Five meters above ground and clinging on to a wall of ice by the tips of my toes, instinct was signaling loud and clear that I should stick to the ice to stay alive.
“Lean backward, (because) you can’t swing your ice tool if you have no space between you and the wall,” Yang You-suk, an instructor of Kolon Sport, called out from below.
With seasoned climber Yang belaying me from the ground, I should not have been worried about my safety. But I had only met him for the first time less than an hour before, so my trust in him was not as rock solid as it might have been in this icy endeavor.
Still I leaned backward, brought my arm up to where I wanted to go next and took what I would like to believe was a decisive swing with a pickax-like ice tool.
With each attempt to get a hold of the wall, pieces of ice broke off in small explosions and showered down on my face. I was thankful for the helmet I was wearing.
When ice climbing, one requires a pair of ice tools, a helmet, a pair of boots with crampons, gloves and warm clothing. I rented everything I needed from the climbing center.
Boots with crampons (Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald)
The indoor ice climbing center at Kolon Alpine School in Ui-dong, Seoul, is probably the coolest place in Korea in summer, with an all-year-round temperature of minus 15 degrees Celsius.
It is the only indoor ice climbing facility in Korea and also holds the Guinness record for the world’s tallest indoor ice wall. Inside the ice chamber, three of the four walls are 8 meters in height and one is a whopping 20 meters, stretching over seven floors of the building.
A usual day at work for me involves minimal physical activity -- I mainly sit at my desk from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. So when I volunteered to go ice climbing for this report, I was pumped, but secretly nervous.
My body was tense, as a sudden fall seemed possible at any moment, on any misstep.
The Korea Herald reporter Lim Jeong-yeo climbs the Kolon Alpine School’s indoor ice wall Thursday (Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald)
“You have to relax your shoulders. You’re ideally climbing with your legs, not your arms,” Yang said.
Before restarting my slow ascent, I took a deep breath, trying to reassure myself that it was fine that my only footholds were through the spikes attached to the toes of my boots.
For 1 1/2 hours inside the ice chamber, which was sealed shut by a heavy iron door in the third-level basement, I struggled to move upward in a coherent flow rather than a mix of helpless flailing.
For all my efforts, I couldn’t make it to the top of the 20-meter wall -- which was probably an overly ambitious goal for a first timer so out of shape -- but finished an 8-meter climb. Not bad for the first day, Yang said. I hope he wasn’t just being nice.
The Korea Herald reporter Lim Jeong-yeo climbs the Kolon Alpine School’s indoor ice wall Thursday (Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald)
I changed back to my summer clothes and stepped outside the alpine school, where the welcome June heat rushed over me. It was a bizarre sensation, stepping out from an icy climbing zone into the glaring summer sun.
The chilly sensation from the alpine center did not fade away quickly when I was making my way back to the office. The excitement lingered. Scaling the ice wall offered an odd contrast with the mass of people milling about with their eyes glued to their cellphones.
Up on the ice wall, every one of my senses had been awake. I couldn’t divert my attention from the challenge right in front of me and my phone was the last thing on my mind.
Even though the ice wall is an indoor simulation of an outdoor climb, climbers have to concentrate as much as possible while grabbing and kicking their way up. My editor had sent me to the indoor ice climbing center to check out a new sport, but I think I found a fresh way to meditate.
