Back In The Day, I had a love-hate relationship with winter climbing. I always loved being out in Winterness, but at the same time I hated freezing my ass off while stupidly clinging to some piece of frozen water. I think many of us think of ice climbing as something like this:
Or maybe something like this:
These pictures are of my buddy Bob, who has had a dream ice season this year.

Well times and technology have changed. Clothing is much better, the tools and screws that we use are much more user friendly, and the experience of climbing without leashes has truly changed the movement and the kind of terrain that are now considered par for the "ice climbing" experience.

I think that winter climbing in Colorado, is unique in some ways. While we get the full value winter in the mountains, the range of temperatures that we experience make for some transient climbs that are here-today-gone-tomorrow. (It also makes for a sometimes horrendously dangerous snowpack.) At this point, I no longer have that love-hate feeling I once did for climbing on the frozen medium, so I get out whenever I can, and I truly love it all as long as there is a landscape of white to play in. But there are certain climbs that come in, only once in a Blue Moon, and to turn a corner after slogging up a steep slope, and find conditions right on a climb that last formed several years ago, is perhaps more interesting than climbing steep pillars and flows that form consistently each season. I compare chasing after such climbs to chasing a ghost. . sometimes its only in the imagination.

Wait a minute! What happened to the landscape of white?? Well last weekend, my friend Frosty and I chased after a ghost in the Flatirons, home to some of the best warm weather slab mongering on the planet, and the ghost was in.
The East Gully of the First Flatiron has been climbed in winter conditions for many decades. A few years ago, the obvious gully in the picture was renamed "The Silk Road" in an online database, and a few old timers complained about the name change. But on the other hand, climbing the East Gully in full winter conditions is certainly a totally different experience then romping up warm slabs during the rest of the year. I am certainly a crusty old-timer myself, but I also appreciate the new name, because it describes my winter experience much more eloquently than "The East Gully."
We agreed to meet at Chautauqua at 5:00 a.m. which would have put us on the route before anyone else. But while driving the ten minutes from my house to meet my partner, I realized I had spaced out my crampons. I had to turn around on Broadway to go get them, and consequently a party (of friends, as it turns out) beat us to the route. So Frosty attempted the alternate start above that didn't go due to unbonded and rotten ice on rock.
Once we settled into the notion that we would not be first on the route, we found the common start to be really neat, thin (a pattern of the climbing to come) climbing with the front points while palming in a right facing corner. This led to contemplation of the slab mongering to come.
I had never thought that hold-less slab climbing in crampons was possible, but as I followed Frosty's great runout lead over low angle rock slabs, I was amazed at the friction between my monopoints and the rock. Of course, the Flatirons usually provide a good edge for at least one point of contact, and on the most tenuous foot placements, (read friction placements) I always found a decent if small edge for my fingers. . no dry tooling on this pitch for me. Points of contact were varied, which is my favorite kind of mixed climbing. The rock traverse got us onto beautiful thin runnels of ice and snice.
The next pitch was mine, and it was consistent, low angle ice/snice, in which the oblique sun was slowly starting to soften the half inch thickness. We're not talking swing the tool hard here. It's more like, gently tap, if it sticks in the least, don't try to get a better placement or the ice will break away. If you can't get a confident tool placement, then you drag the tool gently 'til it catches on some combination of rock and snice. I cannot imagine climbing this kind of frozen-ness at a steep angle, although I know people do. I exaggerate not at all in saying it was between 1/2 and an inch thick for most of the pitch. I was able to place a stubby and then a couple of 13 cm. screws near the end to protect the crux. What made the climbing easy, if runout at times was the fact that I was on my feet and rarely had to pull very hard on either of my tools. Very similar to the Flatirons slab mongering that is so fun on warm days, except in a a winter context. So cool!
Frosty summed up the satisfaction of this climb by saying it had slabs, ice, snice, rock, mixed, trees, views and great adventure. I think it had a little bit of all the elements of climbing that I love. This was the first climb I've done with Frosty, and it was a treat to spend the half day with such a fun and solid partner. If we had not gotten two feet of snow in Boulder a week or so prior to when we climbed this, and then sustained cold temps with just enough melt/freeze, this climb would have been a ghost that we never would have found. As the sun starts to set on the ice season in Colorado, my dreams consist of a journey up the Silk Road.