No Ice at Ice Fest? Try Drytooling, a Little Bit of Doom, and Dance Parties.

Coral reefs, glaciers, Bengal tigers, Arabica coffee, ice climbing festivals. What unites the items on this list? They all face an existential crisis, thanks to climate change.

The danger to ice climbing festivals is obvious. Warmer temperatures mean waterfalls don’t always freeze. For ice parks, unseasonably tepid days make it all but impossible to farm ice, leading to shorter, erratic seasons.

So where does this leave ice festivals like at Ouray, which, through farmed ice, brings people together every year to climb and celebrate all things frozen?

But first, a brief history of the American ice fest

Ice Fests might seem a somewhat newfangled phenomenon as they’ve proliferated across the country, but the first one traces its roots all the way back to the `80s. In partnership with a local alpine club, pioneering climber and Harvard-educated doctor Andrew Embick threw the nation’s first known ice fest in Valdez, Alaska, in 1983. The oldest ice fest in the Lower 48 kicked off seven years later in Munising, Michigan. Not long after, in 1996, Jeff Lowe threw an ice fest in Ouray, Colorado. A year later, the Ouray Ice Park officially incorporated as a nonprofit.

Currently, there are roughly a dozen other ice fests across the country, with many more in Canada and Europe. Bozeman Ice Fest kicks the season off mid-December. A couple weeks later, Wyoming Ice Festival camps out in Cody. Minnesota now boasts two ice fests, one at the relatively nascent Winona Ice Park and another in Duluth. Ouray has added the All In Ice Fest, which focuses on accessibility and diversity. And a couple hours away, the Lake City Ice Fest hosts a friendly comp and festivities every February.

My own history with festivals of ice dates back to 2010, when I showed up at my first Ouray Ice Fest as a novice. A couple years later, I won a blue helmet in the women’s toprope speed comp at Lake City Ice Fest. In 2013, I returned to Ouray for round two—and I didn’t even climb. The park was packed, temps hovered well below zero, and I was nursing a sprained ankle. But I did meet a lot of awesome climbers, including the late Hayden Kennedy, who gave a talk about his controversial bolt-chopping on the Cerro Torre’s Compressor Route a year prior.

Back then, winter felt more reliable and I was filled with cautious optimism about climate action. At a small nonprofit, I was working on plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across Gunnison County, just a couple hours northeast of Ouray. Fast forward over a decade and a warmer planet seems all but inevitable—and winter, increasingly a precious commodity, is slipping through our fingers.

As the outlook for many cold-weather sports grows more tenuous by the season, the question for ice festivals becomes: Would I (or anyone) go to an ice festival if there is no ice?

The inaugural Ice(less) Festival

When my friend Vicki and I decided to go to Ouray Ice Fest this year, we knew the park was off to a rough start. In fact, it had yet to open at all, with warm temperatures hijacking ice farming. But we thought that, surely, it would be open by late January.

Then, a couple weeks before the event, we saw an announcement: Ouray was pivoting to a new format, the Ice(less) Festival. All clinics shifted to non-ice based topics, like drytooling, training, and rope rescue. The Box Canyon via ferrata would even be open. And no ice, it seemed, would be had.

After briefly considering bailing, we decided to go anyway to support the park and try a clinic in a discipline I’ve long tried to avoid: drytooling. Thankfully, temps started dropping shortly after the Ice(less) Fest was announced, and the park managed to open the day before the event. Nevertheless, with some of the ice-less clinics already underway, and just over half of the park’s 250 routes in, the rebrand stuck.

For Vicki and me, the fest turned out to be about as ice-filled as it gets. With no ice clinics and fewer visitors, we easily found open anchors Saturday and Sunday. And after months of unseasonably balmy weather, the forecast itself had finally pivoted, delivering over a foot of snow on Saturday and single digit temps Sunday.

“An extremely difficult season”

While the first-ever Ice(less) Festival went relatively smoothly from my view as a visitor, from a numbers perspective, it was a relative fiasco.

“I’m glad that it’s behind us,” says Peter O’Neil, executive director of Ouray Ice Park. He explained that the warm weather did force the park to be more adaptable, particularly with clinic registration—a silver lining that will improve future event planning. But as a fundraiser for the park, it’s hard to put an optimistic spin on the outcome.

O’Neil estimates that, based on hotel occupancy rates in town, festival attendance was down about 50 percent. Fewer vendors set up booths. One park volunteer estimated that there were two-thirds fewer tents in the vendor village. O’Neil says that most of the vendors who did come only sent a few reps, rather than a full team including athletes. He adds that a couple international vendors declined to come this year because of the “Trump effect,” meaning they didn’t want to deal with the hostility toward non-citizens in the U.S. right now.

Clinic revenue was roughly 60 percent below what the park had budgeted for. Park membership overall is down significantly, too, since the park was closed until just a couple weeks ago. “It’s been an extremely difficult season,” O’Neil reflects.

