The Season’s First Ice Climbing Trip!

As many of you know, Jess and I really like climbing ice, but it isn’t always easy to find climbable ice. There is a lot more ice in Colorado than the eastern locales where we’ve previously lived, but there are also quite a few more climbers competing for the same terrain. We’d been planning to climb earlier in our Christmas vacation, but somehow laziness kept us around town until Sunday morning. Because we still weren’t keen to get up too early, and the avalanche conditions in the back country were a bit on the high side, we decided to check out some ice that I’d heard of a few years ago near the Moffat Tunnel.

For those of you unfamiliar with the area, the Moffat Tunnel is a railroad tunnel that cuts through the mountains on the continental divide linking Rollinsville to Winter Park. Several years ago, I rode my mountain bike over the mountains with some friends from work via the old railroad grade that was rendered obsolete in 1928 when the tunnel opened for service, and last year Jess and I rode the ski train through the tunnel with our friend Jen and her father for a lovely day of skiing in Winter Park. The tunnel is also used regularly by Amtrak and various freight trains crossing the state. It’s one of the only ways to transport coal around the area.

The hike to the ice was short, in terms of distance, but the snow was very deep. We stumbled upon some tracks from a party that was ahead of us, but they didn’t take the most direct path up the hill. In their defense, it was impossible to see the ice once you left the main trail for the woods, so in hind sight, I’m not surprised that we had such a circuitous path through the trees. After about an hour of hiking through deep snow (snowshoes highly recommended) we finally reached the ice. It was a small flow, but we were able to share the space with two climbers from Denver that we met at the ice, and everyone had a great time.

Despite the snow being very deep, it took only around 15 minutes to hike (this time straight downhill) back to the car. We stopped into the Happy Trails coffee shop in Nederland on our drive back home, and had a wonderful dinner with fresh homemade noodles to wrap up a wonderful Christmas vacation.