LONELY TIMES  Savickas learned from men. Most of her climbing partners are men. Since Weiss one female climbing partner moved to Switzerland, she now climbs primarily with men. It’s the same for Zinser and Schuemann.

“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.

Why don’t more women try ice climbing? “A lot of women don’t like the cold, and I don’t either,” Weiss says. “I shiver and freeze, but you figure out how to manage the system and stay warm.” In addition to wearing the right layers, Weiss packs peanut M&M’s in one pocket and GU (a sports energy gel) in another.

“I have a bunch more body fat than most of the guys, so I stay warm,” jokes Savickas, who is disarmingly self-deprecating even though she has led some of the hardest climbs in the Northeast and summitted some of the world’s highest peaks.

KINDRED SPIRITS Two things keep these women climbing, despite the cold and risk: community and a desire to be challenged.

“I live for our community,” says Weiss, who met every one of her good friends in Boston five years ago when she took the ice climbing program. “There’s a huge bond between people that are passionate about the same thing.”

Zinser describes that passion as the “pure pleasure” of kicking her crampons into the ice and then setting her ice axes. The calculated movement, the transcendent rhythm where everything else drops away and the brain focuses on just one singular, all-important task. “All you’re thinking about is what you’re doing, in the moment, in the now,” she says.

The adrenaline-induced focus and the fun of strategizing where ice ax and foot go best can be intoxicating. And so can mellow evenings in front of a cabin’s wood stove after a vigorous day, when talk is about other times, other climbs, near misses and heroics. Stiffened toes are warmed by the wood fire, a beer sits in one hand. That’s how Savickas often finishes a day of climbing, spent in the company of people she’s seconded or led for almost two decades.

But such traditions are threatened. Savickas has found that an already short climbing season has become even shorter in recent years, due to warmer, milder winters. “I always used to climb the Saturday after Thanksgiving up in [Tuckerman] Ravine and now it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. It’s not always reliable.” She’s witnessed the same thing in the Alps, where glaciers are shrinking at an alarming rate. She says, wryly, that she “might get stuck rock climbing, like it or not” if the pace of climate change doesn’t slacken. For now, good ice can still be found, but Weiss says she sometimes has to go in search of it at higher elevations where the air is cooler.

BUDDING ROMANCE  About 100 feet from the top of Willey’s Slide, shards of tiny ice crystals spray my cheek as my left ice ax lands with a satisfying chink. I am on one of the short, vertical bulges of the traverse, a brief taste of what climbing steeper terrain would be like. I lean some of my weight on the ax. With nothing more than a pinkie finger-sized grip in the ice, this one and a half pound tool holds; it could hold my whole body weight if need be. But I have my front points firmly planted and wiggle my right ax loose to swing again. Behind and below me, Crawford Notch yawns widely, a view I will drink in at the next anchor point. The Webster Cliffs rear up steeply on the opposite side, a patchwork of slabby rock and cascading ice where spindly trees bereft of their leaves mingle with their fir cousins. Everything is coated in a white that seems to blur in the haze of the low-lying clouds. Snow is imminent. I don’t feel the chill in the air, only a stiffness to my cheeks. The taut rope that snakes up from me to where Pete keeps hold reminds me I’m safe. I get it. I get the attraction, why being this close to a substance I have intuitively avoided all my life can have its rewards. It is a new frontier, access to a mountain’s nooks and crannies that few people get to see. I’m already thinking about the next trip, the next weekend, and there’s still one more pitch to go.  

—Karen Finogle, the magazine’s senior editor, grew up in the White Mountains and began tramping in the woods at a young age. An essayist and feature writer, she has written for regional conservation and recreation publications.

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