Ice Climbers Grand Coulee Banks Lake

Exhilaration and beauty drive ice climbers

I swung my right ice tool high, the pick slicing into the pale-blue ice with a satisfying thunk. Like squarely hitting a baseball with a bat, the sound signified the tool sticking well into the ice.

A cold wind blew tiny shards of ice into my face as I lifted my right foot over a small shiny bulge, setting the crampon front points into the ice with a sharp kick. I looked down over the white-and-blue pocked ice to my belayer, almost 100 feet below me.

I was a few swings from the top of the popular ice climb Hubba Hubba, near Leavenworth. I took a deep breath and made the next few critical moves, being careful not to make a mistake, since only my ice tools and the front points of my crampons stood between ascending this frozen ladder and taking a long fall.

Obviously, I lived to tell about it. And I've done plenty more ice climbs since then.

Ice climbing is the adventure sport of ascending frozen waterfalls, seeps and snow-formed ice. Its tools — crampons, ice tools, harnesses, ice screws — are derived from mountaineering, but its techniques are unique to the sport. With unpredictability and environmental hazards common, ice climbing is both dangerous (ascending frozen waterfalls will never be the safest thing to do with one's January Sunday) and exhilarating.

Challenge + beauty

Beyond working out the "puzzle" of an ascent, climbers are drawn to the beauty. Ice formations are Mother Nature's ever-changing artwork. Glistening white and iridescent blue, ice lines form unique features such as pillars, curtains, gigantic icicles, ice caves, cauliflower formations and more. As the ice melts and re-forms throughout a season, climbs become easier or harder, gain or lose features and grow longer or shorter. The fact that ice changes frequently keeps climbs fresh, new, interesting and unexpected.

In a cold year, Washington has hundreds of routes, and the Northwest has some of the greatest variety of ice climbing in any of the Lower 48 states: alpine ice (formed from snow under intense pressure), water ice (frozen waterfalls and seeps), and mixed rock and ice.

Lake Roosevelt's isn't always a pretty place | OregonLive.com

By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS Associated Press Writer

COULEE CITY, Wash. (AP) -- The Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area is 129 miles of watery beauty that is becoming a giant outdoor toilet, and workers are not pleased.

The National Park Service is studying ways to stop people from defecating along the shores of the lake, which is the long, thin reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

"It's the greatest threat to the health and vitality of the recreation area," said Debbie Bird, superintendent of Lake Roosevelt. "A lot of people are completely disgusted by this issue."

The problem is that more than 1 million people a year visit the lake, which has relatively few bathrooms. Most of them are boaters who venture far from campgrounds. Rather than using portable toilets, which the service has required since 2000, too many visitors are doing their business right on the sandy beaches, Bird said.

The next visitor to the beach is met with a disgusting sight. And park employees are complaining about having to deal with the messes.

Lake Roosevelt is hardly unique. Human waste becomes a problem anywhere people gather in remote areas -- from the tops of the Himalayas to Death Valley. Canoeists and hikers in some of the nation's most gorgeous country must carry portable toilets to pack out their poop.

But instead of a few dozen backcountry enthusiasts, Lake Roosevelt has tens of thousands of visitors every summer weekend. The lake is becoming ever more popular as the population of the Northwest grows, and facilities are not keeping up.

Even boaters who carry portable toilets to satisfy regulations often don't use them, because they don't want to clean them out, park ranger Adam Kelsey said.

"People don't like to share those things," he added.

When the portable toilet requirement for boaters first began, it was actively enforced by rangers, and a ticket carried a fine of $125.

"We had a potty boat patrol," Kelsey recalled. Cutbacks in staffing forced rangers to shift to other duties, and over time people began ignoring the rule, he said.

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Ice, The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance

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