Very early on dating Freddy, he made it clear that he DIDN’T LIKE ice climbing. Contrarian I am, to torment my boyfriend-now-life-partner, I told everyone that I, Lisa Lacampagne, am an ice climber. The only problem was, I had never ice climbed... 

I begged Freddy to take me; my unrelenting pleading went on for a whole season. He made me jump through hoops to prove my desire: I had to be able to do 5 pullups in a row (which I can now do!), I had to contribute gear (he insisted on the ultralight BD aluminum screws), and finally my own pair of tools. By the beginning of the 2020-2021 season I had fulfilled all the prerequisites.

The time came when the weather was cold and the skiing was poor in Truckee. I’m specifically talking about November 28th, 2020. Freddy drove as far up Coldstream Canyon as his Chevy Colorado would take him and we started skinning to the crag. “Thin and barely in” is Freddy’s strava title for the day. For me, I was scraping my crampons and ice axe against bare rock because Freddy had kicked off what little ice had held. By the end of that day, I didn’t know if I liked ice climbing, but I had already told everyone I knew that I was an ice climber, so I needed to stick with it!

That season provided many learning opportunities for me, including my first ice lead on the Great White Icicle in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I relished the raw challenge of subjecting the body and mind to unpleasant conditions and the sheer beauty of these ephemeral wonders: frozen waterfalls. I was hooked!

Fast forward to fall of 2022. I had made a great connection with a new friend named Audrey. Audrey lives in Chamonix and is genuinely rad. Physically fit, super friendly, absolutely keen for adventure, and to top it off, she has a darling French accent as she is French and Swiss. So we planned to go to Cogne to do some rad ice climbing!   

We tunneled under the Mont Blanc massif into Val d’Aosta on December 28th with a high level of stoke ready to take down the place with our tagline: “Chicks with Picks.” The mood changed at the bottom of Loye, a frozen Cascata above the village of Lillaz; the psych and confidence had left my psyche and all I could think was “fuck this looks like steep ice.” Wanting to impress my new climbing partner, I started up the climb, but I was over gripping and my calves were trembling with trepidation. I put in screws every 2 meters, a faux pas to more experienced folks. Wow, was this slow. Halfway up the pitch, I’d had enough of being really scared, so I pulled off to the right hand side, finding a platform to stand on and good enough ice to make an anchor with.

I belayed Audrey up, only for her to drop one axe and need to be let down again. There was an old Italian couple doing laps around us, and the man kept looking over with a coy smile though never seeming annoyed. We finally got Audrey up to the belay ledge. We had to make it another ten meters to the anchor, and I had lost all motivation to scare the shit out of myself. 
Audrey stepped up to the plate, taking the strategy of resting at every screw she placed to ease the fear she had. Her mental strength was unrelenting! With poise and deep breathing, she hoisted herself over the ice bulge (a scary and insecure position in ice climbing) and tied into the anchor. The whole ordeal had taken almost two hours, and let me remind you: we had made it only 30 meters off the ground.

We rappelled to the ground, my ego beaten as we trudged back down the hill. We stayed at Hotel Ondezana and laid in bed after a warm shower realizing our bodies were beaten as well. We had to turn this ship around! To do so, we watched the whole youtube collection of Will Gadd showing people how to ice climb. That man made kicking and the perfect swing look a one and done undertaking.

The next day really couldn’t be worse than day one, so we struggled on. What I admire about Audrey is her audacity to be so optimistic with her plans. At breakfast, we made plans for dinner at 7:30 with her French Swiss colleagues, and she casually mentioned we would climb two ice routes that day. I stayed silent, not wanting to burst her bubble, and also not able to communicate my skepticism in French.
 

We were off to the classic of Cogne Icefalls: Patri. The first pitch looked manageable, so I volunteered to lead again. After a day of getting smacked down mentally, this pitch went much better. I still, however, was placing screws every two meters. Before getting to the next belay, I ran out. I tried to stay positive about how this is an excellent opportunity to build my own ice anchor! I plunged my longest screw into the thickest ice I could, and felt safe. Audrey made it up to me, passed, and continued to the real anchor. Temperatures hovered just above freezing and the icefall was turning into a semi-Slush-fall. By the time I resumed climbing, my pants were completely soaked. I cursed myself for the stupid Eiger North Face Mammut pants that, when I bought them, thought they would be the perfect pants for ice climbing. Water squelched in my boots as I climbed up to Audrey.

The challenges continued as both of us attempted and retreated on the second pitch, which was short but started with 5 meters of vertical ice. Being a party of two women comes in handy during times like these. We asked a male party to bring our ropes up to the anchor, so we could top rope it. This turned out to be a brutal mistake; Audrey tied into the rope as I yanked on the other side to get it tight. It would not budge. We both pulled, like a game of tug-o-war against an unknown assailant. It turns out the assailant was a frozen rope plunged in snow. Cold, wet, and without a functional rope, we bushwhacked up a creek bed to the side of the pitch, retrieving our frozen rope and giving up on Pitch 2. 

I led pitch three, an easy WI2 without a hitch - finally! Ice climbing is much more fun when you’re not gripped! At the top of the pitch, I looked down at my watch: 4 PM. It had taken over 6 hours to do 3 pitches. At this pace, we were not going to be able to do the 2 more hard pitches to the top of the climb. Still, we viewed this as a success, we had pushed much farther than the day before, and when things had gotten tricky, we figured out a way through them as a team. We scampered down, barely making it to dinner!

Now a tangent, in Val di Cogne, inhabitants first speak Italian, then French, and English being a far behind third. This is indeed a challenge for me, whose French proficiency has severely declined due to my German Classes. There is room for only one foreign language at a time. Though Audrey speaks great English, her colleagues preferred French. Alas, I dutifully stumbled through an entire meal, answered softball questions and tried to make my eyes not glaze over in confusion. We all had a laugh that we didn’t accomplish one entire ice climb compared to the two Audrey had forecasted earlier that day. In many interactions, I feel scared and embarrassed by my lack of multilingualism, but I went to bed feeling so accomplished that I didn’t give up on trying to be an active participant at the dinner table!

On day three, we decided to keep it simple by going to the man made ice wall in the Gorge near Cogne. Thinking that we would be able to set up a top rope, we were disappointed to realize that was not the case. As Audrey tried to psyche herself up to climb the steep ice, a kind Italian couple, sensing our noviceness, offered to let us use their ropes instead. A massive relief! We got a lot of mileage and focused on technique, getting more pitches in than the previous two days combined. We got back to the car, tired but stoked, and drove back to Chamonix triumphant!

The triumph comes from this being both me and Audrey’s first ice trip without someone more experienced. This of course led to working hard on planning the trip, making rookie maneuvers on climbs, moving unfathomably slowly, and having to face your fear when realizing that there was no partner that could take over lead when you didn’t want to. In the moment, it felt painful, but the personal achievement I feel is so much bigger than any other day on ice I’ve had. Though I will not be leading WI5 soon, I feel like my ice climbing identity is not reliant on having someone else drag me up something. 

I am really excited to keep pushing myself - until next season!