As I’ve almost forgotten the last year’s winter climbs with freezing belays, spindrifts, screaming barfies, wet ropes and cold metallic carabiners dangling around the waist, I felt the need to experience all these feelings again on my first weekend in the mountains in 2015.

Although climate change may have delayed the start of the ice climbing season by a few weeks mostly everywhere (compared to last year), this last week the temperatures dropped below 20 degrees Celsius in Cluj. The thought came to my mind: let’s go check the waterfall from Rachitele… it might have frozen!

And yes, on Saturday I found myself swinging my tools into the newly formed ice. Along with Alex and the girls we enjoyed the first ice climb of the year and then we did some vertical laps just to make sure our gloves get soaked and hands frozen.

We also brought our skies to check the snow in a short but nice tour around “Pietrele Albe” and then headed back to the valley for more climbing. We also included dry tooling climbs in our nice weekend’s multi activity. We finished the day with our hands frozen again, forearms pretty pumped, smiling faces and glad to be back to winter climbing.

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