One of the things that attracts me to climbing, and mountaineering generally, is the tradition of good, thoughtful writing that accompanies it. Great climbers are often great writers. (I’m neither.) But I think it has to do with the deep thought necessary to explain the inexplicable; to convince others how something other than sex can be both primitive, and elevating (and also require good pro.) I’m pretty late to the game, but I suspect many of you have experienced the same Monday morning conversation that I have: someone asks you how your weekend went, and then they glaze over as you try to explain how it felt when the mountain’s cold fingers had gripped your diaghram, and the world in your vision narrowed along with your options--but you thought your way out of it. Or you might have been trying to explain how the first slug of beer tasted after a day out. But are they right not to be overly impressed?

Last December a couple of my gal, Karla’s, gym climbing pals, took us ice climbing. Grotto. I was looking around like a wide-eyed child, stepping on the rope and having to be told to daisy in. The next day we went up to the base of the pillar on Lake Louise Falls. As we waited for other beginners to come up I shivered uncontrollably without a belay jacket. But I hardly noticed the cold as I looked out over the famous lake, up the steep rock on the other side, up toward the plain of six glaciers, over the trees whose branches were weighed down with pillows. All from a tongue of blue/white ice that was bizarrely, vertically oriented. Again, I stepped on rope and forgot how to tie 8 knots.

When we got home, a day’s drive from the mountains, Karla saw a need in my eyes—as if a dealer had fed that stumbling child crack cocaine. Gear accumulated. I took an indoor lead climbing course, and dog-eared half the pages of Ice and Mixed Climbing. I began using the exterior of my woodshed for dry-tooling. She and I took a hands-on ice-anchor building course, and by year’s end each had a dozen days on ice, and were angling each other to lead.

I’m old enough to realize (if not recognize it as it’s happening) that there’s a difference between a healthy hobby and an obsession. Karla suspected I was a goner, on the wrong side of the psychological scale. In another barely remembered life I had a girlfriend ask me if I loved triathlons more than her. I said “no,” but the fact that I always met her tired and late, AFTER working out, kinda weakened my argument. And there were those lost years of my youth spent in a dungeon chucking weights around for the sole purpose of “Getting Big.” Well, we were also trying to impress girls. But I have since learned that most of them likely thought I was a self-absorbed goof. Now, I’m a 46 year old man who knows better. Sooo, much better.

Honouring my newer, wiser self (and to assuage Karla’s concerns) I developed and verbalized an image with which I would be satisfied. I made up my own 12 step pre-program, if you will--inoculated myself against the type of obsession/habits I could see myself developing. Dear reader, I bet you know the signs. For instance, asking a person a sincere question, then after a while realizing that she has stopped talking, that you haven’t heard a word, and that your mind’s eye had taken you back to leading Saturday’s crux pitch. Or that other sign: at the desk at work, staring at a computer screen, and wondering if that person who walks behind you occasionally has figured out that the black/grey screen is not a work database, but Gravsports.

I told myself to limit my climbing ambitions. To find a healthy perspective on the activity. I imagined Karla and me, high in an ice cave flanked by dark, banded vertical cliffs that hold the vertical ice world that we are navigating. I have coloured ropes at my disposal.

I don’t know where the image came from--I sure as hell had never been to a similar place. In my image we have a grand view over a big valley. I thought that within a few years we could get to a place like that even while climbing moderate ice.

In early January of 2010 we stayed a few days at the Shunda Hostel in Nordegg. We had each, by this time, led up to WI4+. Karla led Pure Energy, a climb that a year before had intimidated us, in the Cline River Gallery, and now she had that look in her eyes. That night she suggested we do Murchison Falls. I looked at the rating, length and commitment level and gulped but didn’t say “no.”

On the steep trail in, under headlamp light, and then post-holing the last few hundred metres, we were introduced to the next level of commitment. We got to the base of the climb, and while it had been nearly balmy at the truck, we were now soaked and shivering in the much colder wind. I had been lucky the last few days out, with nice weather and sun, and hadn’t prepared with enough dry clothes in the pack. Hands froze almost instantly and took 20 minutes to thaw, even in belay mitts. Joe Josephson says to solo the easy ice of the first pitch. We wallowed exhaustedly in snow trying to walk around it, until we decided Joe was right. I began by going up and simultaneously traversing far to the right. As I got higher the grade stiffened and when I looked down to see if Karla was coming I again realized how committed we were.

The ice behaviour was new to me. The top quarter or half inch was wet, and made the sticks sound and feel plastic and solid. But it had been bitterly cold until recently, and under the soft surface every swing produced a white mushroom cap of fissured ice more than a foot across. By the time I reached the top of the pitch my calves were torched like never before. I wasn’t sure why, probably nerves added to it, but when Karla got up she bent over and gasped and said her calves were aflame and she needed to rest a little before she could walk. I heard water gurgling, under me, so I poked my axe around in the snow, finding a dry line, before going up the wee snow gully. Having not communicated this to Karla, she followed a foot to my right, and dropped into water over her boot. She is often bothered by frozen feet, but she trooped on.

I led the first real pitch, right, then left, moving around bulges, exhilarated in that anxious kind of way. Before I ran out of rope my calves were again searing and seemed about to fail. It was a novel and unsettling feeling. Trouble wasn’t imminent, but I’ve read and heard so often to never fall that until I have much more experience I’m going to be erring on the side of caution that will bring me home hungry and healthy. I threw in a hanging belay. Karla came up then she led over some bulgy, rather unconsolidated ice. As I climbed I saw her cozy inside an ice cave. I realized that I was almost there. From inside the cave I saw not a similar image, but exactly THE imagined view, the banded cliffs, the ice sanctuary, and the exposure, that I had earlier told myself I’d be totally satisfied with. I told Karla that I actually felt a little emotional about it. We were 10 minutes past our turn around time. We had coffee, chocolate milk and figs, then backed up the existing V thread and I swung out the opening. She followed, and soon we were walking down the slope, the trail better now after hardening up somewhat over the day. I thought about how if we returned on a longer day, after more days on ice, and choosing better lines, we’d get to the top.

Before we entered the trees Karla asked me to take her camera out of her pack. I clicked a picture of her with Murchison Falls in the background. It is a stunning sight, the way the ice clings statically to the flat rim of the cliff, like grog that froze as it was poured from a giant’s gnarly punch bowl. I pointed to the ice cave, and said, “I should be able to quit now. I said I wanted to get to a place like that cave, and that would be enough.” I was thinking that I wanted the adventure that ice-climbing brings, it would be enough to get to the high, rugged and improbable places. For me this would be a better way of proceeding than for ice-climbing to become an endless quest to gain another half grade, to reach another level, and tick off test-pieces. I think it’s likely that I’ve already got the easy, early gains, and that to lead W15 and the god-like WI6 would require that I begin to obsess and train like I have for other sports. So, I want to settle in to climbing at a comfortable level, and to get stoked on the adventure, not the on-going nailbiting fights to the top. And I don’t want to take it so seriously that I’m left feeling only as good or bad as my last climb. With some more experience there will be enough moderate climbs in the Rockies to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. Sensible, right?

Before I turned around to go I stole a look to the right, to that clinging vertical splat that looked so puny, so ethereal and forbidding compared to Murchison Falls. It’s the WI6 on the cover of the guide book. It’s Virtual Reality.

I stowed Karla’s camera in her pack, turned around and started walking. I thought about Virtual Reality. I looked at the climb again before going into the trees.

Hmmmmm, Virtual Reality. Now that’s a waterfall. Hmmmm. . ..

Nice piece. I hope you get a chance at Virtual Reality.