water but still. Man, it's water! I know that it was only ice I was gripping on my way up the wall as well. The difference is that when I did slip, the rope was attached to something more reliable.
Having said all that, it was a great experience and hopefully I'll get a chance to do it again some time. Now, if I can just find somewhere I can go snowboarding to try out my new bindings...
4 comments:
ya, my dad's told me about ice climbing...aparently he had to climp up ice walls on the way to school when he was younger, both to AND from school!! crazy eh. Good thing he had sharp finger nails back then.
Hey Kenny,
Have you ever watched 'Touching the Void'. Reading your post reminded me of that!
Ash
Chris, I didn't know about that till you mentioned it. I'm excited about it because Braehead's not far from me at all and the idea of REAL SNOW in Glasgow is just brilliant.
Steve, I wouldn't put that past your Dad. I'm suprised he didn't just get spikey tyres (yes, that's how we spell it) and ride a bike up the ice.
Ash, I only heard of "Touching the Void" very recently. The first time we were meant to go ice climbing we had to turn back because the roads were really snowy. When we got back home, one of the guys I was with offered to show me the film since we had all this free time. He couldn't believe I hadn't seen it. It was pretty crazy. I don't feel especially motivated to ice climb in the outdoors with my ropes anchored in the actual ice with screws. That's a bit more extreme than I'd like to go.
touching the void sound like something really, really bad
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