Renee and I picked Ryan up at 7:00AM Saturday and headed up to Loch Vale for another day on the ice. A storm was moving in for later today, but we were hoping to get a good day of climbing in before the brunt of it hit us. As we made our way up Big Thompson Canyon the winds started picking up. We made the final turn into Estes Park it was full on gale force winds and looking up into the park, it didn’t look pretty.

At this point I think all three of us we thinking more about if Ed’s Cantina served breakfast burritos more than climbing. As we drove down through Moraine Park several gusts of wind hit us sideways that I thought were going to blow us off the road.

We were greeted at the entrance gates to RMNP by a ranger that had no sense of humor, so we did the adult thing to do and made fun of her. Amazingly enough though, when we reached the parking lot at Glacier Gorge, there wasn’t a breathe of wind, just snow, but that’s easy enough to deal with. Scott and Krista were there waiting for us with big smiles on their faces ready to go.

We ran into Eli Helmuth, owner of Climbing Life Guides. He was taking a client that was going to Everest in April up to Loch Vale to train on some low angle ice. We Bs’d with him for a bit while getting ready and then they headed on up to the Loch.

We finally got it together and headed out in the fresh powder. We passed Eli at the junction of Mills Lake as they stopped to refuel. I think they planned that. I broke trail from there on up to the Loch, not to bad until we cut off trail to head up to the ice.

I started wallowing through waist deep snow working our way up to Mo Flo Than Go. There are good things about being first on the ice, but this wasn't one of them! About halfway up I was kind enough to let Scott take the lead. This seemed to be the crux of the climb for the day. We were beat by the time we finally got up to the ice. Eli and his client follow suite on the freshly broken trail. The weather was beautiful though, snow just falling straight down and not a breathe of wind. We made the right decision to forgo the breakfast burritos!

Ryan lead up the main flow and setup a top rope, while Eli and his client Steve climbed the lower angled ice on the right side of the flow. Scott made a run up and cleaned the screws as he climbed, although he did climb past the first screw before realizing his mistake.

Renee, Krista and I made several laps each during the course of the afternoon. Ryan got bored after a while and did some solo climbing on the far left hand side of the main flow. We were joined at one point by a couple of people snow showing that our climbing had peaked there interest. They hung out for a while and took some photos. At least they beat down the trail a bit more for our walk out!

We were later joined by a couple of climbers from Boulder. Scott and Krista made a couple of final laps and we turned it over to them for the rest of the day. We had another really great day of early season climbing and the weather couldn’t have been any better.

We packed it up and Eli met us down at Ed’s Cantina for a couple of beers and a early dinner. We couldn’t have asked for a better day of climbing.

As I woke up this morning, the storm had made its way into Fort Collins and I woke up to a couple of inches of fresh powder and 5 degrees outside. Ryan is heading back up to the Loch today – better him than me!!

As a side note to the day, Ryan had decided that he need a walking stick to aid himself as he is still recovering from his fall last season. He broke out at least a 75cm ice from REI that weighed at least 4 pounds. I’m sure he got some strange looks along the way, at least from all of us. After several attempts at naming his new found crutch, we later deemed it to be Excalibur!