I push the shifter left and up, harder this time, and then let go. It flops back into loose position in the middle, and I give it a wiggle: yep, that’s neutral. I try again, mashing my left foot down and pushing harder on the shifter knob this time.

“Bryan, amigo, we have no clutch.” He raises his eyebrows at me.

Last year, I picked Bryan up from the SLC airport for two weeks of ice climbing in Colorado. All the ice fell down a few days before he arrived, and though we salvaged the trip with some awesome and cold desert crack climbing, a nagging desire for numb toes and the screaming barfies persisted for both of us. This year we tried again, making arrangements to stay with some of Bryan’s family in Ridgway.

“Every great trip starts out with a flat tire,” a wise coworker once told me as our tent collapsed in a snowstorm. It didn’t stop snowing for nine days after that, but I still think he’s right. These words were on my mind as I laid in the snow beneath my truck in Colorado at 5:00 in the morning.

“Okay push the clutch in again. Out. In.” Bryan pumps the clutch. I picked him up the night before and we boogied to Ridgway, psyched to go smash out a bunch of ice pitches in Ouray and get the beginning-of-the-season jitters out of our system. After an hour of tinkering I accept the reality that the master cylinder in my vintage Toyota truck/house has blown a seal in the winter cold of the Colorado mountains. Flat tire, indeed. We aren’t climbing today.

Twelve hours later I crunch a few miles of snowy road in my running shoes to a tiny auto-body shop that ordered a clutch master cylinder for us from a bigger city. 40 minutes and $37.50 later I step on a firm clutch and the Endurance slides into 1^st gear. We are going climbing.

As much of a zoo the Ouray ice park is, one cannot deny the allure of beating your arms and calves into jelly on as much ice as you want that’s all five minutes from your car. We racked up 30-odd pitches each in the first few days before heading for higher ground up the Camp Bird road, where we climbed pretty much everything that was in.

Colorado has had a rough couple of past winters. Last year was warm; this year was cold but there wasn’t any snow. Most ice climbs are fed by the melt-freeze cycle of the snowslopes above them and don’t really need a big snowpack to form up. The Rockies are known for really high avalanche danger and a bunch of really radical ice flows are right beneath giant snow bowls — avalanche deathtraps most of the time. Because of the really low snow this season many of those flows were safe enough for a rare ascent. One of these was Lost Creek falls:

We climbed it. It was cool.

———

I open the door and throw another log on the fire. The thermometer reads 73* inside the rough cabin and 12 outside. Two inches of rime ice hang from the front surfaces of my truck from blasting down the hard-pack snow road to Eureka the night before. Some of the most classic ice lines in Colorado flow down both sides of the Eureka valley, all less than a mile from the Ice Climber’s cabin that Bryan and I are staying in. I did some of my first multi pitch ice climbs here a few years ago with Marcus and have been itching to come back ever since.

Bryan and I peered up at the line from another angle and exchanged the ritualistic trying-convince-ourselves chatter: looks climbable, we can always rap, I think it’ll go, etc. There wasn’t any information about it, but it did look like it would go: a rock pitch over a buttress, a snowy ramp to a hanging icicle, an icy gully, and a summit. Simple!

The first lead goes to Bryan, who takes us up 55 meters to the base of the icicle — which has the white look of sublimated, rotten ice. A rock whizzes out of the gully above. It didn’t look good, but still worth a shot so I grabbed the rack and traversed over on rock edges and smacked in a ringing piton. I swing a tool into the ice, a crampon, another tool, and then I’m fully weighting it.

“Seems good!” I yell to Bryan.

“Crack!” the pillar yells at both of us. Another rock whizzes out of the gully above.

“Seems not good!” I yell to Bryan, and then, “down climbing!” I traverse back to the belay and we weld two nuts into a crack with a piton for our raps to the ground. At the base we drop across the valley and climb Highway to Hell instead.

We were also able to sneak in a lap up Whorehouse Hoses in the same day — a climb I’ve been eyeing for a few years.

Gold Rush wasn’t in, but gotta leave something new for next time.

On our way out we spent a day in the South Fork of Mineral Creek for a run up Snowblind, one of the coolest gully climbs I’ve done.

We pulled into the SLC departures with around 60 pitches of ice each this year. Better than zero!