On the rock crags of Clear Creek Canyon, water flows harden into ice as solid as the rocks beneath them. As temperatures drop across Colorado’s Front Range during the winter, a dynamic balance between cold nights that freeze ice and warmer days that thaw it enough for the water beneath to flow, keeps the ice consistently thick.
Secret Waterfall, Mickey’s Big Mouth and Coors Light have become reliable routes for ice climbers just outside of Golden. While adapting to changes on the ice is as necessary to a climber as ice axes and crampons, climbers say that in recent years, the ice flows have been shifting.
“It’s definitely changing,” said Ben Coryell, who leads ice climbs throughout the Front Range with his company Golden Mountain Guides. “The ice comes in later in the season or doesn’t come in at all.”
He recalled in 2015 and prior years, the flows would come in by December and stick around until mid-March. Some flows have stopped coming in entirely since and in the last couple of years, except this year, popular flows haven’t even come in until March.
“There’s not enough moisture and cold,” said Coryell. “In terms of the ice and the weather, things have been funky.”
Things are getting funky beyond Clear Creek Canyon; mountain guides and climbers around the world whose sports and businesses rely on the consistency of ice are noticing the changes. Even as ice climbing has grown dramatically in popularity and accessibility, the future of the sport may be on thin ice due to warming temperatures.
The American Alpine Club, a climbing advocacy nonprofit headquartered in Golden, began to notice an increased level of awareness about environmental change within the guiding community.
Working with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the group surveyed the American climbing public and found climbers were more concerned about the issue of climate change than the general American public.
To quantify this sentiment, in 2019 the AAC organized a team of researchers to conduct a study on the impact of climate change on ice climbing.
Using the Mount Washington valley in New Hampshire as a case study, the study looked at climate models, an extensive photo archive of the flows over time, and the knowledge of local guides to assess future impacts.
The climate models prepared by the AAC researchers predicted a decline in the length of the winter climbing season in both a high-emission scenario (if nothing is done to lower carbon emissions) and a moderate emission scenario (if steps are taken to lower emissions). The results revealed that by 2100 in a high-emission scenario, the season length for ice climbing could be as short as 30 days.
“We tapped into a reality that a lot of people were experiencing, but not necessarily quantifying or doing enough to talk about,” said Taylor Luneau, the AAC policy director at the time of the study. Luneau said the research not only showed how the ice would be affected but also what it might mean for local economies and the individuals who rely on ice for their livelihood.
Environmental stresses to ice flows are also combined with the growing popularity of the sport. Three million Americans ice climb yearly, a significant increase from the 50,000 participants that took to ice falls in the early 2000s. At Clear Creek, Coryell said that besides this season, Coors Light and Mickey’s never formed so there have been even more climbers at Secret Waterfall.
“One of our big goals as a company is to facilitate a great mountain experience,” Coryell said. “We’ve started doing a lot more of our ice work in less crowded places, to give a better experience and it’s easier to manage the overall risk. If you have 20 people climbing on a tiny flow, it’s going to be a bowling alley if that ice comes down on you.”
The guiding outfit climbs across the front range, including locations that are much further than the easy twenty-minute drive from Denver to Golden and the fifteen up to Clear Creek Canyon. Due to the unpredictability of the ice, Coryell said even though more people want to climb closer to Denver, they’ve been steering clients to their Mount Lincoln and Lake City climbs as the overall experience will be better.
“Clear Creek is so close and accessible to a big market of both tourists and people fully into the sport,” Coryell said. “When that option isn’t there, you lose out on a lot of equity in terms of folks that can go out and climb. From a business standpoint, it’s been tricky to adjust, because you can’t run the same type of programming anymore without going higher up into the mountains.”
While the ice further up in the mountains is more insulated, the impacts of warming temperatures have been noticeable up there as well. At Mount Lincoln, warmer days combined with colder nights have caused the ice to grow much thicker than before.
The economic impacts of a changing climate and the value of ice climbing to a community are hard to quantify but as the ice recedes, so does the access to outdoor recreation and the quality of life that leads so many people to choose to live in front range communities.
As businesses adapt to the changing times, some places such as Colorado’s Ouray Ice Park divert water to form their annual ice flows and ice farmers maintain the ice throughout the season. That water comes down from snow melt in the San Juan Mountains, through the Uncompahgre Gorge, and collects in a storage container for the County of Ouray before being poured over the park’s cliffs to form the flows.
“If it’s a low snowfall year, and there’s less water to go around, what happens to the ice farm,” Luneau said. “Do they still get the same amount of water needed to open or does the water get allocated back?”
Less snowfall and less ice due to warming temperatures lead to critical questions about water resource management in a state that already faces challenges in water supply. A drier system overall can also increase the risks of wildfires and droughts.
“The experience of being on the ice and seeing these changes allows us to step into a much bigger, more drastic conversation,” said Luneau. “We’re very privileged to be able to do this sport and it’s not just about maintaining climbing days. It’s about the downstream effect.”
As ice climbers have begun to be louder advocates for the impacts of our changing climate, they are joined by organizations like Protect Our Winters who have been raising awareness of the impact of climate change on all recreational winter sports. These organizations are making strong calls for mitigation measures, and the study by the AAC was combined with a policy position about changes that need to be made going forward.
Luneau said one of the major ways the climbing community can address the issue is through land conservation and supporting initiatives like 30×30, which aims to conserve 30% of land and water by 2030, as an interim measure of reaching 50% by 2050.
In Golden, the changes ice climbers see on the ice are becoming a bigger part of the conversation. Coryell said that many guiding outfits are getting together across the Front Range to debrief the ice season, see what worked well and how they can provide the best experiences in the upcoming year.
“It’s an ever-changing medium, and what may be here today might not be there tomorrow,” said Coryell. “It’s something all of our guides focus on with clients and we do spend a fair bit of time talking with people and guides about how different it’s becoming.”
Despite the challenges, ice climbers and guides will have to adapt. On a recent climb in Washington, Luneau had been out on the ice at the same time as another group of climbers. Temperatures had been warming throughout the day and the wind picked up, sending a rock tumbling down the hill right into a climber’s face. The climber was injured but thankfully ultimately OK, Luneau said.
“It was a good reminder that these are dynamic systems and what has been predictable in the past isn’t necessarily going to be safe in the future,” said Luneau. “That shift is going to require a lot of attention from climbers as things continue to warm.”