Out-of-the way ice climbs are all about the journey
By Alan Wechsler
Craig Vollkommer wanted to know if I was fit before he took me ice climbing at Sleeping Beauty, a mountain on the east side of Lake George. He made it clear that it would be a long day, possibly returning by headlamp.
Oh, and there might not be any ice. We would find out when we arrived.
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Ice climbing is a changeable and unpredictable medium in the best of winters. It’s easy to get information about popular ice climbs in the Adirondack High Peaks, where hundreds of routes are focused in Keene Valley or near the Cascade Lakes on Route 73.
These routes attract dozens of climbers each winter weekend, and perhaps even hundreds during the annual Mountainfest in early February.
But you don’t have to go to the High Peaks region to climb ice. Here are some of the lesser-known areas scattered around the Adirondacks:
Pharaoh Lake
Driving north on the Northway, as you’re passing Schroon Lake, look right and you’ll see beyond it a mountain with a faint, white line on the south side. That’s what guidebook writer Don Mellor calls “the best moderate route in the park,” a long ribbon of ice about 500 feet high. The hard part is getting there.
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The cliff is more than five miles from the trailhead off Beaver Pond Road, located near the east shore of Brant Lake. The best approach is on skis via the Mill Brook Trail to Pharaoh Lake (you can use snowshoes too, but please don’t bare-boot it, which should be a capital offense on popular ski trails).
When I went in with my climbing partner Ryan many years ago we skied past an arm of Pharaoh Lake and headed northwest. After about 90 minutes of skiing we ditched the skis and started walking uphill with the cliff vaguely in the distance. Another half-hour of bushwhacking later, we rounded a corner and saw the ice up close for the first time.
It was late in the season (you want long days for this trip!) and the bottom pitch was hollow. Yet it was strong enough to support my climbing partner Ryan as he led up 50 feet of tenuous climbing on snow-cone-like ice, finally finding much firmer blue ice (and his first screw for protection). From there, several hundred feet of easy ice ribboned to the top.
If you want challenges, look elsewhere. But for a fun adventure that combines skiing, climbing and solitude, you can’t do much better.
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Some are truly classics. Most require a bit of effort to reach.
They all offer a chance to climb something new—and the promise that you probably won’t see anyone else.
Hoffman Notch
My pitch to my partner Steve Goldstein was: “Want to get a first ascent?”
I had skied Hoffman Notch several times and was impressed by the number of vertical ice walls we passed. They weren’t terribly high, but the ice was thick and blue. I was pretty sure no one had been back there. I mean, who would bother?
So on one cold January day, we snowshoed south from the parking lot on Blue Ridge Road, near I-87’s Exit 29. After an hour or so, we reached the first of several prominent ice flows.
It was probably about 50 feet tall, with a fat central pillar and an ice cave behind it. Steve racked up and started to lead. A pileated woodpecker, visible on a tree nearby, provided a percussive accompaniment.
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Related reading: The end of ice climbing?
“This is tough,” he said at one point. We were used to the popular climbs in Keene Valley, where after a few days of climbing the ice gets picked out, turning a smooth surface into something resembling a pegboard or ladder. But this ice was pristine—unmarred by human hands.
Steve, breathing hard, made his way to the top. Then he called down: “Hey, there’s a rappel sling up here!”
OK, so we weren’t the first climbers. But we were likely the first that season, at least.
A few years later, Don Mellor’s updated ice guidebook, “Blue Lines 2,” came out. It devoted seven pages to Hoffman and noted six distinct walls. We were intrigued to go back one more time to climb, and I continue to ski the trail regularly. Still haven’t run into anyone else.
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Barton High Cliff
About 15 years ago I joined guidebook writer Jeremy Haas to check out Barton in winter. I had been there several times in warmer weather, both to hike and to climb rock, but knew nothing about its winter potential. It’s located east of Brant Lake and north of Route 8.
Getting there is a full-on bushwhack, but at least in winter you can follow your tracks back out (assuming there’s snow). When we arrived at the cliff after a 90-minute walk in, Jeremy led a route now known as Cairngorm Corner. He even placed a piton, something I’ve never before had to remove in all my years of climbing. My climb was hampered by one of my crampons falling off; I hung from the rope and reinstalled it, which is a task best suited for the ground.
Haas must have seen something appealing about that place. A few weeks later, he returned and put up a challenging, 400-foot route called From My Cold Dead Hands.
In his guidebook, Mellor calls it “a big, important route, a real prize.” It’s rated a bit beyond my leading ability, but who knows? Maybe I’ll go back!
Obscure routes
Mellor’s guidebook lists dozens of other potential climbing areas in the central and southern Adirondacks. I don’t know too many climbers who have explored them; for most, you’d need a keen sense of adventure, and perhaps a compass.
Take Crane Mountain. The late climbing guide Jay Harrison lived at the base and had his own private path from his back door to the local ice routes. My friend Mike Hazard roped up with Harrison a number of times, but when I suggested we check out the ice on Crane, he wavered.
“Whenever we went, I just followed Jay’s path,” he told me. “I’m not sure I could find it again.”
I recently got out with the aforementioned Vollkommer, a Glens Falls contractor. He was willing to take me out to Sleeping Beauty, where I had never climbed, and show me some ice routes—if they existed this winter. The routes aren’t in any guidebook.
We met on a rare day when he wasn’t busy with work or taking his son to hockey practice. We hiked for an hour and paused at a frozen swamp to survey the cliff from below. Instead of the gleaming ice flows that I expected, I saw just a few blobs of white scattered around the broken rock.
Related reading: The magic of ice climbing
“Does the ice ever get thick here?” I asked.
“Well, thicker,” he replied.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. A dry late summer and fall had meant lower water flows this winter, and some climbs were thin. We walked along the base of the cliff, until we stopped below a line called “Coco.”’
The route of disconnected ice followed a gully to a ledge, and then to a second pitch of only slightly more substantial ice. “I’m sure I could lead it,” said Craig, who had been up the route eight or nine times before. I wasn’t so sure I could follow, but I agreed to belay him.
He thrashed his way to the top of the first pitch, occasionally hooking his tools and crampons on tiny rock crimps, sometimes pulling on rock gear he placed in cracks, and then I followed. By the time I reached him, my hands were numb and I was out of breath. But I had to admit: it was ice climbing, of a sort.
Top image: The author completes a pitch on remote Pharaoh Mountain. Photo provided by Alan Wechsler.
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