It was a real snow globe of a morning on the busiest day of the 31st Ouray Ice Fest, a welcome respite from months of warm, dry weather. A flurry swirled around an ice wall thick with frozen waterfalls and crawling with newbie climbers like Ken Iida.
“It's awesome. It's so much fun,” said Iida, visiting from Fort Collins. “I never thought I'd get to try this at any point in my life, so I'm just happy to be out here.”
He was watching a buddy scale what’s known as the Kids Wall — basically a beginner area as tall as an apartment building. It’s where the ice-curious learn how to kick their spiked boots into mammoth icicles and use an ax in each hand to inch slowly up, as frozen shards and splinters fly.
It’s a scene experienced climber Corey Buhay worried she wouldn’t see during the festival. Much of the park was bare rock until just a few weeks ago. Organizers had actually started marketing this as ice-less Ice Fest.
“We were ready to climb mud, we were ready to climb plywood, whatever they could hand us,” she said.
Buhay, who won the mixed finals competition at the festival in 2021, was surrounded by throngs of fellow climbers in snow-coated beanies and bright outfits trudging through pillows of fresh powder. Babies looking like puffy starfish and dogs in thick sweaters walked through a vendor village that was sparser than normal. The crowd was smaller than in most years — but maybe more elated.
“I think everybody just feels like it's Christmas morning,” Buhay said. “We're just so delighted to have real winter conditions.”
This was after warm weather collapsed much of the park’s ice and delayed its opening until just a day before the festival — its latest opening day ever. The park’s executive director, Peter O’Neil, called it “a resurrection.”
“I’ve got a grin on my face because I'm so happy. I've been able to sleep at night for the last week,” he said.
And this rebirth took a lot more than just Mother Nature.
“My staff has just worked their butts off to make this thing happen,” O’Neil said.
That’s especially true for the so-called ice farmers who use hundreds of sprayers lining the Uncompahgre Gorge to create nearly two miles of brilliant, climbable ice sculptures. Their job sometimes entails being at the park in the dead of night and requires detailed knowledge about just what angle to adjust the spigots and how much pressure to apply.
None of that deep ice knowledge matters, however, if it’s not cold, and this past December was the warmest Colorado has ever seen. Tim Foulkes and his fellow ice farmers did their best to hold on to hope.
“Some of our coworkers were actually looking at different life plans, maybe even having to go get other jobs. A couple of them did,” he said, adding, “there wasn’t much light at the end of the tunnel.”
Then, well into January, the park finally got slammed with cold, which allowed the farmers to finally make ice. Unfortunately, snowstorms threatened the precious crop, since ice can’t be made on top of snow. So the ice park put the call out for local volunteers to come with their climbing gear and shovel away the offending powder.
Dozens showed up, quickly doing a job that would have taken staff weeks. They helped save one of the premier ice-climbing festivals in the world
“This is a dream. This is a dream come true,” Foulkes said.
It’s proof of how much Ouray loves its ice park — and needs it. Climber Mica Hart, 20, grew up here and has heard stories of what a ghost town this former mining town used to be in the cold months. Now the park draws thousands of climbers every winter. While hotel and restaurant sales have been slow so far this season, they’ve started to shoot back up now that the park has opened.
“That's a huge deal for keeping businesses open and keeping our town alive,” Hart said, “and having that be undermined by global warming and the changing weather and climate is really, really scary.”
But even with that fear in the background, the park brings a lot of joy to visitors and locals alike.
Ouray resident Kevin Schiffer got his daughter into the sport, and now she’s so involved she’ll soon compete at an ice festival in Europe — but not before taking part in her hometown contest.
As Schiffer stood on a bridge peering down about 200 feet at 16-year-old Zoe getting into her harness, he had a nervous, proud grin on his face.
He shouted and waved her on as she methodically raced up a wall of rock and ice. By the time the buzzer went off, she was higher than she’d ever been for this type of climb.
Some of Schiffer’s friends don’t get how he can let his kid do something that would terrify most folks.
“When you see how much she is excited about it and how happy it makes her, it’s pretty easy,” he said, choking up.
Sure enough, when Zoe Schiffer found her dad after the climb, she had an ecstatic smile. It only dropped when she talked about the future of her sport in a warming climate.
“It's absolutely terrifying,” she said. “This is what I do — is what I love doing. And it'd be so sad if it wasn't this.”
She's only been ice climbing for two years and hopes for a world where she can for the rest of her life.
