REAL BEAUTIFUL FROZEN WATERFALL WINDOWS

Its beautifully preserved Queen Anne and Victorian buildings look like a film set, but, in fact, many have been converted into boutique properties like the six-room Imogene Hotel ( doubles from INR 10,081) and locally owned shops, restaurants, and craft breweries. Today, the town’s Main Street, registered as a National Historic District, is busy with visitors all winter long. “The arrival of the ice park in 1996 changed everything.” “It truly felt frozen in time,” said Calhoun, a South Carolina native who hasn’t lost her Southern drawl. One of those diehards, Kitty Calhoun, a climbing legend who co-owns Chicks with Picks and still works for the group as a guide, told me that by the early 1980s Ouray was essentially dead. In those days, a handful of climbers would typically make the pilgrimage to scale the area’s naturally formed backcountry ice. Shopping for gear at Ouray Mountain Sports In winter, Ouray, with no ski resorts, turned into a ghost town. When that industry dwindled, the community relied on summer hikers and off-roaders to keep businesses afloat. Founded in 1876, Ouray was sustained by mining for a century. Ouray Ice Park has undoubtedly helped popularise the sport of ice climbing, but many would argue it has also helped save the town. It’s part engineering feat, part natural sculpture garden. A mostly volunteer team of “ice farmers” carefully grooms its 100-plus climbing routes using excess town water fed through a system of 300 sprinklers and spouts. The events are centred around Ouray Ice Park, the world’s first man-made ice climbing park, and one of the largest, spanning one and a half kilometre of the Uncompahgre Gorge just outside of town. Elite athletes go to compete, while enthusiasts and curious novices partake in a long weekend of educational clinics, gear demos, and nightly outdoor parties. On a frigid January weekday, I drove five and a half hours from Denver to join climbers from around the globe at the annual Ouray Ice Festival. The unofficial town slogan is “Have an ice day.” A climber rappels down a gorge at Ouray Ice Park, in Colorado.

REAL BEAUTIFUL FROZEN WATERFALL WINDOWS

Shop windows carry the sign “please remove crampons before entering”. In Ouray, a tiny town cradled in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, it’s the lifeblood of winter. In most parts of the country, ice climbing is considered a niche adventure sport. But at nine metres in the air, with nothing more than spiky crampons and a third-of-a-centimetre-wide steel point anchoring me to the side of a ravine, it sounded ludicrous. With my boots still firmly planted on the ground, this seemed like a reasonable statement. This was the mantra my climbing instructor, Lani Chapko of Chicks with Picks, had encouraged me to repeat as I attempted to ascend a towering frozen waterfall. Climbing the frozen waterfall in Colorado’s ice park

Real beautiful frozen waterfall