Ice Fest '07

Summary
OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-02-12 10:39:19 UTC-0500
Description


Mt. Washington Valley Ice Festival 2007
February 10th & 11th 2007
Steve Block, Pavel Gorelik, Vesna Damljanovic, Mike Kokko & Bilal Zia

After succesfully getting the stove at Camelot to glow red hot on Friday night, we met up early at DDs on Saturday morning and headed straight to the Flume to beat the masses.
We set up a line on the short, steep wall at the bottom, a second on the huge long pillar in the middle and a third on some thin curtains near the top of the gorge.
Soon, the place was a mad-house, with every available line taken, incuding groups from ICMS and Harvard.
Fortunately, everyone was willing to share their ropes, which made for plenty of climbing for everybody.

We climbed everything going: steep walls, thin verglass, hanging daggers and chopped-out ladders, with ice ranging from rock-hard to dripping slush.
Mike, Bilal and Pavel did a great job as the novices on the trip.
As usual, we stayed longer than everybody else, hiked out in the dark, and headed to the Common Man for free cheese and Trivial Pursuits.

Mike headed to Camelot and the rest of us drove up to Intervale, where we managed, once again, to get hot chocolate everywhere.
On Sunday we set out early to IME for the clinics provided by the Mt. Washington Valley Ice Festival.
We met our guides, grabbed demo gear, and headed out: Vesna to Frankenstein for a leading clinic, and the rest of us to Texaco for a 'steep ice' clinic.

Both clinics turned out to be excellent, with everyone making great improvement.
For those of us doing vertical ice, we each climbed a number of lines: relatively short but consistently steep (plus an awesome little chimney!).
There was plenty of advice from Mark our instructor, plus the chance to watch and learn from a seriously good climber.

Another long, tiring but excellent weekend at the Ice Fest.

Steve