Outdoors/Adventure

PHOTOS: Ice-climbing along Alaska's Turnagain Arm

You may have seen them, scaling the ribbons of frozen water that line the Seward highway from Anchorage to Girdwood: Ice climbers, trusting their life to something that most people try to avoid when walking on flat ground.

But ice climbers aren't a bunch of crazy folks. They often get into it after spending years learning how to safely scale rock, and by the time they start ice climbing, they have a wealth of knowledge to help them stay safe.

The ice along Turnagain Arm comes from water that seeps down along the rocks that loom above the highway, making it one of the most accessible places in the state to ice climb.

On a relatively warm December day, with temperatures in the low 20's, Jesse Farrell and Rachael Bruno headed out to a prominent waterfall near the Seward Highway weigh station. Both had just received new ice climbing gear for Christmas and were eager to try it out.

Bruno has been climbing for about a year, and is hooked. Farrell has been climbing for five years.

"When I think of all the things I do every day, there's nothing more I'd rather be doing than this," he said.

Farrell went up first, lead climbing. Leading means that you set intermediate anchors as you climb, so sometimes you are climbing above your last point of protection. If you fall, you fall at least twice the distance from your harness to the anchor.

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Once at the top, he clipped the rope into a fixed anchor, one of many already positioned along the well-climbed Seward highway. On the way down he cleaned the route, taking out the ice screws he had set on his way up.

Bruno climbed up next, and because the rope to which she was tethered was now only fixed at the top, she had more flexibility and was able to tackle a more challenging ice formation, alongside the route Jesse took.

Getting into ice climbing isn't cheap. According to Jesse, if you were to buy all the gear at once, it would easily run over $1,000.

For those interested in learning how to ice climb, consider attending the annual Mountaineering Club of Alaska Ice Climbing Festival, held at Matanuska Glacier each year in the fall. For a list of places to ice climb in Alaska, check out this online guide.

Contact Multimedia Editor Loren Holmes at loren(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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