Growing up in Vermont, Will Mayo was fascinated by ice. Watching icicles form on the eaves of a roof is one of his earliest memories. He played hockey and was passionate about skiing as a youth, but then he discovered ice climbing as a freshman at the University of Vermont. “I quit the hockey team, started skiing only with alpine touring gear to get to ice climbs, and delved headlong into ice climbing,” Mayo said.
Now a resident of Erie and one of America’s premier ice climbers, Mayo was awarded Climbing Magazine’s Golden Piton Award last month for pioneering routes on the Black Wall of Mount Evans in October.
Mayo sees ice as more than a riddle to solve while he’s attempting a new route. He sees it as a metaphor for life.
“The changeability of ice, and the capriciousness of ice, makes it unique, makes it special,” said Mayo, 42. “A friend of mine used to say that they’re all first ascents, meaning that every time one does a climb, even if one has done the climb multiple times before, it’s different every time. The ice changes. It freezes. It thaws.
“The impermanence of it somehow renders the experience more meaningful as an emblem of life in general — the impermanence of life and a celebration of that beauty of life. There’s something magical about it, and it just helps me personally to value every moment accordingly — carpe diem. It is fleeting.”
Mayo spent two decades climbing hundreds of classic routes back east — in New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Quebec — with three dozen first ascents. Looking for new challenges, he moved to Colorado in 2009.
“There is so much that’s still been unexplored out here,” he said.
Mount Evans, for example. At 13,000 feet on the Black Wall is a rock feature Mayo named the Silhouette Buttress. There with friend Ben Collett, Mayo pioneered a new route in 2013 and two more new routes last year.
“Mount Evans is an anomaly,” Mayo said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It really is like a dream come true. It really is precisely why I moved to Colorado, even though I didn’t know it at the time.”
The water source for the ice on the Silhouette Buttress is a high alpine spring. Because the elevation is so high, ice forms well before winter.
“Way up on the top of the Mount Evans massif, there is an alpine bog, and it’s frozen in the fall and through the winter,” Mayo said. “That’s what we hike up over in this alpine tundra, and these ice climbs appear like apparitions in this very dry alpine Colorado environment. It’s spectacular.”
Mayo climbed the routes on Silhouette Buttress without doing any reconnaissance. He simply rappelled down the wall from the top and then started climbing, not knowing where it would lead.
“To me, those are the most rewarding types of climbs, where there is uncertainty,” Mayo said. “It’s not like sport climbing, where the moves are rehearsed, the protection is pre-placed and utterly assured by the bolts. There still is an element of danger and risk, which to me is an integral facet of climbing. Those climbs have been really meaningful for me.”
Mayo once described the essence of climbing as “the inner trance of the moment.” But for him, one of the most interesting things about climbing is that the reasons for doing it defy easy explanation.
“It’s not bound by earthly contrivance,” Mayo said. “There’s no tangible, valid, quantifiable reason according to the status quo of our postmodern society. There’s nothing to be gained in a material sense, in a practical sense. Yet I believe, and I know, more in my heart and my spirit, that there is something to be gained.
“While it’s entirely abstract and impossible to quantify, I feel like by stepping outside of the daily routines, by pitting oneself naked against nature as it were, that we’re able to find a certain catharsis, an ability to turn inward and shed the stresses and the static interference of the daily grind. We emerge after these experiences purified and somehow, perhaps inexplicably, more able to be a productive member of society because of these experiences.”
John Meyer: jmeyer@denverpost.com or
Will Mayo
Resides: Erie
Born: Berlin, Vt.
Age: 42
Education: BA in English Literature from the University of Vermont (1994)
Climbing: Began rock climbing in 1988 at age 16; began ice climbing in 1990
First ascents: More than 50 (rock, ice, mixed and alpine)
Awards: 2015 Mugs Stump Award grant recipient for an attempt at the unclimbed North Face of the Ogre II in Pakistan; 2014 Golden Piton Award for ascents on the Silhouette Buttress of Mount Evans
