Words :: Ned Morgan // photo & video :: Chris Christie.
Taking advantage of a brief January cold snap in the Coast Mountains, climbers Tim Emmett and Luca Malaguti recently logged the first ascent of Waterworld—a Squamish Valley ice route over 137 metres high and full of gnarly pillars. Chris Christie was there to capture the anything-but-straightforward ascent. The Squamish-based photog got the call from Emmett the night before and was out the door early on a cold, overcast Tuesday morning.
“We had a fair amount of rain, and then it immediately froze…that’s why all those ice features connected because usually they’re just hanging daggers and you can’t get to them from the wall. But this year it all adhered a little better and there was a route to the top,” says Christie.
Shooting the climb proved to be a game of ice-dodging for Christie as he sought a good vantage point near the base of the immense, ice-curtained wall. “As you can imagine, [the climbers are] kicking off ice as they climb, and obviously it’s coming down to earth and bouncing off into the forest. So I had to be in a spot where I wouldn’t get hit. And that was hard when I was flying the drone and had to keep eyes on it, trying not to hit tree branches.”
The photographer took cover under a boulder that provided a protective overhang so he would be safe from icefall while piloting. He also needed to avoid distracting the climbers in a situation where a bad move could spell disaster. “I wanted to get close to them, but not too close to disrupt their mindset.”
Christie himself used to climb ice—a factor that helped immeasurably. “Understanding how ice works as a photographer was critical to being safe, even on the ground.”
His climbing experience also gave him an appreciation for an all-day climb full of the usual technical challenges of ice climbing plus natural hazards including constant water seeping over the ice and onto the climbers. (Thus the route name, Waterworld.) “There was a lot of water pouring down on them… but I think they managed the risks because they’re experts and everything is well-managed and calculated.”
Climbing ice means managing the weather even more closely than usual and paying particular attention to sun exposure. Tim Emmett explains: “We went there three days before, but the sun comes onto [the Waterworld route] by late morning and there’s these massive hanging daggers at the top that get sun first and start dripping profusely. If they break up, you don’t want to be underneath, so we decided not to climb that route, and do a nearby climb in the shade instead. But I knew I needed to come back.”
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I ask Emmett how much scouting is required to line up an ice wall that is morphing daily and even hourly. “The exciting part about ice climbing especially on the West Coast is that until you get there and have a look at it, you don’t know. You can wait a whole year or maybe even two years for the right conditions just to look at one of these climbs, which might be possible for a day or two and then that’s it.”
So in mid-January when Emmett saw the forecast for an Arctic outflow over the Coast Range, he knew it was game on.
On the drive up the valley, Emmett experienced a near accident that rivalled or surpassed the risks he and Malaguti would be taking on the ice later that morning. “It was just after 6 am and I suddenly realized that this car was coming towards me at speed in the same lane and whoever it was had fallen asleep or was under the influence. And I was like, ‘There’s a car coming towards me and I need to move out the way right now.’ I moved over and the car went straight past me. It was pretty wild how we had a potentially life-threatening situation before we even went ice climbing… It took me back to the days when I used to wingsuit fly, where I was flying past trees or objects or cliffs at that sort of speed and I just reacted and moved.”
“We had a potentially life-threatening situation before we even went ice climbing…”
Notwithstanding the near head-on collision on the way to the crag, I had to ask Emmett how he climbs up jagged pillars of ice without fear of them cracking underneath him.
“The answer to that is experience—spending a lot of time on ice over the years. On the crux pitch of this route—the picture that was in Mountain Life—I’m pulling out onto this hanging icicle that’s not connected at the bottom. It’s not really connected to the rock where I’m getting onto it, either. It’s suspended in space and there’s a lot of water pouring down the route. I was looking out across at this piece of ice, thinking, ‘Well, let’s see if it’s gonna go…’ I had to clear a lot of the very fragile ice out of the way. It’s about using your skills and experience—in my case, 25, 30 years of ice climbing—to negotiate and navigate onto this big piece of ice without knocking it off.”
And no matter the level of skill and years of experience, an ice climb of this difficulty must be judiciously managed, second by second. “On that particular section of ice I didn’t have any protection apart from the belay Luca [Malaguti] was attached to,” says Emmett. “You can’t put any gear into the ice when it’s not attached to the rock. So I knew as soon as I got onto this dagger, I was going have to climb for a good 25 or 30 feet before putting in any ice screws. If the ice breaks off and you’ve got an ice screw in there—that can really cause problems.”
He concludes: “The climbing here is very committing and cerebral.”
For this mission, Tim Emmett wore Mountain Hardwear’s Phantom Belay Down Parka and the Dawnlight GORE-TEX Pro Jacket and Pant.
Check ML’s conversation with Tim on the Live It Up Podcast.
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