Ice Attraction 

AMC Outdoors, January/February 2008

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!”

A native of Michigan and recent transplant to the area, the young, outgoing computer programmer and analyst immediately applied for the Boston Chapter’s ice program, but lacked the basic rope skills needed. So, like most ice climbers, she first turned to rock, spending most of 2006 in a harness and rope.

“It opens up more terrain…I can go more places,” Schuemann says, explaining the appeal of the sport. “It must be more than that though. It must be a little bit about the challenge of going other places that not everybody can go.”

For Mare Weiss, a senior designer at an architectural firm and co-director of the Boston Chapter’s ice climbing program, the attraction started “with [the] outdoors, which is my whole life.” A former Girl Scout who used to go camping with her family, Weiss started hiking the White Mountains in high school with friends. By the time she was in college in Brooklyn, Weiss was spending every weekend hiking in the Catskills. In between trips, her sleeping bag and tent never left her car trunk.

In 1996, at the Shawangunks, a famous climbing area on the fringe of the Catskills, Weiss first witnessed climbers ascending steep, vertical slabs of rock. She took a one-day class soon after, bought shoes that night, and has been climbing hard ever since. It wasn’t until the winter of 2001 when she saw a couple of men climbing ice near a trail that she was hiking that Weiss thought, “Oh, I have to try this.”

“I’m super claustrophobic…and for some reason I love the idea of being at the edge of a cliff, which is the absolute opposite of being in an elevator,” Weiss says.

Heidi Zinser was at a singles dance in 1996, three days after moving back to Massachusetts from Florida, when the man she was talking to said he liked to rock climb. “Huh. That sounds… stupid,” was her response. Still Zinser, a veteran marathon runner, went with her date the next week to try it out. “We only lasted a few months, but the climbing was my real love.”

The following winter, Zinser and a friend took a one-day ice climbing course with a private outfitter. “At first I didn’t really like it because it was cold, and I had trouble staying warm,” Zinser says, voicing a complaint that keeps many women, and men, from getting on the ice. Still she took the Boston Chapter course in 2000. Last winter alone she logged 10 climbs, completing more than 50 pitches. “It’s a whole new set of challenges,” Zinser, a clinical data manager, says. “Even though the basic climbing principles are the same, it’s very different from rock.” Ice feels more alive; its surface can change in just a few hours.

That’s exactly what Nancy Savickas, a veteran ice climber of 15 years, likes about it. Unlike many climbers, Savickas has always preferred ice over rock. “I know it’s more dangerous, but to me I feel like I can’t get off route, and I always have three points of contact in.”

Savickas’ “three points” include those on her crampons, the sharp metal picks strapped to each boot. The “front points” on each crampon are two alloy steel spikes, which stick out at the toe of the boot. Climbers kick these into vertical ice and rest some of their weight on them. It can take new climbers time to trust that these knife-like points, one and a half inches long and thinner than a pencil, will support one’s body weight. But they do.

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.”