A slippery slope

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2016 (3732 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seriously, you’re going to climb that thing?

Not only voluntarily, but you’ll pay to do it?

Dude, that ice wall looks higher and scarier and slipperier and craggier and even more like totally straight down than The Wall on Game of Thrones.

But climb it they did, with gusto and relish and huge ice picks and boots full of enormous spikes, more than 20 people trying out the ice wall on Messager Street just outside the gates of Festival du Voyageur at $20 a climb.

“That is a workout and a half!” exclaimed Tony Torka after performing his because-it’s-there moment and returning safely to the frozen turf below.

“It’s exertion, right?” laughed Torka, having climbed the ice wall in about eight steady minutes.

The St. Boniface chapter of the Alpine Club of Canada has been building the ice wall every winter since 1996, dousing the structure constantly with water for up to a month to create a few precious weeks of what it boasts is the highest such structure in an urban setting in the western Hemisphere.

One member said Sunday it’s 60 feet high, another said 20 metres — whatever, it’s high.

“The ice is one to five feet thick,” explained member Paul Hrynkow. “We use three telephone poles to create a framework” for a summer climbing wall, which transforms each winter into an ice wall.

“We have the water going 24 hours,” he said.

Good years — these people define good as unbelievably frigid — it can take a couple of weeks, and hold up from late December to the end of March. With the weather so bad this year — what most of us would call wonderfully mild— it took four weeks to get it to freeze properly.

Torka is a cable guy who climbs as part of his job, and has done some climbing in the Rockies. Sunday was his first try at an ice wall, and he was pumped — Paul Hrynkow, you might want to talk to him about membership.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Torka said.

Down below, his partner Erin McKenzie shot the whole adventure on her cell phone.

“He’s an adrenalin junkie. We’ve done a lot of wall climbing,” McKenzie said.

She wasn’t sweating it, McKenzie said: “No, he knows what he’s doing.”

Torka was attached to a rope the whole way, anchored at the top of the wall, and held by a club member on the ground, while other members of the group watched his every move.

One piece of advice appeared initially to be somewhat rude, until the supervisor repeated that Torka was to “Move your axe!”

Once atop, Torka needed a leap of faith — he had to remove his picks and accept that the person on the ground would have the rope in hand as he bounced down the side on the descent.

Acknowledged McKenzie: “It’s always the coming down that’s the nervous wreck part.”

Torka allowed that his legs did most of the work.

“The arms are just there for support,” he said. “There are some not so good holds, halfway up.”

Torka said, yes, first time out, it takes some trust to let go at the very top.

“You have to inherently trust your belay person,” he said.

Trust indeed.

Member Therese Dube said proper equipment can easily run two grand: ice picks go for $600 a pair, boots $500, crampons — the fierce spikes for your feet that look like a T-Rex’s dentures — are at least $200, proper pants, ropes, gloves; they add up fast.

The club members open the site up to the public each Saturday and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. as long as conditions allow; Thursday and Friday evenings, people with at least some experience can come out.

Dube said there are six routes up the wall to provide some variation; members do the climb half a dozen times or more each day it’s in operation.

Inside is a series of ladders and small platforms leading up to the top, where the ropes are attached.

Hrynkow expected more than 20 people would get their first taste of climbing the ice wall Sunday.

As for those of us for whom the second rung of a step ladder while changing a light bulb is an exercise in terror, Torka had some sage wisdom: “If you’re afraid of heights, don’t do it.”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca