“Try walking like a cowboy.” Leah Pierce edges away from us, her crampons digging into the slightly crunchy snow, her exaggerated bowlegged swagger punctuating each step. After her snow-walking crampon tip, Pierce, with a tool in each hand, and carabiners dangling from her harness, heads towards the base of Orient Bay’s Cascade Falls, one of many ice climbing spots near Nipigon, Ontario. After a long cold winter, it almost feels like a balmy near-zero degrees in the sun (it’s more like -10 C), a little chillier in the shade, but not too bad. Dreading the possibility of minus thirty on my first ice climbing venture, I’m personally thrilled. “We have never climbed in such warm weather before,” helper Julie Sachs gushes. “This is lovely.”

Read the rest of this story in the Winter 2008/09 issue of Superior Outdoors.