First time ice climbing

I recently had my first experience ice climbing so I thought I'd share what I learned for anyone else thinking about giving it a try. The gurus tend to gloss over a lot of the little details that we newbs might find important. I've been climbing rock for years. I'd used crampons for glacier travel before so I was familiar with a lot of the concepts and had a decent idea what to expect. 

We figured it was safer to top rope everything for a first outing even though it ultimately proved unnecessary. Over two days I had two slips that I held each time and no falls. As in, I lost my feet twice but the picks held so I never ended up loading the rope. 

Even with a relatively strong grip from rock climbing my forearms were screaming by the end of the day. I was probably over-gripping and wasting tonnes of energy on my placements. 

By the end of the second day I had learned a lot about placements. First you would be amazed at how little the pick has to penetrate hard ice in order to hold your weight. The trick is making sure that you're pulling straight down on the tool so that the grip is against the ice also. As a rock climber I tended to want to hang back with nice straight arms. That position pulls the grip out from the wall and causes the pick to quickly lose its ability to hold. 

I found it very trickly to transition between ice types and immediation alter my swing to accomodate their different properties. When moving from hard brittle ice to soft plasticy ice I found myself sinking the pick several inches. It could be that this is how deep you should place the pick into soft ice but it felt like wasted effort on the strike at the time and then more effort moments later to free the pick from the ice. 

As I grew tired I fully embraced the use of previous picks. On hard ice it was extremely easy to place the pick into a pocket and pull up on it feeling secure. On well climbed routes I was able to simply place my picks in previously created pockets the entire way. 

In the transition from rock climbing I really struggled with my foot placement. I'm used to being able to place my foot almost anywhere. In rock climbing it's common to place your foot gently on a small feature and have it hold. In contrast each foot placement on ice was a violent action that left me feeling more like I was trying to brute force my way through it than actually finesse it. 

It was definitely more difficult to actually see my foot placements as the route became more vertical. I really felt like I was striking and hoping for the best. Not like I was applying anything that could be called skill. I'm sure that was the cause of my slips as I found it difficult to test the quality of the foot hold. That's something I will have to work on. It also felt a little like my glacier crampons with their horizontal front picks were a little less adept at vertical ice work than their cousins with vertically orientied front picks would be. 

With concentration I found it fairly easy to achieve decent form on vertical ice, pushing up with my legs more than pulling on my arms. The low angle stuff that was too flat to feel like "climbing" but too steep to simply walk up was the most annoying. 

I was amazed at how thoroughly abused my staminia felt at the end of a few laps. Climbing ice does utilize a few different sets of muscles than climbing rock does. 

We had good weather so the cold wasn't much of an issue but I can see how it could be. I felt cold at the start of the day. My feet were almost uncomfortably cold. But that quickly went away after climbing. My hands felt almost too warm on the first day so I tried a thinner pair of gloves on the second day but quickly switched back to the heavier gloves. The thinner ones weren't warm enough or water resistant enough, nor did they offer enough protection. I had very sore knuckles after my first climb from striking the ice with my fist.

If you're an experienced rock climber, ice climbing will be a bit of a shock. While some of the core muscles are the same, there are so many other things that are different. But I can't wait to go again.