It happens every year at various levels, even here in the Southeast. Creaking, expanding, sparkling in the sunlight-the ice comes. And as it drapes over road cuts, cascades in frozen waterfalls, plasters itself to many a north-facing cliff-the climbers come, too.
“There’s a fluke winter every 10 or 12 winters where we usually have 20 places to ice climb within 20 minutes of downtown,” says local climber Kirk Brode, though he’s hesitant to tell where exactly these places are located. Whenever a good ice crops up close by, he says, it’s usually so full of eager ice climbers that there’s not a lot of elbow room.
“Nobody told me where any of these local spots are. We hunted them down ourselves. If people are super motivated that’s what they’ll do,” Brode explains, adding that a climber needs to be super motivated if they want to take on the sport.
Unlike its sister sport of rock climbing, for which countless crags are waiting to be explored, ice climbing is a bit more elusive. Conditions need to be just right, says Brode, with a few cold nights at around 20 F, and if there’s not enough water, there won’t be enough ice. “We just kind of watch the weather and we look for two or three nights around 20 degrees,” he says. “The first one is always hard to pin down.”
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