Frozen Dream: Ice climbing on Shannon Falls

The mild winters of the West Coast are rarely cold enough to freeze waterfalls solid, but the winter of 1980 was the second year in a row that Shannon Falls had been stilled by a stretch of sub-zero temperatures.

Bryan Beard and I stood gazing up at the great mantle of ice. We had been non-committal on the long drive from White Rock via Vancouver, but as we wordlessly prepared rope, harnesses, helmets and hardware, not for a moment did I believe we’d turn and descend the Shannon Falls trail.

Looking higher, up into the middle of the falls, I saw a geyser of water spraying from the otherwise frozen cataract. Temperatures were several degrees warmer than the previous day. Were we too late?

My mind wandered back to my first summer in Canada: 1965. My aunt and uncle, who emigrated to Canada in the ’50s, took my family on a day trip to view this natural wonder. That was before the wide trail and tourist facilities. I scrambled around on the boulders beneath the falls for hours in the sun and spray while my dad shot off rolls of 8mm film and the day wasn’t long enough.

This day was different: still beautiful, for sure―but somehow forbidding.

I felt like a mad mechanic as I clanked off over the ice. “We’ll get up to that ledge and and then talk about it, OK … We can always retreat from there.”

It was after noon as we clambered up the first pitch, consisting of a little buttress of ice cut by a water channel. No problems. I held my breath and jumped the foaming water to land on a small, metre-square platform butting up against a five-metre vertical step. I “rock-climbed” this using the front-points of my crampons. While ice-axe and hammer dangled from my wrists, I utilized pockets and icicles for handholds.

One more ice screw for protection and then easier going brought me to a good belay place. Bryan came up and led through to the big ledge we had spied below, where he made a stance and called me up.

From here the route ascended a fantastic feature: an ice-encrusted granite ramp angled at 60 degrees, running leftward, forming the second of two tilted triangles on the far right margin.

The ground was flat at the base, flanked by the granite of the cliff. A thick layer of ice permitted me to sink a solid tubular ice-screw. Clipping into it, I started up the ramp.

The ice layer was too thin to sink hardware for another running belay so, after a long runout, I found a small pedestal at the top of the ramp to rest a cramponed foot on. I tried to get a big Chouinard screw in. Whiz!―off it went in a wide arc, whistling out of sight. Damn!

This misfortune left me with one screw for a belay; I put it in. It wiggled about uselessly in the porous ice. I inserted it in another spot without any more conviction that it would hold a fall. Smashing my hammer and axe into the ice with as much strength as I could muster, I tied the belay into them―a bit more secure.

Using an indentation in the ice, which I deepened and sculpted, I knotted the end of a nylon sling and wedged it like a rock climbing “nut” into the “crack.” There―bombproof!

I started to bring Bryan up to my stance. He was half way up the ramp, looking wide-eyed. I really didn’t have much faith in the rickety belay, but I didn’t want to unnerve my partner.

“Hey, Bryan.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t fall, OK.”

“Are the anchors that bad?”

“Just don’t fall.”

Bryan arrived beside me, above the icy ramp. Changing places, we looked nervously at the next problem, an inside corner composed of intricate icicles running with water―a bizarre formation we aptly christened “the chandelier.”

It seemed too perfect to attack as I took the first swing of my axe, but soon all thoughts of aesthetics evapourated as cold water ran down my sleeves and over my wool-clad knees.

The rope ran through one of the belay anchors below but otherwise there were no runners between me and my belayer. The top of the corner overhung my position. Everything was rotten, undermined by water.

I tried to use the fantastic shapes to my advantage. Each placement of axe and hammer took two, three, four swings to clear away loose icicles. My hands became cramped claws around the handles of my tools. My breath, hard and measured, echoed from the enclosing walls. I tasted fear but remained confident.

Eventually, I got two good placements for my tools so that I could lean back and stem up the corner, using a sort of demented French Technique. Then, hooking a pick over the top of the chandelier, I hauled myself after it.

Landing in a heap on a commodious ledge of ice, I decided to bring Bryan up. As I set up the belay, I mused vacantly that, at a push, one could fit a deck chair and barbecue on this little “sun deck.” Not much sun. I felt drained.

“Next bit’s yours, pal,” I told Bryan.

From where I sat, it looked pretty reasonable: not too steep, lots of bulges and hollows. Bryan moved cautiously upward.

“Nice goin’ Bry … seventy-five feet.” The halfway marker on the rope passed through my mitts.

With fifteen feet left, my friend still had no safe place to establish a belay. I unclipped the rope from the topmost anchor and undid the figure-eight knot―no easy task wearing ice-encrusted mittens and with the rope frozen to the stiffness of wire.

I stood there an eternity, shivering in the late afternoon. “Beard, for Chris’ake get the lead out,” I silently fumed. “Knew I should’ve led this one ….”

I forgot my earlier fatigue and struggles. I could only think: It’s 4:30. I’m cold. It’ll soon be dark.

“Belay on!”

Finally! I started, thinking I’d fly up the pitch, but I was instantly sobered. Here was some of the steepest ground yet: really precarious stuff.

I stopped to remove one of Bryan’s placements―a “wart hog.” I gave it a good sideways whack with the hammer. A big “dinner plate” of ice sheared out, landing on my insteps and nearly dislodging my front points. Gingerly I disengaged one foot and let the slab slide off into space.

