Climb Local

Craig and I headed out early this morning to try some local (local if 2 hours away is local) ice. By 7am we were in the Dingmans Ferry area of the Delaware Water Gap.

The plan was to scope out a couple of different areas, checking on conditions and hopefully climb something.

The first was Raymondskill Falls. Unfortunately it wasn’t ready to climb. There was one pillar we could have top-roped and had a lot of fun on, but we wanted a little more.

So we headed directly to Dingmans Falls knowing there was also Silverthread falls in the vicinity. Between the two, something had to be climbable.

Turns out Dingmans wasn’t ready either, but Silverthread was.

It was basically two pitches of waterfall ice. This was the lower pitch with the upper in the back. Being that this was our first real waterfall climb, we were honestly a little sketched out. Most of what we’ve climbed so far has been “seeping ice” which forms slow, fat and solid to the rock. The whole idea of fast moving volumes of water in a waterfall freezing and becoming climbable seems iffy, so we were very cautious.

I led the bottom pitch, which wasn’t very difficult and more popularly soloed (climbed without rope), but having some kind of attachment to Craig in case the whole thing gave way, helped set my mind at ease – a little bit.

The second pitch was much taller and the flowing water underneath more obvious, so we decided to setup a top-rope for more security.

Turns out we soloed half of it and used the top-rope for the second half. We climbed the right side mostly, though I did venture over the center flow and climbed the left side once. The roar of the water underneath was enough to insure I didn’t do that again.

There were some folks with some pretty nice cameras taking pictures from a distance. They were nice enough to send us some.

That section Craig is doing was near vertical if not completely vertical for about 12 – 14 ft. It’s really kind of strange how different things get when it turns vertical.

What’s really strange is how different things look from the top.

Looking down on all that I’d say there’s no way we could climb any of it, but we did and many times.

Since getting home, I’ve found pictures of what it looks like not frozen.

It’s actually more of a drip than a flow. Almost a fat seep even. If I’d known that before going up there, perhaps I could have been more bold. Not so much more soloing, but more leading and definitely over the flow itself which was the easier line.

Oh well. Important thing is we had fun, learned a lot and still here to learn some more.

– b