Climbing on Ice
The Mount Washington Valley Ice Fest in Conway/North Conway is one of those winter institutions that feels both local and cosmopolitan: a long weekend of clinics, demos, and evening community events that has been running since 1993, drawing climbers into a landscape where frozen water briefly becomes usable terrain. My friends and I signed up for a “vertical ice” style clinic—meant for people who can manage themselves on a rope but want to move with more competence on steep, brittle surfaces. The day began the way festivals quietly teach you they should: meet at basecamp for gear checks and borrowed tools, accept a little borrowed expertise, then head out into the cold with a small cohort and a guide who knows exactly how fast confidence can outpace technique.
On the wall, ice climbing immediately clarified what makes it distinct: your tools don’t “stick” so much as they “place,” and the difference between those verbs is the difference between control and wishful thinking. Swing too hard and you dinner-plate the surface; swing too softly and you’re left negotiating a rattly, unreliable bite. Crampons add their own grammar—front points that can feel magically secure until your feet drift even slightly off line and the spell breaks. The most memorable lesson, though, was physiological. Our instructor warned us about the “screaming barfies” (hot aches): that nauseating, pain-spiking rush when circulation returns after your hands and forearms have been cold and clenched too long. I thought I’d dodged it—until I was lowered, felt fine, stepped onto the snow, and then folded over as the blood came roaring back and my arms lit up with a throbbing agony that felt wildly disproportionate to the day’s effort.
Even with that small misery, I left convinced that ice climbing is worth doing precisely because it grants access to a kind of winter wilderness most of us only witness from a safe distance. A frozen flow that reads as impassable to the eye becomes, with training and good judgment, a traversable line—temporary, conditional, and oddly beautiful in its fragility. It’s also part of a real winter economy: recent research estimates that ice climbing draws thousands of visitors and contributes on the order of millions of dollars annually to the Mount Washington Valley, while separate work on the region is already documenting how warmer winters complicate the reliability—and livelihoods—built around these routes. So yes: I wouldn’t recommend the barfies. But I would recommend the day, and the strange privilege of moving through a landscape that only opens for those willing to learn its narrow terms.
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