Alaskan Alpine Club
Da Ice Wall 2 page.
10 January 2005 through 1 February, and beyond that on Ice Wall 3, etcetera.
This guy John Reeves, local ice artist, is making a rather impressive art sculpture on a rather sizable scale. Even I stop and look at it when I drive by, along with all the other folks. This is on the main road heading north to the North Slope, so a lot of truckers enjoy it, as well as the local Fox people, the Fort Knox gold mine folks, and an increasing number of people just trying to get farther away from those pitiable sops in Washington DC.
10 January. Photos below. Got cold. 30 degrees below 0, (F). With the ice above the 80 feet of pipe, the ice is now 83 feet 7 and 1/2 inches (25.5 meters), calculated by turning my head sideways and squinting. Any error is due to the glare of the sun below the horizon. The visible vapor coming out of the top, as the water hits the air, is more noticeable on site. The water is spraying several feet higher.
There was a few days that we did not climb the ice, for the reason pictured on the left. It was mostly 40 to 50 below 0 F.
14 January, when the temperature got back up to -10, I made an effort, climbing a bit over half way on a questionable self belay, and lost interest when a row of ice teeth snarled at me again, I looked back down, my toes suddenly got cold, and I remembered that I had to check my email. Some days are not climbing days.
15 January was a nice 0 degrees F, and three of us were there to play, ah, add 10 more feet of pipe. 90 feet of pipe total. The ice was still 40 below and hard as ice at 40 below, offering brittle climbing.
20 January. 95 feet high. At 20 below 0, it was a bit chilly to add pipe with the comfort to which we have become accustomed.
The thin hollow curtains at the top offer interesting ice tool placements when trying to get over the vertical edge.
22 January. 97 feet 3 inches at the highest ice point, before the new pipe. Added 10 feet of pipe. Total of 100 feet of pipe. A rather nice climb for the back yard. You will have to excuse the guy in the dark clothes and white helmet, who led the climb. He is not yet convinced that the newer digital cameras have color digits. And the computer guy does not yet know how to change the colors or you would see a fire engine red climber on neon green ice with flashing yellow icicles. Nice day at 5 above 0 F.
24 January. 102 feet high.
31.1 meters, or there abouts, for the feet challenged climbers.
29 January. 105 feet high. Well, ah, 20 below zero, and the other guys did not show up to put up more pipe. If we had driven all the way down to the Alaska Range to climb ice, we would have climbed the ice. But put the ice right next to Fairbanks, and these guys want a warm day to go climbing. Intelligence ruins perfectly good adventures. The warm sun was shining on the summit of the ice, but not down in the cold valley. Beset with the dilemma of having already put on my climbing boots, I set about the task of soloing the thing, despite my new solo belay toy and new ice screws having not yet arrived in the mail. An indicator of how high I got is the fact that I put in only two screws. The first screw was at the base, for the rope anchor there at the top of the cone-like slope. The ice was so hard that I stripped the hanger off the ice screw while putting it in. That is hard, way hard. I had to chop the darn screw back out of the ice. Yeah, well, that means that the second ice screw was the replacement, at the bottom. Still enthused with enthusiasm for the climb, I was up on the vertical part, actually climbing ice, when one swing of my Black Diamond Fusion ice tool popped a crack through the ice that sounded like the largest, loudest tenor drum that has ever been made by ice and hit with something. The sound pierced my coat and resonated my bones. My toes suddenly got cold. My fingers got numb. I remembered that I had to upload these pictures, get to a wine tasting function, and overthrow the Washington DC government. I looked around. No one was watching. I backed off. It is okay, the water is still coming out the top and building the ice. Maybe another ten feet of pipe when it warms up a bit.
1 February. 106 feet high. The Ghost Raven appears in the photo on the right. It did not warm up. It is 30 below 0. To climb hard brittle ice at 30 below, is to get better stories than this one. But I had a brilliant idea. This was gonna make things easy. I got an old crossbow from a friend who found it in the dumpster. I made a bolt (a crossbow arrow) from an old broken ski pole section. I glued a carriage bolt in the tip for weight. The ski pole had been broken by Tyson Flaharty, a hot local, University of Alaska, get-out-of-the-way ski racer who does international races and breaks poles. I taped some 550 cord (parachute suspension line, little cord) onto it, to shoot over the top of the ice, to pull a climbing rope over, to anchor it, to climb the rope with ascenders, to get to the top even at 30 below, and add more pipe. This was gonna be too easy. I laid the cord out at the base of the tower. I pointed the crossbow at the top of the ice. I pulled the trigger, the first time I have ever shot a crossbow. I was impressed with the solid, thunk, sound of the crossbow. The bolt launched into the air, fell against the ice about half way up, and came back down. Unfrazzled, and certain of my brilliant idea, I shot it again, pointing the thing more straight up. It did the same thing again. Well, so, it was only a brilliant idea, not a hot idea, and it needed to be a hot idea at 30 below. Therefore being curious, I untaped the 550 cord to see how high up the ice the bolt would shoot without the cord. Last thing I saw was a little round dot disappearing into orbit. Apparently the mass of the bolt had not been sufficient to sustain its inertia in adequate proportion to the accumulating mass of the 550 cord anchor. Or something like that. Maybe next time I will try smaller cord. If you find a short section of ski pole anywhere, it might be mine if it did not hit anything expensive.
