Ax Wielding Maniacs – Ouray Ice Festival, CO
Ouray, Colorado is one of those great little mountain towns that’s a little bit now and a little bit 1890s. Surrounded by a staggering wall of mountains that create a sense of separation from civilization, the town is a small oasis in an ever-urbanizing world. I’ve always been drawn to this town for its setting, historical charm, and its interesting residents. I have on occasion sat in my suburban cookie cutter house and thought about the life I should be living in Ouray, though I realize these thoughts are like someone fetishizing over a supermodel, my fiction may be better than the reality.
Over the years, I have read about the Ouray Ice Festival, a mid-January event held in a box canyon at the north end of the Uncompahgre Gorge, just outside of the town of Ouray. In the 1990s, Bill Whitt and Gary Wild began using hoses and piping to farm ice by cascading water down the sheer canyon walls to create an ice climbing wonderland for a burgeoning ice climbing movement. The ice festival draws thousands of people each year to participate in the ice climbing events, climb for fun, or just watch the ax wielding maniacs take their lives into their own hands. I am definitely in the later category.
I find the idea of adventure sports fascinating. When Ouray was founded in the late 19th century, people risked their lives to trek across the mountains, ford white-water rapids, and pad across ice covered lakes and streams, just to gather the food or get the things they needed to merely survive. I’m sure that our pioneering relatives and predecessors imagined a day when people could get unspoiled food from one central location, stay inside to take a leak, or have bridges across rivers. And yet, in a day and age when we can tell the woman (or English accented man) in our phone to order a pizza that someone will deliver in an electric car, more and more people are taking up sports that actually lower their predicted life span. And yet, as I write this, the hypocrisy of my wonderment is that my high stress, sit behind a computer, eat late at night job, is doing the same thing.
So I say to you squirrel suit flying, water filled cave diving, rock arch swinging, ice wall climbing crazy people, who are you? What are you chasing, or running from? How do you live in the monotony of modernity when you regularly face your own mortality? And most importantly, will you take me with you? My Rock Climbing Zen magazine classified ad would read: “Pasty white, nearsighted, middle aged man with an aggrandized sense of his own wit, seeks thrill seeking, wild person with delusions of invincibility to teach them how to just let go (though to be clear not let go of anything that would cause me to fall to my death).”
The Ouray Ice Festival is a magnet for the worlds thrill seekers, and in my case contact thrill seekers. On my first day at the festival, the climbing event seemed a practice in masochism. Contestants had 12 minutes to climb a slab of ice, then a rock precipice, and finally, because nature isn’t challenging enough, a man made box covered with an assortment of seemingly random things someone found in someone’s closet. Because I’m terrible with judging distance, I will say that the total climb was some where between 30 feet and 1,000 feet, though it was probably closer to 30. I went through the same progression of excitement for each contestant. The person would start their climb and for the first few minutes, I would think that maybe this was a dumb idea to drive 7 hours to watch something so boring. Then the climber would hit the rock portion of the climb and the human drama would begin. As the climber sprang, dangled, and lurched from point to point I started to lean and wonder what their next move will be. Then as exhaustion began to grind on the contestant and they started to slow and stretch limbs that were pushed over the red line of exertion, I would say their name. Quietly at first, but louder as their time ticked away. At this point it didn’t matter who they were or where the were from. This was a solitary human drama playing out for a crowd of people in over priced outdoor gear, and in that moment Emily, Chris, Alejandro, or whoever was climbing, was my hero for doing what I knew I couldn’t. Inevitably they all fell, or at least the ones I watched, gravity pulled and flesh failed and my hero, my maniac with an ax separated from the canyon wall and we all made a collective gasp as nature once again came out on top. And then the rope caught and our proxy of human strength and endurance descended to the ground. Their name, like so many great men and women of history, quickly faded from my mind, as the next thrill seeker began their ascent, and I again wondered why I drove all that way to see this, and so the cycle of drama went for several hours.
For me, the highlight of the festival was not the competition, rather it was the people climbing for the joy, or challenge, or thrill, or who the hell knows why. The competition took place lower in the canyon. As one moved deeper into the Uncompahgre Gorge, away from Ouray and the competition, the canyon became deeper and the ice became thicker. The scale of the climbing became inconceivable to my numbed city brain. Below me, in the iced over gateway to a frozen-over hell, the men and women that took on the massive sheets of ice were only noticeable, because of their bright blue, orange, yellow, and green gear. I came closest to understanding why they do it when the sun broke through the overcast sky and threaded the needle of the crevices opening to illuminate the ice. I have heard that the Eskimos have 1,000 words for snow, describing it in all of its conditions. What I saw in the canyon also required 1,000 words to describe. With the extra light I could see brown ice, white ice, and brilliant blue ice. It was rock hard, brittle, and slushy. The surface was flat, rippled, mounded, and jagged. It broke into powder, bits, chunks, and Volkswagens. It was beautiful, it was harsh, and it was an amazing thing to behold.
When the sun fell behind the peaks, the wind picked up, and the temperature dropped, my family made it clear that it was time to go. As we walked back to Ouray, I had my own moment of delusion when I said to my brother that I thought I could go ice climbing. My brother, as is his right as my brother, promptly reminded me that I was to chicken to jump the 20 feet from a bridge near our childhood home into liquid water, so he had some doubts about me climbing up 60 feet high on frozen water. He’s probably right, and while in my heart I feel like I could do it, the truth is that for the foreseeable future the only ice I will be testing my will against will be the icicle I knock of the eve of my house or the cubes in my gin.
What: Ouray Ice Park – Ouray, Colorado
Where: Ouray is located on US Highway 550, 70 miles north of Durango and 98 miles south of Grand Junction.
Website: www.ourayicepark.com
Recommendation: Get the Mouse’s Famous Scrap Cookie at Mouse’s Chocolates and Coffee (520 Main St.) in Ouray, Colorado.