Ice climbing is a fun activity, but people might wonder how difficult it is before they’re willing to try. I’ve written the following guide to help you judge how difficult ice climbing is.
So, how hard is ice climbing? Ice climbing is a difficult sport, both from a physical and mental perspective. Not only does it require a high degree of fitness, there are also several logistical and planning challenges that go into it.
What makes ice climbing so difficult is the danger and constantly variable conditions that the sport presents. The physical aspect of the sport is difficult enough, requiring a high degree of fitness and good core strength, but the mental aspect is even more challenging. To ice climb, you need to be able to perform difficult moves under highly strenuous conditions, dealing with the pressure of not falling and whatever other challenges mother nature might throw your way.
What Makes Ice Climbing So Hard?
So, what makes ice climbing so difficult? What separates ice climbing from other challenging sports, even similar ones such as rock climbing, is the fact that you need to perform challenging physical activities while dealing with large natural hazards.
A lot of other sports will be as or more physically demanding as ice climbing. However, what makes ice climbing so hard is all of the other factors surrounding the sport: the cold, the remoteness, the fall danger, the ice quality, and so forth. To go ice climbing, you need to place yourself in a fairly precarious situation by wandering out into the wilderness in freezing cold temperatures. Already this presents some dangers surrounding navigation and hypothermia.
Once you’re out there, you need to make several judgement calls concerning the quality of the ice, the placement of your protection (to catch you if you fall) and the likelihood of being hit by a falling rock or an avalanche. You need to judge whether or not you’re good enough to climb a route.
Then, once you do start climbing, you need to deal with the ‘no-fall zone’— the fact that you can never fall while ice climbing on lead because of the disastrous consequences of doing so. This can mess with your mentality and make you get in your own head. Sometimes, being scared can cause you to stiffen up and actually make mistakes, which can lead to a fall.
So, in summary, there are three main things that make ice climbing so difficult:
- Physical challenges: Ice climbing requires a high degree of physical strength to perform the moves safely.
- Mental challenges: You need to be able to keep a cool head in stressful situations to avoid falling.
- Natural Hazards: Ice climbing is performed in the wild, where lots of things are going to be out of your control.
I talk about all three in more detail below.
Physical Challenges
The physical aspect of ice climbing is the one that most people are probably going to think of when they consider how hard the sport is. People want to know ‘am I strong enough to do this?’ or ‘will I have to train before I go?’.
I have an entire article written about the physical side of ice climbing if you want more information, but the short answer is that ice climbing is very physically demanding.
There are two types of physical fitness you need to ice climbing: strength and stamina.
Strength
Strength the raw power you need to execute the moves on the ice climb. This includes being able to hang your entire bodyweight onto your axes, pulling yourself up using your back and your legs, and keeping your core activated so that you stay on the wall.
If you rock climb frequently, you probably already have the base level of strength required for ice climbing. Other sports such as gymnastics would also give you a good base line.
Ice climbing requires strength in a few key categories:
- Forearms: Your forearms are responsible for holding your axes (and your bodyweight, at certain times), so they’re extremely important in ice climbing.
- Calves: When ice climbing, you gain purchase for your feet by kicking into the ice using a crampon (a spike on the front of your foot). However, with only this spike sticking into the wall, it then falls on your calves to keep your body upright when you’re standing.
- Quads: Ice climbing technique requires you to enter a deep squat when you kick, before pushing yourself up into an upright standing position. This movement requires strong leg muscles to perform.
- Abs: Finally, you need your core to both achieve this squat position and to hold your body firm against the ice.
Stamina
Aside from raw strength, you also need stamina to go ice climbing. In fact, I would argue that the stamina piece is actually more important.
Ice climbing technique is designed to conserve as much energy, and therefore require as little raw power, as possible. As you get better and your technique improves, you’ll become less reliant on energy-intensive motions. What you won’t be able to do, however, is shorten the length of the route you’re climbing.
When I talk stamina is ice climbing, I’m talking less about running-type cardio and more about your aerobic muscle capacity: how long your forearms, calves, and core will be able to last under moderate amounts of strain.
To show why this is important, let’s try to put into perspective just how long an ice climbing route is. Say your route is 20 meters, which would be roughly 60 feet. Each axe placement moves you about 6 inches hire in the wall. For each time you place your axes, you need to move your feet three times. This process takes about 5 seconds.
So, that means that on one route, you’ll need to move your axes 120 times and your feet 360. You’ll have to stay suspended in thin air, with nothing but two axes and some spikes on your feet to keep you in place, for ten minutes.
If you think that sounds easy, find a pair of monkey bars and try to hang from them for 10 minutes. That’s the type of strain you’ll be putting on your body, and that’s why ice climbing requires a lot of stamina.
Extraneous Activities
Beyond the climbing, there’s some other stuff involved in ice climbing that you need to tackle before you even get to the route. Often you’ll have to spend an hour or more on the approach to the climb. This includes walking with a 20-pound pack on, sometimes through deep snow, almost always up hill, before you can even tart climbing.
You need to make sure you’re fit enough that the approach doesn’t tire you out to the point where you can barely climb.
Movement
Finally, one of the other physical challenges of ice climbing is the fact that you need to train your body to move in a completely different way.
There’s no other sport or experience that can mimic the feeling of ice climbing. Suspending yourself on a vertical surface, using only tools to hold you to the fall, is a completely foreign feeling. To be able to ice climb, you need to take this foreign feeling and teach your body how to deal with it.
