Weekend Whipper: Lucky To Be Alive When Ice Climb Collapses

Readers, please send your Weekend Whipper videos, information, and any lessons learned to Anthony Walsh, awalsh@outsideinc.com.

If you’re an ice climber, this week’s whipper will horrify you. It might even horrify you if you’re not an ice climber.

This winter Mike Bularz was on a week-long climbing trip in Munising, Michigan, with a couple of friends. Conditions leading up to the trip were on the warmer side—highs of 35°F, lows of ~25°F—but still reasonable, Bularz thought, to find some reliable ice.

The night before this accident occurred, Bularz says temperatures dropped to 13°F—the lowest they’d been in a long while. Thirteen degrees isn’t “too cold” for ice climbing, but, paired with the warmth the days before, it creates challenging conditions: dense, brittle ice that can delaminate from the rock it’s adhered to.

Bularz says he noticed the long, horizontal crack tracing the bottom of a WI2 at Miners Castle, but wasn’t overly concerned. An ice climber of nine years, Bularz regularly looks for some degree of “settlement crack” when he climbs ice after a cold snap. On columns of ice, cracks can be a sign of tension releasing (and re-stabilizing) the feature.

Ice climbers, please note: The crack that Bularz deemed “good to go” is far from reassuring to us. Settlement cracks generally appear on vertical columns—not rambly ice. Regardless, cracks should be approached with extreme caution. Ideally, you should wait several days after a cold snap to give the climb a chance to re-attach itself. On this particular WI2, the crack is far too wide and continuous; the top of the climb is no longer connected to the bottom. (And we haven’t even talked about the biggest red flag.)

• Also read: How to know when an ice pillar is stable

From our armchair perspective, the biggest red flag here is the mass of rushing water to the climber’s right. Bularz says Miners Castle is an interesting ice climbing area because the “falls rarely fully freeze, as it’s more a narrow river than a steady or intermittent creek, and you climb the smears … on the canyon walls sometimes.” Fair enough, but we’d bet that one peek into the gaping horizontal crack he climbed past would have given a clear, sobering view of a ton of rushing water—a sign that this climb was both disconnected from the ground below and the cliff itself.

Miracuously, Bularz was not crushed by any of the ice blocks that cascaded around him. “I landed on my left thigh and … it stayed numb for about a day, before bruising,” he reports. “My other leg tweaked a bit at the knee—possibly a small ACL issue—and I pulled an oblique muscle. That’s it. A very, very lucky outcome.”

Agreed. Happy Friday, and be safe out there this weekend.

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