The nonprofit ice park isn’t the only one hurting. The park’s employees also suffer, since they lost weeks of work with a late start to the season. O’Neil anticipates the park will likely need to close early this year, too, given conditions, further impacting his ice farmers and rangers. Since the ice park plays a pivotal role in Ouray’s winter economy, the decline in visitors and hit to lodging ends up impacting the entire town.

Cognitive dissonance in Cody

A few weeks before Ouray’s Ice Fest, in early January, Griffin Lawrence showed up in Cody for the annual Wyoming Ice Festival. Based in Lander, he wasn’t able to find any info on conditions online, so he decided to just make the trip out.

In an effort to dodge anticipated overhead hazards from warm conditions, he and his buddies woke up at 4 a.m. and hiked in to their objective by headlamp. The first red flag? The approach was “pretty much entirely on mud,” as Lawrence recalls. The payoff for their dawn patrol dirt hike was a “terrible” mix of very thin ice and steep dirt. Defeated, they hiked out looking for anything climbable. The one route they found, Bozo’s Revenge (WI3+; 3 pitches), loomed above exposed grass and was crowded with other climbers. They ended up spending the day stuck behind a party with a tangled rope.

After the double shutdown, they realized just how bad things truly were when they stopped by the festival’s Black Diamond tent and overheard Will Gadd talking about going rock climbing the next day.

Lawrence, who works as director of the Responder Alliance, a nonprofit that helps outdoor professionals and first responders manage burnout, was bummed to have taken off work and driven a few hours north to Cody. But what really got him down was the cognitive dissonance he witnessed at the Wyoming Ice Fest. He recalls that climate change felt like the elephant in the room—a phenomenon that was unequivocally sabotaging the ice festival, but something no one wanted to talk about.

“People were too depressed to mention it,” Lawrence speculates. “I found that kind of upsetting. Here we are looking in the face of a widely predicted and well understood phenomenon that we knew was coming … I think people are going to wait until there is no more ice climbing and skiing before they realize this was never political.”

Party like it’s 1996

An ice fest with terrible conditions and a collective sense of denial is likely not the sort of event anyone would want to attend. An ice-less fest with a drytooling streak and a “we’re in this together!” vibe is a novelty—but one that might get old quickly.

So do ice fests belong on the growing list of Things Endangered by Climate Change? Probably. But with these annual events serving as mission-critical fundraisers for several ice parks, is it possible to keep the institution alive in spite of waning water ice?

Ouray put forth a good example of what an ice fest (minus the ice) can look like, and in short order. In the meantime, O’Neil of the Ice Park says they will work on their nimbleness—and on developing more drytooling routes. Though he doesn’t see that as a major solution to the problem. “If ice climbing is a niche sport, drytooling is a niche of a niche sport,” he laughs. More likely, if it’s too warm to ice climb, people will head to the desert rather than make Ouray their new go-to drytooling destination.

There is one interesting stat that came out healthy from this year’s Ouray fest. Attendance at evening events, from films and panels to the Saturday night dance party, emerged relatively unscathed by the tough conditions. O’Neil estimates that the Wright Opera House, which served as the venue for these events, was filled to 90 to 95 percent capacity.

That checks out with my experience. While the park felt strangely empty and the vendor village much smaller than years prior, at a screening of Girl Climber, we could barely find a place to sit. I also took no small joy in observing how the dance party scene had evolved from 2013 to 2026: Think less flannels and duct-taped puffies, more crop tops and on-trend male cardigans.

In my ice fests of yore, some of the greatest highlights have been the post-climb hangs. Peanut shell-covered floors of a pub in Lake City. Too many IPAs and gear debates at the Ouray Brewery. The two-bedroom Main Street apartment where a couple dozen other fest-goers and I crashed. The Celtic punk dance-down at Ouray’s now-closed O’Briens Pub.

Partying serves as a core value of many ice fests beyond Colorado. Michigan’s annual Chris Kalous Dance Party (of The Enormocast pod) has gained mythic status across the Midwestern ice community and beyond. A DJ dance party serves as the culmination of many an ice fest, from Valdez, Alaska, to Winona, Minnesota.

Why is partying so integral to the modern ice fest? I have a few half-baked theories. By contrast, warm-weather climbing fests don’t need to work as hard to encourage social gathering—people naturally congregate around campfires or in town. Maybe ice climbers dance because they just need to warm up after a long day of enduring (ideally) cold temperatures. Possibly, we’re all just rage dancing, mad about the climate inaction endangering the sport. Or perhaps it’s because ice climbing is decidedly niche, often attracting misfits and weirdos who love bonding over sharp objects and, say, EDM.

In the interest of not ending this reflection on a dreary note, I would like to propose that even if the ice doesn’t come in, it’s worth getting together once a year to find new partners, support ice parks or local climbing organizations, drytool (if you’re into that) and, yes, party. Everyone knows that parties at the end of the world are the best kind.

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