2 February. 40 below. Two of us tried the crossbow trick again, with small nylon string. Each time, of several times, the new crossbow bolt beautifully arched up over the top of the ice, albeit barely, and down the other side about 10 feet, and no further. The bolt did not have enough weight to pull the string against the friction of the ice. Well, either we are at the cutting edge of shooting lines over the top of ice towers, learning new knowledge, or a lot of people out there are laughing because we did not engineer this endeavor enough.
So we went spelunking in the labyrinth of tunnels and chambers inside the tower. There is one tunnel system, mostly crawl ways, around the entire column, on the inside behind the top of the sloped cone at the base, which includes multiple layers and hallways. It is almost as good as glacier moulins, on a smaller scale, and a lot closer to Fairbanks than the Alaska Range glaciers. The higher chambers will be a later endeavor.
Oh, about that first crossbow bolt, a day later I got an email from some guy in Guadeloupe. He sent a picture of a ski pole section that looks suspiciously like the one I made into the crossbow bolt. He said it fell out of the sky in the town marketplace, hit a a slanted tin roof over a steet-side stall, with a startling, whack, that got the immediate attention of a nearby squad of police officers, ricocheted off the roof and hit a dog in the butt. The dog jumped forward under a table of iced fish, without much ice left because it was late in the day, hitting the legs of the vendor, who fell sideways, grabbed the corner of his table, took it down with him, spilling the fish on the next vendor's blanket of incense, and generally caused a bit of a commotion. Nobody could figure out what the hell the short red colored carbon fiber stick with some yellow and green tape was, or where it came from. He said he figured it out right away, on account as he is rumored to have a lot of mangos riding on how high the ice tower gets, and checks this website every other day. But by the time he stopped laughing, everything was cleaned up in the market, so he decided to leave his colleagues with the mystery. He says he sells, ah, opportunities to guess how high the ice tower will get, and similar things around the world, in regard to events described on websites. Interesting business. He figures that the total damage to the two vendors at the market place, including the lost business due to the commotion, comes to 12 Euros, or about that in any hard currency other than the failing American money. Therefore he said he owes me 8 Euros, for the 20 Euros worth of laughter he got from the show, and will pay me in mangos if the ice tower gets high enough and if I get to Guadeloupe. If he would pay for the plane ticket to Guadeloupe, the ice tower would get higher faster. Where is Guadeloupe?
View of the ice from the crossbow launch site.
We received a report that a few folks out there do not yet quite recognize the full rhetorical magnitude of this artwork, and the work of industrial artist Big John Reeves with his team of art engineers. Some folks think that this artwork is just water being sprayed willy nilly into the freezing air of another Fairbanks Alaska winter. Homeland Security has not yet recognized what is camouflaged in the middle, as usual. Hollywood, still lost in California, is missing the available story line. The Governor of Alaska, a previous Washington DC Senator deep inside the warm and fuzzy DemocanRepublicrat cocoon, does not know what ice is. And the tax funded Alaska Council for the Arts is only spending money on themselves to claim credit for any artists who cannot escape the government artist list. Every day the Alaska oil pipeline security helicopter flies overhead, on account as the oil pipeline is just across the road. They still have not figured out what is really going on, despite their ability to look directly down on the top, real close, much to our amusement. You should see what that particular array of icicles does to the onboard radar in military jets known to prowl the pipeline corridor. The flight pattern for over-the-pole commercial airliners landing at Fairbanks International crosses directly overhead. At least they figured it out, and have the good sense to veer off course when they get close. The news media is only looking at the website.
After deciding upon the overall concept, the artist selected a team of assistants, including the engineers, site preparation equipment operators, hydrologists, water pumping technicians, pipe and nozzle guys, photographers, color analysts, lighting specialists, ballistics experts, ice climber sorts, and me of course, the web slave chained to the computer with no chance of escape. No small undertaking. Just consider the piles of peanut shells laying on the snow, resulting from the planning and engineering phases for this project, involving the entire team standing around, homdihooming and eating peanuts, leaning against the pickup, pointing to what would happen if this or that were done, while going over every detail of the project, and other things happening in the world, including the cost effective analysis of said details, to insure the success of every result you see, before the next drop of water was launched willy nilly into the aforementioned freezing air. Every phase completion date was completed ahead of schedule and below budget, in defiance of global warming. Follow-up comparative analysis phases, to stay ahead of the intense international competition, involved travel across the land, through the snow, around the ice, an occasional glance into the sky when no one is watching, and even a research team sent as far away as Florida. Well, never underestimate the Florida ice competition.
For a better understanding of the magnitude of this artwork, imagine if the US Government or its University of Alaska were given the task to produce what you see, or any artwork of this size, complexity and weight. Years later, and a million or more tax dollars squandered, mostly for overpaid bureaucrats and their lawyers sitting in conference rooms, with cashews rather than mere peanuts, they would still fail miserably as usual, but entrench an annual budget for an expanding bureaucracy. That is an understatement, in itemized detail, for the University of Alaska's outdoor recreation and art departments which seem to be headquartered in Washington DC.
So there we have it, a million dollar artwork privately produced for public view from the adjacent highway. With a few more sentences, we could get it up to more than that, much to our ongoing amusement.
Mo photos on Ice Wall 3.
04-05 Ice Wall 3
04-05 Ice Wall 4
04-05 Ice Wall 5
04-05 Ice Wall 6
04-05 Ice Wall 7
04-05 Ice Wall 1
03-04 Ice Wall
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