Ice Climbing

Yesterday I spent the entire day with some friends ice climbing near Green Bay, and it was a blast. One of my friends used to do a lot of rock climbing, so she found out about a demo day they were having at a place called the "Ice Pit". The vendors would provide equipment, and you could get into the Ice Pit without a membership. Since there are no mountains in Wisconsin, the Ice Pit is located in an active quarry that can be climbed on weekends. We hiked into the quarry, and the picture below is what we saw. There were tones of amazing ice formations dripping off the quarry walls with people climbing all over the place. It was really cool.


The ice formations along the walls of the quarry were really cool. We went over to the vendors to get some equipment, but they were all out. A lot more people than anticipated showed up for the event, so we had to wait around for a while. We watched a lot of other people climb. After a while, we were afraid we wouldn't get a turn before we had to leave when I nice man came up to me and asked if I would fit in his gear.

They let us borrow all their stuff and then gave us a good lesson to begin climbing. The smaller, beginner walls had really long lines, so we started on a more advanced climb. I was the first to go, and it was awesome. Ice climbing is quite a bit different from rock climbing, and it was fun to swing the picks into the ice walls. It is amazing that the picks can hold your weight when only 1 inch of the pick is embedded in the ice.


The wall of the quarry was about 110 feet high. I only made it about 1/4 of the way up, but it was still a ton of fun. I wished we could have climbed a little more, but hopefully I can do it again someday.