OURAY — When Joe Miller awoke in a hospital after a military rappelling accident nine years ago, he was partially paralyzed. His doctor told him he would never walk again.
“I’d like to see him now,” the 36-year-old from Durango said Saturday after climbing a pair of 80-foot frozen waterfalls in Ouray’s famed ice park.
Miller and a dozen of his self-designated “gimp” brothers and sisters are scaling the box canyon’s ice cascades this weekend as part of the second annual Gimps on Ice festival, hosted by Boulder’s Paradox Sports. All the athletes are missing body parts, an absence trumpeted by the “Got Stump?” stickers on their helmets. But with some tweaks in climbing gear — like crampon feet, instead of crampons on feet, or arm prosthetics that end in an ice ax — every athlete became just as abled, if not more, than any fully limbed climber in the frigid walled park.
“It’s like a new community to me,” said Molly Bloom, a Denver 20-year- old who lost her leg nearly three years ago when a limousine she was stepping into on her prom night zoomed off with her only partially inside. “It really opens my eyes to what can be accomplished.”
Army Capt. D.J. Skelton called it all “Mission Gimpossible.”
“Really, this is post-traumatic growth. This is about taking a tragic event in our lives and using it as catalyst to push forward and make our lives richer,” said Skelton, who was 27 in November 2004 when he took a rocket-propelled grenade in the chest during “an interesting day downrange” in Fallujah, Iraq.
He lost his left eye and most of the movement in his left arm. As he watched more of his fellow soldiers limp back home, he mined his own life spent climbing and found he had to share his source of strength.
He remains an officer in the Army, one of the few American soldiers to move deeper into military leadership after enduring a life- altering injury.
Two years ago, Skelton joined Boulder climber and globe-trotting altruist Timmy O’Neill and founded Paradox Sports, which brings human-powered sports — kayaking, rafting, climbing and skiing — to people with disabilities.
“Life is imperfect. Life is impermanent. And life is also about adaptability,” said O’Neill, a gregarious entertainer and professional climber who has guided his paraplegic brother up California’s iconic El Capitan three times. “Whatever happens, we come back fuller into life.”
“The fear is worth it”
Disabled is the wrong way to describe the athletes climbing this weekend. At the bottom of the glacial gorge, athletes hobbled and hopped across a ladder spanning a snow-choked stream. They kicked crampons into sheer ice walls, hammering tools farther up the face with each step. The ravine reverberated with optimism and exhortations.
These days, Molly Bloom is studying psychology, linguistics and Nordic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Even though she confesses she tends to not stay enamored with new projects, she’s pretty sure climbing is on her top list for good. On Saturday, for her second-ever spin at ice climbing, she donned a pair of studded gloves customized by local ice-climbing guide Mark Miller and spent almost an hour methodically ascending a precipitous pitch of white ice.
When she finished, she was cooked. Tears tumbled down her face.
“It’s just so emotional for me,” she said. “All I want to do is cry.”
Kate Sawford, a 27-year-old veterinarian from Calgary, Alberta, is scared of heights. That didn’t stop her from strapping a crampon onto her bum leg and climbing to the lip of the cold chasm.
“The fear is worth it,” she said. “The adrenaline is amazing.”
Finding ways to adapt
A team of more than a dozen volunteers — big-name mountaineers and professional climbers, all corralled by Paradox executive director Malcolm Daly, who lost his lower leg in an Alaska climbing accident a decade ago — made the climbing possible. They rigged complex systems to lower athletes into the abyss and set up seven ropes on different routes. Climbers sampled a variety of routes, from near overhanging ice to less steep but still grueling walls of frozen water.
Vijay Viswanathan, seated near the orange-tinted stream and watching the action, noted that even fully limbed climbers employed a host of special equipment to scale the ice.
“Everyone has to adapt because you are working against gravity,” said the 23-year-old from Breckenridge who was paralyzed from the chest down in a 2003 rappelling accident and rapped into the ice park on Saturday. “I just adapt without my legs.”
It was at Craig Hospital following his accident that Viswanathan learned he did not have to abandon the sports he loved just because he lost use of his legs. This weekend, Viswanathan did hundreds of pull-ups on a fixed line in preparation for a multi-pitch ascent of a desert spire near Moab later this month.
“I’m so psyched I can do all these sports with just a little adaptation, and everyone has to do that,” he said. “Climbing a rope isn’t necessarily the most fun, but it gets me to places I really want to explore.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
