Judging the conditions as to when you can go ice climbing is one of the skills you need to master. I’ve written the following guide to help out.

So, how do you know when you can go ice climbing? There are a variety of factors that need to be assessed including weather, avalanche risk, and the quality of the ice. In general, ice that is thick, blue, and free of any natural hazards should be safe to climb.

Judging whether or not it’s a good time to go ice climbing is a dynamic process that requires you to look at a variety of factors. These include non-ice factors, such as the weather and the risk of natural hazards (like avalanches) as well as ice factors. When judging the ice factors, you’re trying to see if there’s any risk that your pillar of ice is going to break while you’re on it, which can have disastrous consequences.

Ice Climbing Conditions

To understand what can happen if you wrongly judge ice climbing conditions, take a look at this mini documentary about a man who had a 100-ton pillar snap off while he was climbing it:

In this scenario, the climber judged the route to be safe even when it wasn’t. Now, John Freeman (the man in the video) is a better ice climber than I’ll ever be, and I don’t want to criticize his decision making. What I do want to do, though, is to highlight two main points:

• Judging ice climbs is difficult
• Getting that judgement wrong can have drastic consequences

What makes this process so tricky is that there’s no clear-cut guidelines telling you when you can and cannot go ice climbing. To make a decision, you need to do a holistic assessment of all factors involved and then make a judgement call based on your experience and intuition. Part of learning to ice climb is getting the necessary miles under your crampons to be able to make these decisions.

So, before we start, a disclaimer: this guide is not enough to teach you whether or not you can go ice climbing. If you’re planning on going for a climb tomorrow, do not make your decision based solely off of what you read here. All I’m doing is providing the information so that, when you go off with experts, you can understand how they’re making their decisions.

If you are trying to make a decision as to whether or not to go for a climb, I would recommend calling your local parks department and speaking to an expert. The rangers there are usually happy to help, and they’ll be able to give much more case-specific, specified information than I am.

So, with that said, let’s talk about some of the things you need to consider before you can go ice climbing.

Season

The first thing to touch on is the season.

Now, obviously, you can only go ice climbing in the winter, or in the extreme shoulders of spring and fall. The exact months are going to change heavily based on your location, but a regular ice climbing season would be between November and April. Too early and the ice isn’t yet frozen enough to begin climbing; too late and it will start to thaw, leading to a host of dangerous situations.

The season will also change year-to-year depending on what the weather is like. Sometimes it may come earlier, while other times the good ice may not form until mid-December.

There are two easy ways to know if you’re in ‘season’ for your geographical climbing area:

• Experience: Living in the same place for a long time will give you the ability to judge the weather and know when the ice will be frozen
• Ask: If you’re less experienced, consider asking more experienced climbers. Park rangers, guide companies, or Facebook groups about Alpinism/Ice climbing in your specific area should have a pretty good idea.

Weather

The next thing to consider is the weather for the specific day you’re going on (and the days surrounding it). Getting the season right is good and well, but knowing what condition the ice is in today is the only way you can really judge whether or not it’s okay to climb.

Temperature

Temperature is the major weather-related factor that you need to be aware of. If the day is too warm, the ice can become slushy and insecure. If it’s too cold, the ice can actually turn brittle: the can heighten the risk of something breaking, especially thin pillars.

When talking about temperature, however, you can’t judge it in a single day. You need to know what the conditions were like in the days leading up to your climb. For example, if you know that there have been a lot of cold/hot swings recently, you can expect the ice to be full of air. If there have been a few warm days followed by an incredibly cold snap, the ice is going to be very brittle.

Again, if you’re unsure how the temperature may be affecting ice for your specific area, consider speaking to an expert and getting their opinion on the matter.

Change throughout the day

Weather fluctuates throughout the day, and you need to be aware of how that will impact your ice climb. Just because it’s -2 when you start doesn’t mean that the climb is safe; if you’re on a long route, the temperature may rise while you’re climbing, softening the ice and making the situation dangerous while you’re halfway up.

A good way to avoid this is to judge the day based on the ‘high’ temperature estimate. It can also help to add a couple of degrees to this if your route is exposed to the sun, because that will further heat it up.

Snow, Wind, etc

These have less of an impact on the ice quality and more of an impact on your safety and ability to enjoy the day. Snow, high winds, and other inclement weather patterns can make it a lot harder to have fun while you’re out there.

Furthermore, they may actually impact your safety. It’s a lot harder to lead a tricky pitch when the wind is howling and you’re getting pelted in the face by sleet. It’s not unheard of for storms in the mountains to ruin climbs, so be aware of the weather and do your best to mitigate it.

Avalanche Risk

This applies mostly to alpine ice and not as much to crags, but it’s something that you should consider before you start a climb.

Avalanche risk is one of the hardest to mitigate risks in ice climbing. These disasters are often unforeseeable, not caused by climbers, and completely unavoidable. Three world-famous alpinists died in Banff recently when an avalanche came loose thousands of feet above them, plummeted down a gully, and wiped all three of them off the wall.

To avoid this risk, you need to thoroughly research the route before you go and ensure that you’re aware of what the avalanche conditions are. Route reports, either online or in guidebooks, can give you an idea as to whether or not your specific climb is exposed to any avalanche risk. Websites should tell you the avalanche conditions for your specific area.

When you’re reading these reports, it’s important to look not just at ‘level’, but also the level above you. Avalanche zones are often broken into three areas: treeline, sub-alpine, and alpine. Even if your route only goes into the sub-alpine, you need to be aware of the avalanche risk in the alpine, because an avalanche started here still has the chance of hitting you.

