Ice Climbing & Scuba Diving

Working hard going from one adventure to the next these days. Isn’t that what life is supposed to be about? Mine sure is! Splitting my leisure time between two fairly intense pursuits - ice climbing and scuba diving. Yes, some would say opposites but somehow strangely complementary. Here’s why...

Clawing my way up a frozen waterfall wielding ice tools with crampons strapped to your feet may seem completely different from exploring the depths of Lake Ontario (yes, we dive there) but these two activities actually work really well together. Take the last two days for instance. On Saturday Jonah and I drove the three hours north from Toronto to Bancroft to check out the ice there. We climbed all day and had a ball and by the end we had pretty much toasted out arms and calves from the exertion. We left elated as we finally found a decent sized piece of near vertical ice in Ontario to get some good runs in on. Since Colorado all we have been climbing is road cuts and little frozen dribbles here and there and, quite frankly, we were starting to get bummed out. Funny how I started climbing ice after I moved to Ontario from BC. Whoops! In Bancroft at least there were a couple descent pitches and we could feel like ice climbers again and that was awesome!

Sunday morning is a dive training day so by 8:00 am there we were under water down in Humber Bay just off downtown Toronto working on buoyancy skills and trim for as long as we could stand the cold. The water was 34F and the outside temperature was -10C (I don’t know why we measure water temp in F and air in C but that just seems to be the way of it). Davis was helping me find my way in the water and is very patient (thanks D - sorry you missed the waffles). Even after 63 dives I still struggle with my trim (horizontal position) in the water. I gravitated early on in my dive career to a more technical style of diving and that means a big double tank setup with redundant everything in case of emergency. The diving style we follow is known as DIR (Doing It Right) as set out by the Global Under Water Explorers. They are a bit like PADI only with a much more holistic approach to the sport. Way more emphasis is placed on excellence, fitness and skill mastery and I find it really resonates with me personally. Heck, their last newsletter had a whole section on yoga for divers. Nice! I like diving with GUE trained divers like Davis mostly because the tend to be darn conscious divers and really good at what they do. They are also really safe as they constantly practicing drills so that if (when) anything ever does go wrong they (we) will be ready.

So I took up both these adventure sports within the last year. Both are super intense, physical, mentally demanding. Each endeavor can be scary or ecstatic depending on the day... or second. Both would be considered dangerous by some and crazy by others. Both require terrific physical fitness in order to get to anything but a basic level and both require constant practice in order to improve at all. On dive days I get to rest my forearms and calves and ice climbing affords me copious amounts of fresh air and perspective. In short I am really grooving on both my new adventure sports and I plan to write all about both a whole bunch more in posts to come. Here are some of my goals for both activities and I’ll keep you up to date with my success and possible failures with each.

Dive Goals For 2010:
-Get up to 150 dives under my belt.
-Do my GUE fundamental training.
-Dive the wreck named the Comet as that is my name.
-Dive in a cave - something I never thought I would do or want to do (now I want to do this)
-Dive on three salt water wrecks - so far I don’t have a lot of experience in salt water.
-Master my buoyancy and trim.
-Learn to fin backwards.
-Master all basic skills.
-Learn how to take fantastic photos underwater.
-Get an awesome “hero” dive portrait for my inspiration wall (and blog).

Ice Climbing Goals For 2010:
-Do at least 3 multipitch ice routes.
-Get on some sustained WI5 routes and climb them with confidence.
-Get to the point where I can lead WI4+ with confidence.
-Get on a bunch of mixed routes and become a better mixed climber.
-Get an awesome “hero” ice climbing portrait for my inspiration wall (and blog).
-Ice climb in the rockies.
-Go ice climbing with Will Gadd (part of my philosophy of “why not learn from the best”)