I watched the thermometer in my car dashboard with dismay.  Negative six.  Then negative five.  It kept doing down all the way until negative eleven where, thankfully, the downward spiral stopped.

I was driving a mere thirty minutes north of Anchorage to go ice climbing with my friend Dave.  That thirty minutes was enough to take us into a valley and therefore into another, even colder weather system.  The good news about the cold: The ice was going to be fat.  The bad news: I was going to freeze.

We parked my Subaru on the road below the climbs and suited up.  I left it running with the heater blasting, trying to stay in the warmth for as long as possible.  Once we had our boots, harnesses, and helmets on, it was time to go.

Our first climb was about thirty meters of WI3 ice.  The ice was hard in the cold and I struggled to get good placements as I followed up after Dave.  Once at the top, I was greeted by a beautiful view of the Mat-su Valley.  The sky had begun to clear and the clouds glowed orange in the sun.  I thought about taking a picture to post on this blog.  And then I was too cold to fathom the idea of taking my gloves off to do so.

After rappelling down, we stopped and took a hot cocoa break.  The hot cocoa was the best thing to happen all day, it seemed.  We were out there in the cold air, standing on the cold ground, getting ready to climb up the cold ice.  It was invigorating to come into contact with something that was actually warm.

We moved on to the next climb, which was about 50 meters of WI3.  Dave was doing a great job leading, but I still found myself getting cold at the belay.  It was once I started climbing that I realized just how cold my hands felt.  I made it to a wide ledge and stopped for a moment to try and warm them up.  Then it hit me.  The experience was unmistakable.  The dreaded screaming barfies.

Ice-climbing lore is replete with tales of the screaming barfies: where you want to scream and to toss your cookies because the warm blood has just rushed back into your cold hands at the top of a climb.  So I just stood there for a few minutes, hands warmer, stomach churning, and tried to compose myself.  Eventually I pulled it together and headed up the final ice pillar to finish the climb.

Thawing out my hair in the car after climbing

Dave and I finished up and made a quick retreat to the Eagle River Alehouse.  Chowing down on tacos and gulping down beer, we joked about how some people like to be “comfortable” on the weekends instead of going out climbing when it is negative eleven degrees.  Their loss.  We had fun.  Painful fun, but fun nonetheless.

I found myself thinking of what an ice-climbing instructor once said to me to describe why she often chose to ski instead of climb in the winter, “On a sunny day you have to go to the coldest, darkest place, and that is where the ice is.  You have to have a certain amount of toughness in you to ice climb.”  At the time, I did not quite understand what she meant, but now I do.