Maroon Bells Landscape in Aspen, CO

Spend a Day at Maroon Bells near Aspen, Colorado

Welcome to Ouray Colorado where the surrounding peaks stand an amazing 5,000 feet above Main Street. Home to the world’s first man made ice-climbing car, this town of about 800 swells to nearly 6,000 people during the annual ice festival. Male 1: My favorite thing about coming to Ouray to the ice festival is the community that gathers around this. This is really a gathering of the tribe, it’s the biggest ice festival in the United States, maybe the biggest in the world. The annual four-day festival includes competitions, clinics and an entire weekend of events. Male 2: I enjoy the competition very much, it’s the favorite time of the day on Saturday’s when everybody is poised and focused on who can get to the top the fastest. Female 1: I always wanted to do this, I always wanted to climb this side on this competition to see if I can hang with the girls and I guess I can, so I’m pretty psyched. But Ouray wasn’t always recognized as an ice climbing destination. Male 3: We started climbing in Ouray and in the south west Colorado in Ouray and this area of Silverton in the 70’s but it really wasn’t developed here in Ouray until 1994 or 95. There’s a hydro electric plant here and water leaked off the cliffs and made this big yellow smears of ice and said that the locals have climbed this. But then it took some guys who lived here to really have the vision that says, “Hey we can actually start to farm this ice and its like irrigation.” You know you irrigate a field while you irrigate the cliffs, so we can climb in here. Now there’s a mile of ice. When you’re ready to join the action, sign up for a clinic, they range from beginning to advanced and you can borrow gear from the festival sponsors. Even if you cant make it to January’s festival you’ll find plenty of helpful guides in Ouray. Male 4: One of the great things they give you in this festival is an evolving in the simplest competition venue with nothing else going on and so okay, how can we make this a better festival? And that is when we decided to have this clinic’s, why not have this athlete’s share the knowledge with everyday climbers. Lets make it’s a tree rendezvous where the people are just learning how to climb can meet their heroes. Female 2: My favorite part is probably to see people that have never ice climbed before tell me that it was their first time to do it and their over there training out with the same place as the pros would be doing it. Apart from climbing, visitors can enter an axe throwing contest or a slack line competition. Afterwards, you can warm up in the Ouray natural hot springs. Male 5: One of the great things about Ouray is that its pretty darn civilized for ice climbing. I cant tell you how many times I’ve done the death march in the climbs in falling ice fall and we know here is we can go down to that coffee shop in the morning and have our latte and bagel sandwich and walk up here from town. Get a few pitches in, its amazingly civilized and that’s one of the reasons that its full of people all the time. So no complaining the next time temperatures has dipped below freezing, it means the folks in Ouray are just getting started.