Hopefully ice climbing will open up a lot more peak bagging opportunities for me here.
Categories
learning to ice climb
Month: December 2007
Since the start of December (or some time around then) the snow just hasn’t left the streets. Well, technically it’s left the streets. Unless you count the mushy brown stuff that looks distractingly like creamed butter and brown sugar. But it’s still everywhere else.
These photos were taken at the start of December, just before Banff Avenue re-opened (after months of roadworks). It was a perfect surface for skiing up and down on.
The Christmas lights are coming out all over town now. And suddenly all of those Christmas cards and images and song lyrics make a lot more sense. I’ll have my first white Christmas this year.
And when there’s enough snow on the roads, you can skate (ski skate that is) up the Tunnel Mountain road, and get this view of the Banff Springs Hotel at night, surrounding by snow covered trees.
In lieu of any new ice climbing activity on my latest days off, I’ll just have to reminisce about climbing Cascade Falls the other week.
Just outside of Banff, the 300 metre high Cascade Falls are a popular tourist destination in Summer (there was even a tour bus that had stopped to admire them as we were walking back to the car after finishing climbing for the day – noone on the bus showed much of an inclination to get out though). And in Winter they turn into a fairly classic WI3 ice climb.
We only did the first 150 metres or so, which is fairly low angled and steppy for the most part. It was very odd to see the waterfall still flowing underneath the ice in some spots though (and hear the gurgling of water rushing past after an ice screw was removed).
Categories
gear saturation
Gear saturation: That mythical time, at some point in the future, when you will own everything you would ever need to do anything you would ever possibly want to do.
Gear saturation is a state that you can only ever strive towards, and that you will never actually reach. Always something pops up and is incredibly necessary. And if there’s not gear to be bought for new activities, then there’s always old gear that’s past its prime, falling apart, being superseded by technological advances, or being eaten by wombats.
Indeed, if you ever actually reached gear saturation, it would truly be a sad day. You could only wander around gear stores disconsolately, your debates about which item and brand was truly the superior for the intended purpose would have no fire, and your browsing on the internet would have no point.
Because standing in a snow and ice filled gully receiving no sun is a perfect place way to spend a negative fifteen degree day.
Even the glacier worms were finding it cold
