This weekend wasn’t too exciting. Just a day of chilling before Jen left for Germany and a day of freezing cold granite with Mike. So, instead of talking about climbing the same routes in LCC that I’ve done hundreds of times, I’ll point you toward some rarely climbed ice.
Early in the winter, Alex, Rick, Jess, and myself decided to head up to the Uintas and check out a tip on some climbable ice that we got from one of Rick’s friends. After a quick scouting run on the sled, Alex shuttled the rest of us back into the area, and we were all stoked by what we saw. The very first cliff band we came to had probably 20 pitches worth of ice climbing spread out over a few hundred yards, and a short run further up the road found even more. Most of the ice was south facing and sun baked, but we thought that was likely as good as it got. A quick search on the interwebs revealed a shot of the same place with probably five-times as much ice on the same cliff. Either way, we all had a pretty kickass time climbing unknown lines aided by an overcast sky which was the only thing keeping the whole place from melting around us.
When we got back, I though it would be a good idea to keep our mouths shut about the place, so we could get back up there and pick the plumbs. Then a couple things occurred to me. First off, that’s kinda dumb. Second, there’s no damn way that we are even close to the first people who have been up here. And third, not many ice climbers have snowmobiles anyway, so who cares? Then I ran into my friend Kyle a couple weeks later after having approached Baghdad on Alex’s sled. He asked if we had ever taken the sled to the Uintas, and if there was anything up there worth checking out (not knowing that we had just been there), and I sure wasn’t going to lie to him. So, the person most likely to get up there and climb everything already knows, which makes keeping a secret pretty useless at this point.
On that note, here’s the beta: All the ice we found forms from snow-melt, so you want a good freeze-thaw cycle to start with. Then you want some cold temps and overcast skies to keep everything from melting out because it’s all south facing. If you get those two things happening up there, then grab a friend with a snowmobile and drive as far into the West side of the Uintas as you can, then cruise a few miles up the road on the sled and look to the left. There should be ice all over the first cliff band you get to, and I’m sure there’s a serious amount of ice elsewhere in the range as well, so go get it!
