Ice Climb PA

Even though I just got back from NY after a great weekend of ice climbing with some old and new friends in the Catskills during IceFest, I want to talk a bit about the more 'local' ice. When I lived in Philly, we always went straight to the Cats or Daks for ice. After all, it was more reliably cold with thick ice, the conditions reports on NEIce.com were always more up-to-date, and the proximity to NYC meant there were lots of potential partners. My brother got me Griz's PA Guide to Ice climbs three Christmas's ago and I frequently check out the updates on the Central PA ice pages at HikeBikeClimb, but because the last two ice seasons got cut short because of injuries I never once made it out in PA.

I finally fixed this a few weeks ago. A friend who is relatively new to ice (he'd been out once before with a guide in NH) and to climbing in general headed up to the closest reliable ice: Lock Haven.

Roadside Gully: We put in an all-day, full-on mountaineering practice effort on Roadside Gully that was made much more difficult because we only had one set of ice tools. The ice was wet and thin in the middle of the easy stuff headed up to the ampitheater and required the leader to somehow pass the tools from a belay set up in a tangle of brush and mountain laurel, down a low angle gully, to another belay set up in a tangle of brush. We tried such esoteric techniques as Tyrolean Tool Transfers, but ended up fixing lines and ascending and descending on prussiks to transfer the tools. Good practice, but this makes for extremely slow going. The ampitheater itself is has three tiers. Only the first one - a broad low angle WI2 - was reasonably formed for hacks like ourselves. The others were thin clusters of curtains and long icicles that could have been strung together by someone with some talent and little need for protection, but not us. We took turns leading the first tier, then made five rope-stretching raps in the dark to get back to the road. I think we spent about 7 or 8 hours messing around on a 'roadside gully' and couldn't have been happier.

Tom even got his first ever lead over with (that's him seconding in the big photo, he's right about at the crux (I took this pic after we rapped after climbing it once and I took my turn leading it)). He had never led a single pitch of rock or ice before this and did a great job. He really had to work through some mental issues just before the crux and held it all together to pull the bulge even with a thin-ice top-out. A little bit of steeper ice, lots of multipitch practice, some rope tricks like prussiking fixed lines, a first ever lead... all in all it was a great refresher for the first climb of the winter season.

We hit Fox's Market House restaurant in Lock Haven for dinner that night. What we really needed was a bar, but we ended up here on the basis of a single review in Yelp. It was brightly lit, quiet, with a moderate selection of bottled beers and friendly service. Odd, mish-mash crowd of teenagers on dates, old couples (on dates?), kids and families, couples and two kinda loud guys by the pig statue that you can pet. We got great burgers though and beers at a good price from a crazy-happy waitress, so it was a good spot.

Spent the night sleeping out (which is like camping out except with no fires, no tents and a bit of whiskey) on the snow under the bright stars in Sproul State Forest.

Hidden Ampitheater: The next morning we woke up shortly after dawn, ran into town for some coffee and hit up Hidden Ampitheater. No low-angle ramp approach here, just a jumble of talus. The ampitheater itself is three-tiered like Roadside but here the first two pitches were thin icicles and still forming curtains. Definitely climb-able for some folks, but there was no way either of use were gonna lead that unprotectable horror show. I would've like to give them a go on toprope but would have done more damage than it was worth on pitches that fragile. The third pitch is the longest and it was well formed so we angled our way left and up around to the top of the third pitch where a few giant trees gave us bomber toprope anchors. This approach is not risk-free but it's fine if you're comfortable front-pointing up frozen turf (with one tool each). We took turns lapping that pitch for some good vertical ice practice. I even managed to try a few strenuous lie-backs and Tom got a little bloody from some falling ice, so, again we were happy as pigs in shit. Rapped off shortly after noon and beat it back to State College in about an hour (including a quick stop at Sheetz where you can top off your frozen nalgene with hot water). Damn fine weekend.