What is summer icecimbing

What is Summer Iceclimbing and what you should know about it

There is a point of view that climbing ice is a purely winter kind of activity only. Such an idea certainly has the right to exist. Definitely, the winter iceclimbing is much more diverse, interesting, cooler and brighter, but nevertheless, this sport can also be practiced in the summer months - with a certain difference in geography and some technical aspects. So, what is summer iceclimbing?

First, in the summer season you can forget about such exquisite pleasure as climbing frozen waterfalls, if only you are not too lazy to fly to those lands where everything is frozen and covered with snow in summer. But as applied to the realities of our northern hemisphere, where summer, after all, is the season quite warm, climbing the summer ice is possible only on the glaciers located at the altitude that precludes or retards their rapid melting. That is, high in the mountains, on the slopes and breakes of the glaciers, you can find quite decent verticals for practicing this very interesting type of activity. However, the specificity of summer iceclimbing lies precisely in the fact that no glacier will provide you with the diversity and pleasure that lies in the real seasonal winter iceclimbing.

For a better understanding of the details, let's introduce to the text two definitions - "cold" ice and "warm" ice. Cold ice is formed from flowing water at temperatures below zero and has a high density, plasticity and high reliability for climbing and protection. "Warm" ice is a perennial substance of uneven density which forms most of the high mountain glaciers massifs. Climbing "cold" and "warm" ice differs by the level of quality of the protection, security of the belay points, the possibility of using various iceclimbing technics, and the general variety of the routes.

Summer iceclimbing is significantly limited in its technical details due to the peculiarities of the glacial structure and the density of the summer "warm" ice. Lets say that in the summer it is possible to climb exclusively on the not steep faces of the mountain glaciers of the moderate inclination - from easy slopes to moderately overhanging glacier breaks - seracs, primarily focusing on choosing the iceclimbing site according to the considerations of the lowest level of the objective danger - especially considering the glacier mobility and tendency of the seracs to unforeseen collapsing. The low density of the "warm" ice and, often, its high sponginess, do not provide high reliability of the protection, therefore, all sorts of the gymnastic iceclimbing tricks which are possible on the dense "cold" ice are not available in the summer. Similarly, the reliability of the belay points on the "warm" ice requires special care when leading and organizing the belay stations - as a rule, in our summer iceclimbing sessions we organize top rope belay to reduce the risk of accidental breakdown of the intermediate belaying point. Given these technical subtleties, it is quite possible to estimate the usefulness of iceclimbing training on the "warm" summer ice, which, of course, provide a lot of fun and necessary skills both with considering physical activity, but cannot be opposed to the normal iceclimbing training on the winter ice - frozen waterfalls and cascades.

Summer iceclimbing fully fits into various acclimatization programs of different intensity, is suitable for learning the basic techniques of climbing and protection on the ice, it fully prepares for the climbing the alpine routes, containing the steep ice or mixed obstacles. But in order to perfectize the iceclimbing technique, to work out a good "feel of ice" - the ability to be confident on the steep ice and use it for climbing and protection, it is necessary to become familiar with the real "cold" winter ice.

As I resume the above written: summer iceclimbing is a quite possible and interesting variant of the mountain activity, which has the right to exist in the frame of any training and educational or acclimatization mountaineering programs. But for exploring the subtleties and peculiarities of the classic iceclimbing - the summer "warm" ice is not as useful as winter ice, and therefore, it can not be considered as a good training iceclimbing relief.

Text — Alexey Trubachev, founder of the MCS AlexClimb mountaineering and climbing school.