The last bit was a traverse over rotten, opaque ice into a shadowed gully, where my friend was hanging by a sling from a horn of rock. He had this backed up with a screw in the ice beside him. Very impressive.

I felt more than a physical proximity to him as I finished the traverse. “Hey Beard, I love ya man!”

He looked over at me from under his red helmet, through a curtain of icicles hanging from its rim. “Bloody good job, ain’t it!”

In the lengthening shadows and growing chill, the place impressed itself upon the unconscious. This is the stuff of dreams. Nightmares, perhaps.

Evening was drawing its veil as I tried to move quickly yet carefully up the vertical moat. I knew we must get off soon or bivouac.

At the next tier, the nightmare spread its wings: water sprayed like a fire-hose from a rent in the turret of ice. The whole structure—tonnes and tonnes of ice—appeared ready to collapse into the gully, in which we were trapped. There was no safe way forward. Given our limited selection of anchors, retreat was not an option.

I decided we must try to exit the deadly dihedral via the rock wall to the right. Therefore I down-climbed to the only slim hope: an overhanging groove, leading to what?

On a warm summer day, wearing shorts and friction shoes, this piece of rock would have presented a pleasant though strenuous challenge. Trying to get up its ice- and moss-coated flank wearing heavy, crampon-clad mountaineering boots and suffering from numb fingers was no joke on an evening in January.

Three metres out of the gully I felt the strength ebbing from my arms. I tried desperately to wedge a forearm into the slippery crack. Failure. I pushed off backwards before losing control completely. No thought. No question. Falling.

I hit the frozen gully feet-first, crampons biting into ice as I lurched forward, grabbing for something stationary. The front points of my crampons arrested my fall before the rope, running from carabiner and screw, could do its job.

My attention shifted to the pain at the end of my right leg―“Damnit, sprained my ankle!”―then back to our predicament which was becoming more serious by the minute.

Now it was Bryan’s turn to wait and freeze. Already half an hour had passed since I climbed out of his little lair. It took a fumbling lifetime to remove crampons and stuff them in my pack, then to buckle my ice tools to the outside. I called to tell Bryan of my plan and to ask him to retrieve my pack. I knew he could’t hear.

Against my ankle’s objection, I tip-toed up the slabs. Thrusting desperate hand-jams into frozen cracks, I finally found myself crouching breathless on a tiny rock ledge. I threw a sling over a shallow flake of granite behind me, tied on, and sat on it. “Why didn’t I bring a few pitons?”

Fear is a strange beast, and the key here was not to end up literally frozen in its claws. Depending on one’s disposition in such situations, one is tempted to imagine either benevolent or malevolent forces at work. But, as I gazed over the strange luminous ice into the shadowy crevices of the soaring grey cliffs, I sensed that this raw place and, in fact, the whole of this starkly beautiful world was utterly indifferent to our existence. Freed from the projections of our ego, we are able to take full responsibility for our own survival and to see the terrible beauty of our planet unfiltered.

Meanwhile, Bryan had been out of earshot (due mainly to the rumbling and rushing water) around the corner below. He’d endured forty-five minutes of cold and tension, his hands wooden on the frozen rope.

And so it was a great relief when I started taking in the rope, signaling him up. This he accomplished climbing the rope hand over hand as I held it taut. It was no time for ethics―it was night time. Pausing beside me, this world-class rock climber blurted, “How the hell did you get up that?!” Hell indeed.

We had reversed roles. Bryan was still wearing crampons, so even though I was ostensibly the ice expert, he went for the narrow ice hose running down from the rim. We could see a big tree silhouetted by the pale light of the rising moon. So near … so far.

Bryan executed an exacting lead up the fragile veneer of ice, occasionally resorting to clumps of frozen moss to bridge sections where the ice had fallen away. It was an exquisitely nerve-wracking performance to watch, as my rope-mate employed his famous balletic style on an unfamiliar medium. Of course, we held the knowledge that, again, the belay was strictly a psychological construct that created either a false sense of security, or an onerous bond of mutual responsibility. Should Bryan fall, we would both be torn from our perch, to plummet 250 metres to the dark boulders below.

I heard a coarse yell of success and had Bryan tie off the rope so I could pendulum rightward onto a shadowy artête. From there I gained his stance easily.

What now? We were on steep vegetated ground. Bryan belayed and I moved up, using my axe in the slippery vegetables. Thirty metres up, I hit a band of cliffs. My comrade traversed right and minutes later we we found our way onto an open knoll lit by the full moon.

Tension evapourated. We hugged and shook hands. This was our summit. The lights of Squamish shone below.

In memoriam

 

Epilogue: Arriving back at the base of the falls, after a long hike back along the Sea to Sky Highway and up the trail by headlamp, we discovered a film canister balanced on a rock next to our gear stash. The canister contained a roll of film and an address torn from a cheque. The resulting B&W negatives (restored with the help of Photoshop) are the source of the images that accompany this post. The original story, titled “Ice Climbers: Embracing the Fragile Beauty of a Frozen Waterfall,” appeared in the February 1981 edition of Whiskey Jack magazine. This reprise is dedicated to the memory of Bryan Beard — father, musician, photographer, champion of the environment — an artist in all things. Forever in my heart.

Tagged as: british columbia, bryan beard, ice climbing, shannon falls, squamish, white rock