Ouray Ice Park draws world’s top climbers in rare internationally certified contest
Climber Lindsay Levine scales a rocky section of the wall Jan. 20 during the UIAA Ice Climbing Continental Open event at the Ouray Ice Park. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
“If you want to try ice climbing, this is the place to come to try ice climbing. It’s incredibly accessible.”
— Peter O’Neil, executive director of the Ouray Ice Park
Every winter, when the temperatures drop, the Ouray Ice Park farmers start dribbling water down the sheer cliffs of the Uncompahgre River Gorge, building fangs of ice that lure thousands of climbers to the region.
Those climbers stir a vibrant winter economy for Ouray. The peak of the park’s season comes with the Ouray Ice Festival and Competition. The 29th annual event this year drew 48 of the world’s top ice climbers who competed in an internationally sanctioned contest. They scaled specially designed routes that combine both ice and rock, earning points for international rankings with the UIAA governing body.
The park hosted a test UIAA-like event in 2021, proving to the international governing body that the Ouray Ice Park was capable of developing an in-person and livestreamed international contest for the world’s top ice climbers.
The next year the Ouray Ice Park hosted its first UIAA-sanctioned North American Ice Climbing Championship, the only sanctioned event in North America. It was livestreamed in 24 countries, drawing 330,000 views. The event was supported from the Colorado Tourism Office’s pandemic-recovery Meeting and Events Incentive grant fund. Additional grants from Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Economic Development Commission, the state outdoor recreation office and the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media helped with park infrastructure and a one-hour documentary detailing the park’s rebound from the pandemic and a 2021 rockfall that crushed a bridge and penstock in the park.
A Kent State University professor studied the economic impact of the park’s 20,600 annual visitors, led by the 4,000 spectators who come to the Ouray Ice Festival. Winter visitors spend about $13 million a year in Ouray and summer visitors to the park’s Ouray Via Ferrata kick in $4.8 million more. The park supports 184 full-time workers who earn $6.4 million. The park is now wholly owned by the city of Ouray and Ouray County as part of a unique deal forged last month with the longtime owner and operator of the Ouray Hydroelectric Power Plant.
Park boss Peter O’Neil was gassed after this year’s festival, still buzzing from the thousands of spectators who crowded the rim of the gorge to cheer on the nimble climbers. Colorado climbers Tyler Kempney and Shirley Catalina won the men’s and women’s open competitions.
Ice climbing has changed a lot since the early days when intrepid alpinists ventured into remote winter landscapes to test their abilities in the harshest conditions. The Ouray Ice Park helps hone those skills only a short stroll from hot springs, hotels and coffee shops.
“There’s no other place where you can literally walk up from town and throw a rope down and try ice climbing or you hire a guide and come up and climb in the park,” he said.
“It’s such a unique sport,” O’Neil told photographer Hugh Carey. “It takes a lot of mental stamina and mental energy and it takes commitment and you gotta be tough. It’s a different kind of problem-solving, but it makes the high mountains, which have both rock and ice, more accessible.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to see Hugh’s photos from the Ouray Ice Festival
Lights out in Glitter Gulch
The City of Aspen glows under a bright moon seen from Aspen Mountain, Feb. 25, 2021, in Pitkin County. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
An authentic nighttime experience can be a challenge among the glass-and-timber-walled manses of Aspen. The twinkling trees, the fulgent foyers, the illuminated architectural marvels. It’s just so … glittery in Glitter Gulch.
A new “lights out” rule is casting a shadow on the radiant parade in Aspen, following a growing appreciation for darkness, stars and nights free from electrified glow.
“We’re not saying turn your lights off completely, but after curfew you need to dim them or draw your blinds,” said Haley Hart, a long-range planner for the city of Aspen.
The new rule in Aspen warns homeowners and businesses to dim exterior lighting from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. The glowing palaces up Aspen’s tony Red Mountain may need to draw the blinds on their floor-to-ceiling glass walls to avoid complaints from neighbors weary of basking in the brilliance.
Lots of communities have deployed lighting ordinances that prevent upward lights, certain high-intensity bulbs and obtrusive “light trespass.” There are 15 places in Colorado with official Dark Sky designations, including Crestone, Norwood, Nucla and Naturita, Ridgway and Westcliffe and Silver Cliff in the Wet Mountain Valley. More communities are hoping to join that shadowy club, working to curtail light pollution and protect the darkness.
Aspen’s approach — with the lights-off curfew — is a new strategy in the keep-it-dark movement. It stems from “many lighting concerns and complaints,” Hart said.
There’s no plan to pursue dark-sky designation, only the desire to curb the glow so everyone can enjoy nature’s light show.
