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The third point of contact is an ice ax that a climber will plant in the ice for stability and leverage. Climbers also have a second ice ax and will swing and plant one ax, swing and plant another ax, and then lift and kick each foot to “front point” up the ice. Leaders of a climb, like Savickas, will use one hand, their fourth point of contact, to screw or hammer ice screws into the ice. The ice screws are the anchor points for the rope, which prevents a leader, or her second, from falling too far. Savickas, a native of Dorchester, Mass., and administrator in financial services, was trekking the lower foothills of Nepal 20 years ago when the mountaineering bug bit. She gazed up at from getting on the ice. Still she took the Boston Chapter the rough outline of the Himalayas cut against the backdrop of sky and thought, “I want to be up there.” “If you wanted to do anything winterized, any form of mountaineering, it’s always good to get some technical skills,” Savickas says. “Even if you wanted to just keep it at a really easy pace, it’s just a beautiful world to experience, and you’ll never see it…just skiing. I’m not a skier, I’m terrified of skiing. It’s too fast for me.” “Lonely times.” That’s how Laura Waterman, mountaineer and co-author of Yankee Rock & Ice, summed up her ice climbing experiences as a woman in the 1970s. “I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that I was about the only woman interested in climbing ice—regularly, that is,” she wrote. “Some of the women I knew from the Gunks might come for a weekend or two but didn’t stay.” That was more than 30 years ago, when modern ice climbing, with crampons and the more versatile ice axes invented by equipment maker Yvon Chouinard, was just getting started. Front-pointing was a new phenomenon. Prior to 1969, climbers in the Northeast had used their axes, which were longer and more cumbersome than Chouinard’s, to cut steps into the ice, a process that took all day on climbs that are now done in a few hours. Waterman began her ice career just as new equipment was making the sport more accessible, but to a mostly male clientele. Times have changed…slightly. “You see more women now ice climbing, but by far it’s male-dominated,” Savickas says. And that can often lead to surprise encounters when she is out on the ice. “It’s always funny when I’ve led guys up ice. A lot of times I’m the only leader…or we’re swapping leads…and people are always like, ‘Oh, she’s not your girlfriend? You’re not hauling her up something?’” That reaction never fails to amuse her. According to the Outdoor Industry Foundation’s latest Outdoor Recreation Participation Study, for 2005, nearly 9 million Americans are climbers, and most climb natural rock (about 5 million) or artificial turf at an indoor gym (about 6.7 million). Only about a million people choose ice and of that group, roughly 100,000 are women. In the Boston Chapter’s ice climbing program, Weiss says that of the 22 participants accepted each year, only two to four, on average, have been women. Such a gender discrepancy can be intimidating. Schuemann worried she wouldn’t do as well as the men when she took the program, so for two weeks before the first outing, she practiced calf and arm strengthening exercises instructors had recommended. She wanted to make sure women “were well represented,” and she succeeded. She never tired, and even though some of her male instructors advised her to “just hit the ice like it’s your last boyfriend,” Schuemann found her own rhythm with the ax, often gaining good purchase without landing heavy blows.
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Zinser on the route Pegasus in Crawford Notch. Photo by Mildred Kennedy.
