One Pair of Boots

I’ve been climbing frozen waterfalls for nearly thirty years now. The first few years were characterized by a lack of individual equipment because ice climbing requires special gear; crampons for your boots and hammer-like picks for each hand, not to mention the usual mountaineering stuff like a rope, a harness, ‘biners, slings, etc.

Crampons are the claw-like devices which attach to the bottom of your boots and allow you to stand or climb on frozen snow or ice without slipping. There are two types of ice crampons, flexible and rigid. Flexible crampons were originally designed for glacier travel, moving across low-angled surfaces of frozen snow. They have a hinge in the middle so that they can bend with the sole of your boots. Rigid crampons, like the name implies, have no hinge, do not bend or flex and like ski boots, are uncomfortable to walk in. Rigid crampons were specifically designed for steeply angled or vertical ice so that a person could sink only the front points into the ice or snow and still stand comfortably.

In the late seventies my brother-in-law gave me a pair of leather hiking boots he bought on vacation in Switzerland while he was in the US Navy. Turns out for some reason these boots had a wooden midsole which made them perfect for rigid-style ice crampons. Most hiking boots are unsuitable for rigid crampons because the soles flex & bend to some degree. The only other boots available for such a task at the time were the plastic mountaineering boots that expedition members wore on trips to Denali and the Himalayas. Their outrageous cost prohibited any of us ‘normal people’ from owning a pair.

John, Tim, Dave, Dana and I, along with Peg, Michael, Greg and others soon began to spend nearly every winter weekend on the ice somewhere in Colorado. I would set up a suitable anchoring system at the top of the waterfall, either to established bolt anchors or with rock gear. Depending on the location, sometimes I used bushes or trees for anchors. Once set, I rappelled back to the bottom where everyone eagerly awaited their chance to try something new or improve their existing skills. I would sit down on a rock, unlace & take off my boots and someone else would step into them, hook into the rope and start climbing.


After a few seasons we all acquired our own set of tools and crampons. With a huge increase in the popularity of ice climbing in the early 1990’s, getting the opportunity to climb an ice waterfall on the weekend soon became an issue of who got there first. Over the years, we proved to the Colorado ice climbing community time and again that we were the most dedicated climbers, leaving our nice warm beds and partners at 2 or 3 am (oh-dark thirty) so that we could be the first ones on the ice before sun-up. Occasionally we let latecomers join us, if they seemed nice enough. Otherwise they got to sit and wait, sometimes for hours, till we were done hacking up the ice with our tools.

Even though the original group has splintered apart for various reasons like advancing age, injuries from other sports and geography we still keep in contact with one another. Protecting someone on the other end of a climbing rope quickly builds a bond between those two people which is not easily broken. We lost the first member of our group, Dave Brooks, when he was killed in a tanker truck accident in California in 2006.

Now, as I sat at the memorial service for Tim this past week I realized that half of the people who came did so because of a bond that had been forged over nearly three decades and how it had all started with that one pair of boots.

I reflected back on all the adventures and good times we had shared together over the years and I realized just how amazingly fortunate I’ve been to have that kind of lasting bond with so many wonderful people.