we had a record turnout this year for the ice event. And the weather was magnificent.
Frank and I arrived first and I managed to get in seven consecutive days of climbing.
On the second day, Sara,Caleb and several others came trickling in,. That’s when I had a little incident.
it was a freak accident as I was being lowered from the top of a climb I just finished. Too much slack was in the line and it flipped me over backwards and in the process of kicking out from the ice one of my FrontPoint crampons went straight into my calf.
so I was hanging upside down and backwards with a cramp on sticking straight out of my leg. 40 feet up I had to pull that thing out of my leg which caused a little bit of damage in a lot of bleeding.
Fortunately we had a team doctor on board. Neil was Johnny on the spot bandaging me up. I managed to miss the bone which was fortuitous.
that night we did civil war battlefield surgery.
Neil, Sara, and James did such a good job that I managed to climb every day thereafter. Given the open wound, though, I had to forgo the hot tubbing.
on one of my next to last days of climbing I ran into an old friend with whom I was in Tibet China and Nepal with back in 2016. This is Edwin. We had been climbing together all day before I realized who he was and we made the connection. I was climbing Cho Oyu and he was going to camp 3 on the north side of Everest. I kept looking at him thinking he was familiar to me. Edwin is a screenwriter who now lives in salt Lake City so they were down for a long couple of days of climbing.
Neil prevailed upon us to take that 2 hour 50 minute drive across the state to visit the new ice climbing area called Lake City. Five of us crammed in the vehicle and away we went. It was beautiful going over the frozen lakes and seeing that part of the state. I will say the climbing there is primo. The temps are colder and the elevation a bit higher. A lot of stuff was melting out in o u r a y. Here it was cold and winter still retained a firm grasp. There are long runs almost 80 ft. Definitely enough to get your pump on. We liked it so much you’re going to incorporate it in future trips. Well worth the drive
we got back for our final day on the ice. There’s several side notes to this trip. One of which is that Richard and Linda got engaged. The other is that Caleb’s vehicle broke down somewhere outside of Kansas. So we spent a lot of his vacation dealing with that headache.. I’m very sorry for what he had to go through.
that’s me on berserker one of my favorite climbs off of the pic of the Vic.. James and Richard took great photos.
overall I’d say it was an amazing trip. If you didn’t go you missed out.
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