“Our idea with the updated code was to create some guardrails,” Hart told Sun reporter Tracy Ross. “We don’t want people’s seasonal lights in their neighbors’ windows.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
Kit Carson will be dropped from a 14er in the Sangres. But what will replace it? Frustum? Lawrence? Crestone?
The Sangre de Cristo range, including Kit Carson Mountain, viewed from the east side, on Sept. 6. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
“Kit Carson has a reputation that was not all that good in the valley.”
— Kizzen Laki, a trustee in Crestone
There’s a pattern emerging for how the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board changes the name of a prominent feature. The board mulls a proposed new name, like, say, Mount Frustum to replace the 14,171-foot Kit Carson Mountain in the Sangre de Cristos. The public hears the proposal and suddenly there are several more new suggestions.
A frustum is a geometric shape: a pyramid with the top lopped off. Early surveyors touring the West in the 1870s called the three-summit, flat-ridged mountain above the Town of Crestone in the Sangres “Mount Frustum.” Since 1906 the mountain has been called Kit Carson, named for the trapper frontiersman who led military campaigns against Native Americans. It’s highly likely it will not keep that name much longer.
After the Colorado naming board in November tabled consideration of Frustum to replace Kit Carson, some new ideas started coming in. How about Lawrence Peak, after John Lawrence, the white settler who founded the town of Saguache? Or Tabeguache-Ute Peak to honor Native history and connections to the massif? The town of Crestone wants to name it Mount Crestone, but could that be a problem with adjacent summits called Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle?
More suggestions could be coming, said Jennifer Runyon with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Board on Geographic Names, which fields suggestions from anyone and vets recommendations from the state naming board.
“Here we go, shades of Mount Evans,” Runyon said at the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board meeting Wednesday, noting the surge of possible names that came to the national naming board as it affirmed a state decision to change Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky.
The board delayed any action on renaming Kit Carson Mountain, taking a careful tack on choosing a name that could last centuries. There seemed little board support for Frustum. The change from Evans led to a change in the name of the wilderness area below the 14er. The stripping away of Kit Carson could be more challenging. There’s a county and town on Colorado’s eastern plains with his name. There are 12 natural features in seven states named after the mountain man.
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
CPW under fire for wolf reintroduction bumbles while the predators are covering ground in Colorado
Colorado Parks and Wildlife on Wednesday published a map showing where 12 collared wolves in Colorado have roamed between Dec. 18 and Jan. 22. (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)“They feel like criminals.”
— Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis, of his staff who are releasing wolves
It’s been whispered. But Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis said it out loud Wednesday in a committee hearing as state lawmakers lit into the agency over its handling of wolves.
When Sen. Dylan Roberts asked Davis about “an extreme loss of trust” between residents and CPW following the secretive wolf reintroduction and the agency’s denial of lethal force to stop wolves that have killed 20 animals in Jackson County, Davis agreed that landowners have begun to lock CPW out.
And he was worried about the impact of wolves on his staff.
“They feel like criminals,” he said of their voter-mandated mission to reintroduce predators to the state, noting that an underway review of CPW’s first round of wolf reintroduction is to better support a beleaguered workforce. They “feel like they are breaking the law.”
CPW wildlife biologists never seemed to like the plan to bring wolves back to Colorado. But they never said it publicly. Maybe this rare admission of disdain for the voter-approved reintroduction is the first step in CPW mending fences with landowners who have long allowed CPW biologists and licensed hunters access to their private land, but now are saying, “Hey I don’t really want to work with you anymore,” Davis said.
“That’s painful because the majority of wildlife live on private lands, even though we have a lot of public lands in the Western Slope,” Davis said. “So we recognize we have a lot of work to do to work with stakeholders to repair relationships.”
As Davis spoke Wednesday at the Joint Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources committee hearing led by Roberts, CPW released a map showing how far 10 gray wolves from Oregon have roamed since they were released in remote corners of Grand and Summit counties. Roberts, a Democrat, represents those counties and said he’s heard from constituents who “say they are going to close their gates.”
“That’s a concern,” Roberts said. “We need that local collaboration between private landowners, between outfitters, between our communities.”
The map shows the 10 wolves released in mid-December — and two other wolves that wandered down from Wyoming last year — covering a lot of ground. The GPS collars on the 12 wolves record a location every four hours and CPW, while not detailing precise locations, released a map showing which river drainages the animals have visited in the past month. The map includes drainages in Eagle, Garfield, Grand, Jackson, Rio Blanco, Routt and Summit counties, stretching from near the Wyoming border to Interstate 70.
>> Click here to read this story
— j
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