Silverton, Colorado, is a tiny town of a few hundred souls sitting in a high alpine valley cleaved by the Animas River. Surrounded by steep, treeless mountains that top out at 13,000 feet, Silverton's existence is due to the extremely rich ore bodies that lie deep inside its mountains.
In the summer, you can see the small heaps of tailings dotting the mountain sides. In the winter, everything gets covered up with deep, unstable powder snow.
In 1993, Luke Laeser, Jon Butler and I were looking for a golden day on great ice. We drove to Silverton three times that season, hoping conditions would be good and we'd enjoy a great adventure. And twice, we were driven away by conditions that seemed insane. Avalanches were spilling down gullies and ravines we assumed would be climbable. Climbing there would've been suicide. We sulked home, our heads low. We'd wasted time, money and energy, just to be shut down. As the saying goes: third time's the charm.
We awoke early one snowless day and headed north along the Eureka (an old ghost town) road. As we rounded the last corner, our collective eyes popped out of our small skulls.
We were looking at an enormous strand of thick, blue ice, that undulated skywards for 1,000 feet: Stairway to Heaven. Stairway to Heaven is by no means the hardest climb in the area, in fact, it would be regarded as moderately difficult. But the stunning beauty of this weird blue path into the heavens made us drive no further. We had to climb it. We had to be a part of this miraculous thing 'Ol Ma Nature had shown us.
We tromped across the river to the base, and began up the first steep pitches. That brought us to a shelf which we unroped for, then continued up. Few times have I ever seen such high quality ice.
These days, the ice climbing fraternity is turning to rock faces, pre-protected on rappel with bolts and pitons, that might have little or no ice whatsoever. And most of these new style routes are getting done on crags that see big crowds. I liked the fact that we were the only people in this entire valley. As I tied back in, then whacked my way up the crux curtain of ice, I wondered what might be wrong with me.
Luke and Jon lead the last few pitches, and we topped out after only a few hours. It was a great feeling up there, picking out other climbs to do, and studying the massive avalanche debris piles that lined the walls of the valley. As we took our first few steps on the descent, something in a low shrub fluttered. A weasel? A pika?
"Look, Luke said, pointing at a white blob that was moving past us up the slope."What is that?" Turned out to be a Ptarmigan, a bird of prey whose feathers turn white during the winter months. None of us had seen one before, and we stared in wonder. "Now that," Jon said later, "was worth all those trips down here."
Ice Climbing