The biggest challenge is learning how to judge ‘placements’ — that is, how solidly your tools are stuck into the ice. You need to get a feel for the way they penetrate and grip the surface so you can know if a placement is going to hold, or if it’s going to break.
You also need to learn to move on these placements so that you don’t compromise them. Shifting your weight too much can cause an axe or a crampon to loose purchase, leading to a fall.
Mental Challenges
Even once you get the physical strength down, you’re less than halfway to dealing with the challenges of ice climbing. The mental aspect is what really puts this sport in a category of its own when it comes to difficulty.
The mental aspect makes ice climbing so hard because they add a completely new layer of challenges that you need to overcome. Not only do you need to perform challenging moves over a prolonged period of time, but you also need to do them while keeping your cool and not letting the stress of the situation get to you.
Furthermore, it’s harder to prepare for these mental challenges. It’s not like strength, where you can train yourself in a controlled environment before going out ice climbing. The only way to train your brain to not be scare while ice climbing is to actually go ice climbing.
There are two main things to be aware of:
The ‘No Fall’ Zone
If you rock climb, scramble, or even hike, you may have heard of the ‘no-fall zone’ before — an already where you need to be extra careful to avoid a fall because of the disastrous effects it would have.
In ice climbing, the zone is the entire route. You can never fall when you’re leading in ice climbing — and I don’t mean never as in ‘you should try to avoid it, but accept that it might happen’. I mean never as is ‘If I go ice climbing every weekend for 20 years, I should fall 0 times’.
The reason behind this is that ice climbing falls are dangerous and harmful. Because of the sharp tools that you have on your hands and feet, very few ice climbing falls will be ‘clean’ (where all of your limbs come off at the same time and you fall in a controlled manner). Instead, it’s more likely that your crampons are going to stick into the ice even as you fall backwards. This places a lot of strain on your knees, ankles, and leg bones; it can lead to broken femurs, torn ligaments, and a wide array of other injuries.
To make matters more challenging, avoiding falls isn’t as simple as just climbing easy routes. You need to train your mind to stay calm in scenarios when you know that danger is present.
See, the human mind is a fickle thing. If you start thinking to yourself, don’t fall, all that you’ll be able to focus on is falling. Once you start focusing on that, you begin to imagine all the bad things that will happen if you do fall. Suddenly, your palms are sweaty, your knees are shaky (and maybe weak), and you’re having trouble controlling your breathing.
This is a state known as ‘gripped’— when a climber becomes so scared of the fall that they forget how to climb. It stiffens your movements and makes you a worse climber which, unfortunately, actually makes it more likely that you’ll fall.
To ice climb, you need to be able to block out these thoughts and focus on getting to the top safely. Learning to do so is one of the most challenging obstacles to being a good ice climber.
Planning and Decision Making
Another mental hazard of ice climbing is the risk associated with the decision-making process. In ice climbing, you need to be able to take in the current conditions and natural hazards (which we discuss later) and make a ‘go or no-go’ decision. You have to ask yourself ‘is this route safe to climb? Am I good enough to do it without falling?’.
This is made harder by two factors: human biases and commitment.
Human biases are lapses in your brain’s ability to think critically, caused by you focusing on the wrong pieces of information. Biases can cloud your judgement and make it hard for you to make a smart decision. There are tens of them out there, but a few you should be aware of include:
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Thinking you’re better than you are, or being so clueless about ice climbing that you don’t know that hazards that are in front of you.
- Confirmation bias: Only paying attention to the information that confirms what you’re thinking.
- Group think: Where several people all fall prey to the same misconception because they convince each other of their own biases.
Being aware of your biases can help prevent them from affecting your decision-making.
The other thing to look out for is what I like to call commitment factor. Someimes you have to put a lot of effort into getting to an ice climb. You need to plan, train, wait for the right conditions, drive a few hours, and hike a few more.
After all that build up, it can be difficult to get to the base of a climb and say ‘nope, I don’t feel comfortable doing this today’. Training yourself to live with the disappointment of not getting to attempt a route is a vital part of staying safe while ice climbing.
Natural Hazards
Finally, there are several natural hazards that help make ice climbing more dangerous than sports that are performed in a more controlled environment.
Ice Quality
You need to be able to read the quality of ice to ensure that it’s strong enough to hold the weight of your body before you go climbing on it. This includes:
- Temperature: When ice gets too warm, it’s more prone to break. This is especially important to pay attention to when the weather changes throughout the day.
- Air pockets: During a freeze/thaw cycle, ice an sometimes trap air inside of it. The presence of this air means that there’s less real ice for you to put a tool or a screw in, making your placements less trustworthy.
- Condition: If lots of people have climbed an ice route before you, you’ll see that it’s been chewed up by crampons and axes. This makes if difficult to find your own placements.
Avalanche and Falling Hazards
These are some of the worst risks to try to mitigate, because there’s really just not that much you can do to prevent them.
Ice and rockfall happens when something becomes dislodged on the route above you and tumbles down. This is something that both you and your belayer need to be aware on. Making sure that everyone’s wearing a helmet is a good way to mitigate this risk.
Avalanches will fall through gullies where you’re climbing, ripping you off the wall or simply burying you in tons of snow and preventing you from getting out. It’s difficult to judge the likelihood of this happening from the base of a route; instead, try to read avalanche reports beforehand so you can be aware of the danger and plan in advance for it. If avalanches are likely, consider finding a different route.
