Women who climb ice are devoted to a game where mind and body work in concert with the ice. Digging in front points and picks to get up close and vertical every chance they get, these ice-loving women are a rare breed, but they’re out there, in greater number than ever before. Meet four female climbers who choose to conquer the frozen surfaces of the Northeast, and keep coming back for more.
The 9-millimeter purple rope is already cold against my fingers as I weave it through my harness and tie a figure-eight knot. Now threaded to my two climbing partners, Pete and Michelle, I share an equal stake in getting to the top of the ice before me. I watch them, both experienced climbers, sort the gear while I stack the 60-meter rope beside me. It’s my first ice climb, and the slight nausea I feel has nothing to do with the uphill slog through waist-deep snow it took to get here. No. My stomach is a powder keg of nervous excitement because I am thinking about the ice axes: Will I be able to swing and sink their intimidating, serrated picks into the frozen bulges above me?
Willey’s Slide, in New Hampshire’s Crawford Notch, is a grade two climb (five is the most difficult), a low-angled ice flow several hundred feet high mixed with pockets of snow and bordered by forest. It is an ideal place for beginner ice climbers like me to learn; the ice is usually stable, the grade is mild, and the trees to our left offer a quick exit route in case something should happen. But I’m not thinking about that, yet. As Pete readies to lead the first pitch and I feed his end of the rope through my harness and put him on belay—to arrest any fall he might take—I’m thinking about why I decided to do this. What possessed me to put on three layers of clothes and strap sharp spikes to plastic mountaineering boots so that I could become more intimate with…ice?
FIRST ENCOUNTERS
“It was just so cool.” That’s how Bostonian Brooke Schuemann describes her two-pitch ascent of Frankenstein Cliffs, in Crawford Notch, last winter. (Each pitch is about a rope length long, and some routes will have several pitches in a single climb.) She was one of four women who, with 18 men, took AMC Boston Chapter’s annual ice climbing program, a multi-weekend course for beginners. In the same breath, she’ll also tell you that she got scared, but just a little and especially when a crack would form in the ice around the pick of a climber above her. Imagining a plate of ice breaking free and falling on her caused a moment’s pause, but she quickly told herself that “other people do this kind of thing and they’re OK,” and that she just needed to use “some common sense.”
Schuemann’s ice attraction began three years ago when she found a housemate’s copy of AMC Outdoors and a listing for the Boston Chapter’s climbing program. Already intrigued by the sport and exotic climbing areas in foreign locales, she shifted her attention to local ice after a little research. “It seemed like New England was one of the better places in the world to ice climb,” Schuemann says. “All this fun practically at our doorstep. Yeehaw!”
Ice climbers. Photo courtesy of Jerry and Marcy Monkman.
