ICE IS IN!

Well, for the past month I have been in school mode.  Listening to lectures, speakers and writing papers out the wazoo!  Putting a 30 or so adults who still suffer from sitting still for more than 45 minutes is a recipe for disaster!  To handle this the teachers make sure we have breaks every hour...for some of us however, this is not enough.  We remedied this for the first part of the month by pushing the rock climbing season until the bitter end but once we received our first blanket of snow we had a bit of a problem...the snow was too thin to ski, the ice was still water and there are no established drytooling areas that I know of.  Well a couple weeks ago I was doing a bit of a day hike and I came upon this only 20 minutes of walking from my house!

What a find!  Kamloops has plenty of interesting outdoor 'stuff' around it but my lack of car(or drivers license for that matter)  make it difficult to get out sometimes.  Well, problem solved!  But not only is this find great for my lack of transportation but this means I can run a few laps on my way home from school every day!  So ever since the find I have been going back to see how the freezing process happens.  On saturday me and Scott headed down and things were close!  But still too wet to climb.  well two days later and consistent cold weather brings me to this morning...I woke up to a cold morning after a cold night.  Scott called me telling me he was in for a look before class(with ice tools this time!).  I was tired and he was leaving fast so I bailed on him but decided to head down on my own when I had properly woken up.  After a small breakfast and quickly packing my gear, I was out the door greeted by a crisp morning cold!  After hiking into the valley and two somewhat simple rappels down to the base of the falls i was given the good news!  Now for those of you who have never paid attention to how water falls freeze up, here is what those two (seemingly) small water falls turned into only a couple weeks later.             

                                                

I fixed a rappel line down the main falls and quickly zipped down!  After a couple of laps up my hands were cold and papers were calling my name.  I was pleased with the climb so i hauled up my frozen rappel line packed up my gear and started walking home.  Well now its back to writing papers but what a great start to the morning...some people wake up to a cup of tea, some like a cup of coffee...but frozen water is my preference, and ill take mine double double!

Heres a few more pictures from the day.

Sorting out my gear at the top

View of the highway that cuts through kamloops from the

top of the climb

Notice my gear on the tarp, the rope was coated in ice

and the screws were completely clogged with ice.