December 2018 – Ouray, Colorado

When I unexpectedly got time off work between Christmas and New Years, my husband and I decided to book an impromptu trip. Our imaginations went wild. Would we go to Utah? Thailand? Mexico? But then he suggested a place I’d never heard of. Ouray, Colorado, home of the Ouray Ice Park and not much else. 

What is the Ouray Ice Park you ask? As the legend goes, years ago, city water pipelines leaked over the gorge making people realize that this created the perfect spot for ice climbing.  Over time, locals started farming ice. Now the park is a legit place with permission to use hundreds of thousands of gallons of city run off water distributed through 250 sprinklers to create essentially an outdoor gym. And it is free to visit!  Planning to visit Ouray Ice Park is a bit weather dependent. It normally plans to open in mid to late December, however, the date sometimes gets pushed back and in the early season all of the routes haven’t had the chance to form. It is generally open 7:30 – 4 on weekends and 8-4 on weekdays.  Don’t worry though, this is plenty of time to play out in the cold! http://ourayicepark.com/

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I’d never ice climbed. Yes, it was something I’d wanted to try, but the instability of waterfall ice had always scared me and I haven’t gotten enough snow skills to try my hand at glacier ice yet. 

So I borrowed some crampons, bought some water resistant pants from Outdoor Research, and finally got to give my mountaineering boots some legit use. We packed up our ice axes, ice screws in our newly created ice screw case from Neon Climbing, and some lab safety goggles (safety third!) and were ready to adventure! 

I had been working for a week straight from 10 pm to 8 am and then sleeping once I got home.  On Christmas morning, rather than going to bed after getting home, we went to the airport for a flight to Grand Junction, Colorado. Grand Junction is not the closest airport to Ouray.  It is a 2 hour drive away. (The closest airports are 90 minutes away.) However, it is a large enough airport that the flight prices are much more reasonable. We had also considered a cheaper flight to Denver, but the price savings was not worth the additional 4 hours of driving time.

At this location, we grabbed our rental car (we had requested all wheel drive and told them our destination), took a photo with a giant bison and headed on our way!  The roads and mountains were covered in snow and I was thankful that my husband learned to drive in Vermont and New Hampshire. Upon arriving late that night, we went into Secret Garden Bed and Breakfast and went to sleep.

We chose the Secret Garden Bed and Breakfast because of the reviews saying that the host Sara was able to accommodate for dietary restrictions.* Since I am dairy free and at the time was trying out being a vegetarian, we paid a little extra to ensure that I could have a big breakfast to fuel the day.   This was a great decision. Ouray is not the best town in terms of food for dietary restrictions. In this small town, I ended up with a lot of Impossible burger patties on salad. One restaurant that boasted about vegan cauliflower wings could only for sure tell me one sauce that was vegan. 

Upon waking in the morning and receiving a nice warm breakfast, I was still exhausted (remember I skipped sleeping the day before!). We dressed in our layers, filled a thermos up with coffee, and headed into town to see if we could pick up a guide book. In hindsight, the guidebook isn’t the most useful. You don’t really seek out routes at the ice park. Rather if you see an open anchor, you grab it! And not all of the areas in the book are farmed currently.  But the proceeds supported the Ice Park so it wasn’t a big deal. 

We parked in the lower parking lot along a bend in the road and started trekking the 10 minute approach through the snow. When we finally got to the park entrance, there were fire pits blazing and you could see into the large canyon. It was a magnificent sight. I had to learn how to put on my borrowed crampons and then we crossed the large metal bridge across the School Room.  We set up a top rope on the first empty route we could find and both rappelled into the canyon. Many parties belayed from above, but as I had never climbed ice before, we thought it would be helpful to watch Tyler climb first and then him be able to see me to offer guidance.

I had figured since I had spikes on my hands and feet, I would be able to stick to basically anything. I mean, wasn’t I essentially making my own holds? But alas, I had hardly gone 10 feet and I started getting really hot and dizzy. I was over exerting myself. As I dangled there, pondering why I had gotten myself into this situation and how I was going to do a whole week of this, I started feeling a bit better. We did one route that day. Just one. Tyler started looking for another anchor and the next thing I knew I was vomiting in a bush in the snow. Crap. In hindsight, since we know that I get nauseous if I don’t sleep enough and I had skipped a full night of sleep, maybe we shouldn’t have tried climbing the first day, especially since there was also such a large elevation gain entering Colorado from our sea level home of Seattle.

The next few days got better each time. I was finally starting to get the hang of ice climbing. However my feet and hands were not getting the hang of the cold. For all the belays I was constantly marching in place while singing “Two by Two” from Book of Mormon both in my head and sometimes out loud. (The song goes, “two by two we’re marching door to door…”) When I go back, I’ll have to find some alternative marching songs so I can mix up my internal playlist. 

After we were either too exhausted or too cold to continue climbing, we would return to the B&B for the hot tub.  We spent a lot of time staring at the mountains while the snow came down. It’s a very strange sensation having your body be very hot, the air be very cold, and then noticing your husband’s beard is frozen!  Ouray does have “natural” hot springs that it boasts as a tourist must, however they looked like a giant swimming pool and cost $18 to visit. Our dirtbag selves were content with the hot tub.

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We spent most of our time climbing in South Park and New Funtier because the School Room was always so packed.  (The School Room is the area when you first walk in that has a metal bridge spanning it.) We got to practice some dry tooling and mixed climbing as well because sometimes when you set up your rope from above, you didn’t realize that there wasn’t ice covering every section of the route.  When we finally were able to snag an anchor in the School Room, the sheer length of the climb was both exhausting and slightly terrifying. But it was worth the wait and a good way to end our trip.

Our trip would be wrapping up with the start of the new year.  We went to bed early on New Year’s Eve because we were so exhausted.  We had our alarms set for 11:40 pm so we would not miss the festivities. When the alarm went off, we begrudgingly bundled up and walked up to Main Street in the snow and cold, wondering why we had gotten out of bed. As we waited in Main Street with everyone else, it turned midnight.  Nothing happened. Where were the fireworks? There were lots of intoxicated people singing and yelling, but there were no fireworks. We waited and waited for what seemed like forever in the cold, wondering when we should give up and return to our warm room. At about 12:07 though, boom! The fireworks started shooting up into the sky and the canyon would momentarily light up and show off their gorgeous red mountains.

*Since writing this piece, it has come to my attention that Secret Garden Bed and Breakfast changed ownership. Therefore, I am unsure what their current status is on accommodating for dietary restrictions.

**There is an ice climbing festival in January, however, if your goal is to get a lot of climbing in, I don’t recommend going for the festival. They had opened the park earlier than usual and not all of the routes were quite ready yet, and still it was packed. I can’t imagine getting to do much actual climbing during the festival!