Hey!  Guess what?  ...No, no...  I haven't gotten any body piercings or found some new use for Rogaine... (although I have heard you can get some pretty funny results if you put it into your climbing partner's sun screen!)  On a trip to the Adirondacks over New Years, I became a Canadian!  Well, sort of...  I became a member of the Alpine Club of Canada.  A friend of mine, John O'Marra turned me on to it.  We stayed at cabin belonging to a friend of his.  It can be extremely difficult to drive to this cabin after a big snow storm when you have bald summer tread tires on your car (yes, I speak from experience), but it is situated smack dab in the middle of all the best climbing in New York state.  There were a bunch of folks staying there.  Most them were from Ottawa or Montreal, with the exceptions being a bloke from England (now living in Canada), a woman from France (we thought she was from Canada because most of them spoke French too) and of course, us.  Everyone was very friendly, especially John's friend, David, and it was really quite a nice time.  The highlight, of course, was the climbing.

We drove up early on Thursday, January 1, 1998, met John at the local greasy spoon, the Noon Mark Diner, and headed over to Pitchoff Chimney Cliff to work out the cobwebs and warm up for some bigger stuff.  There were quite a few people there as it was about as short an approach as you can get in the 'Dax'.  They were mostly working top ropes, but I needed to get on the sharp end to get used to being scared, so I led up about a 70 foot section of this wide ice flow.  Damn, if it didn't look easier than it turned out to be!  After climbing it, John said it was probably an NEI 4 -.   Jake did real well, but he got tied up near the top.  It took him a little while to muster up the commitment to attack the final thin exit moves.  I was beginning to get a little concerned about doing anything big as Jake was still getting his "crampon feet".  He had only started ice climbing two weeks earlier and was coming along nicely, but perhaps it was just a little soon to go jumping on anything too big.  Anyway, after that, we went over a little ways and set up a top rope up on a more interesting part of the cliff.  John got first dibs on it.  I use the term loosely, as it had obviously been hacked to pieces by gobs of others.  He flashed right up it.  He should be leading harder stuff.  He climbs really well.  I finished it off quickly without much crying and then it was Jake's turn.  I would have timed him, but I forgot my calendar.  (Gee, I hope he reacts better to this than he usually does to my ribbing...  Look Jake, I'm making ya FAMOUS!)  While Jake was camping up there, I wandered around the corner and chatted with three guys that were working on some amphibious monster.  Damn.  Now that thing was worthy of a top rope!  Hmm...  Maybe next time...  Jake finally got off at around dusk so we headed back to Canada.

Well everyone else at the cabin considered it a piece of Canada.  Everyone was quite nice and we talked and played cards, as it was still early, despite being dark outside.  Jake told his joke about how Canada got it's name...  They had something like a lottery, where they pulled letters out of a big tumbler...  And the announcer called out the letters...  "C, aye"  ...next letter...  "N, aye"  ...next letter...  "D, aye"  ...Hey, I thought it was funny.  I got up early next morning (ok, it wasn't early, but I got up before everyone else), fetched water from the well outside and made breakfast.  I had to go upstairs to wake John and Jacob.  We finally all got our act together and headed out to climb.  I really wanted to do Chounard's Gully but John wanted to do Multiplication Gully.  I knew MG was one of the classics, and since John knew exactly where it was, I agreed.

It wasn't far from Whiteface Ski Area, and they were having Olympic try-outs, so the traffic was a zoo.  When we first saw the route from the road my jaw dropped and I was afraid Jake was going to start crying.  It looked like death waiting to sweep us away...  It was a steep streak of ice in a cleft situated on a 300 foot cliff way up over the road to Whiteface Ski Area.  With almost two feet of snow on the ground, and a steep, rocky, and wooded hike to get up there, just the approach promised to blow our socks off.  As luck would have it, there were some climbers already on the route.  Surprise, surprise.  Maybe if we all had gotten out of our sleeping bags when we should have...  Well, at least one of the parties ahead of us had made the approach with snow shoes.  That made our walk up quite a bit easier than it would have been if we had to post hole our way up.  John had done the route some years ago and said the crux was on the first pitch, and that if I led that, he would lead the easier second pitch.  I agreed, so we waited for the rest of the team in front of us to finish up and then I started up.  We did a lot of waiting for the climbers in front of us, but we had to be careful because they knocked a lot of ice down as they made their way up. I didn't want to have a repeat of what happened a few years ago on Mt. Washington.  The first pitch was a breeze, if not somewhat devoid of good protection and a tad unstable with all the snow on it.  After I got my belay set up, I took a good look at the next pitch and psyched up to lead it because I was sure John wasn't going to want to...  It looked AWESOME!

Again, we had to wait for the team in front of us to finish.  The three of us stood on a small snow platform that I had stamped out on the one side of the gully.  This put us out of reach of the ice that the other climbers were knocking down.  It also gave us a better vantage point for observing the struggles above us.  I told John that I wouldn't be upset if he didn't want to lead that, but he stuck to his guns.  So then I joked with him that he knew all along what a gem that pitch was and that he sand bagged me into doing the first pitch so that he could lead this gem.  Aside from being cold (and scared), everyone climbed real well and we finished the route without incident.  So it really wasn't the death trap that it's first impression had promised.  We rappelled back down the route to retrieve the packs we left at the base of the gully, and slid like otters, back down through the woods.  It was dark by the time we got back to our car.

We went back to the cabin for another night of cards and marveling at people's accents.  As we were zippin' up our sleeping bags, John noted that it was a lot easier to fall asleep, despite the conversations that continued down stairs, because they were speaking French and it just sounded like background noise.  He was right.  Had they been speaking English, it would have been much more distracting.  Saturday, was so warm that any attempt at climbing ice would have been reason enough to have us committed, so we packed up all our gear and took Jake into Lake Placid to show him the Olympic ski jumps.  He had never been up there before and they are a sight to behold.  We had lunch with John at a nice little Mexican restaurant across from the Olympic Center in town, where we were served by the Burrito Nazi.  If you've ever seen the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld, you'll get the picture.  Anyway, I survived the holiday.

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