Ice Quality

Once all the extraneous factors have been considered, you still have to judge the actual quality of the ice when you get to the route.

This can be one of the hardest decisions to make. After researching for a route, psyching yourself up for a climb, waiting until a fair-weather day with low avalanche risk, and hiking hours uphill to get to the climb, it takes a lot of willpower to look at the route and say ‘nope, not today’.

You have to be able to make those calls, however, because sometimes the ice just isn’t in condition to climb. Below are some criteria that can be used to judge whether or not the ice is in a safe condition to climb on.

Colour

Colour is a major factor in judging the quality of an ice. To keep it simple, there’s a nice little rhyme you can use: blue is glue, white is fright.

It’s not the catchiest of rhymes, nor is it super self-explanatory, but it does the job. ‘Blue is glue’ means that blueish ice is solid, well-formed, and should allow you to stick to it (hence the glue part). ‘White is fright’ refers to the fact that white ice is not as strong, and so the thought of climbing it should scare you.

As ice freezes, it sometimes traps air inside of it. These air bubbles give the ice its white colour. They also mean that there’s fewer water molecules in the ice, because a lot of the space is taken up by air pockets. With fewer molecules to bond, the ice has trouble staying together, and it creates a weaker surface for you to perform your climb on.

Size

The size of the ice you’re climbing on is another major consideration when judging its strength. This one doesn’t need a rhyme, because it’s very self-explanatory: thin ice is more dangerous. Thick ice is more solid. The thinner an ice column is, the higher the chance that it’s going to break when you swing an axe into it.

Do your best to judge the thickness of the ice not only at the base of the ground, but also at the ‘lip’ of the climb— where the ice pillar is attached to the rock. Remember the video up above? The ice broke not where it was thinnest, but where it was connected to the wall behind it. That’s often where ice is weakest.

In terms of thickness, judging whether or not a route is safe depends on a variety of factors. The higher quality the ice, the thinner you can get away with while climbing. It also matters whether the ice is ‘bonded’ to the rock or if it’s free hanging.

I don’t have space to go into it here, but this article by Outdoor Research does a great job breaking down thin ice and everything you need to consider.

Running Water

Running water on the surface or underneath your ice is like a warning sign flashing DANGER right in your face. When water runs over ice, it thaws it out and makes it less solid. This diminishes the strength of the ice. It also means that temperatures are probably getting dangerously warm for you to be climbing.

Now, running water doesn’t have to be an immediate sign that the route is unsafe. Once, at the top of a pillar, my climbing partner punched through the ice by accident and found that the entire structure was actually hollow, with a waterfall right in the middle of it. However, because there was a good 8 inches of ice still bonded to the rock, and because he knew he could be careful with his placements, he judged the route still safe to climb.

That was a very short pillar, though, and we were in a fairly low-risk scenario. If you’re trying to climb something at the edge of your limit and you see water running behind the ice, it should be a strong indicator that you need to proceed with caution.

Temperature

The temperature of the ice influences not only its quality, but also your safety while climbing it. The rules are pretty simple:

• Too hot and the ice becomes mushy. Your tools might pop out, or the entire thing might slough off.
• Too cold and the ice becomes brittle. Entire structures might shatter.

On the cold point, however, the ice breaking isn’t the only consideration that you need to be worried about.

Remember, leading while climbing is a dangerous game, and falls can have some pretty extreme consequences. When ice is cold, it becomes harder and more brittle. This makes it harder for you to get a good placement. Your tools are either going to bounce off of the surface, not stick as deep, or shear off little sections of ice every time you try to get a placement.

If you’re planning to climb something near your limit and it’s an especially cold day, maybe consider pushing back the project. Brittle ice can make a route more difficult and, therefore, more dangerous to climb.

Damage

Finally, you want to assess how damaged the ice is before you begin climbing on it. The axes and crampons of other climbers can do a number on a route, and that makes it riskier to climb on.

Not only do they run the risk of weakening the ice, but you also face the same problem that you faced with the ice temperature: damaged ice is harder to climb on. Your tools won’t stick as well, there are fewer places to put in a screw, and then ice might crumble when you try to get a foothold.

This is another thing where I can’t really give quantifiable criteria as to whether or not the route is okay to climb on. You need to gain enough experience to tell whether or not you think the ice is too damaged.

Resources

Finally, let’s tough on some of the resources you can use to judge whether or not a route is safe to climb. The following areas are great sources of information:

• Local guides and wardens: One quick phone call is all it takes sometimes to get the information you need. It could be as simple as calling a local guiding company and asking ‘I was looking to climb xx route this weekend. Do you have any idea about what condition it’s in?’
• Forums or Groups: Facebook, Reddit, and other websites can have groups where ice climbers and alpinists will hang out, asks questions, and share information. Post there if you’re unsure.
• Historical Reports: If you live in a major ice climbing area (Colorado, Calgary, etc.), you can likely find historical reports online. These give you some information as to when you can expect routes to start forming.
• Avalanche Conditions Report: You should always read this before heading out on an alpine ice route.
• Guidebooks, Online Route Reports: These can give you useful information and tips for specific routes. The online trip reports may even have recent information.

Most of this stuff can be found via a quick Google search. Just type in ‘New Hampshire historical ice reports’ or ‘Idaho ice climbing Facebook group’ and see what comes up.