Cartman's Mom

I have a photocopy of the chest pinned to my wall at work.  I put it there as a reminder to leave at a more reasonable hour and to allow for time in the evenings and weekends to continue this project.  Lately I've been relating that image to another one, a spot that had an interesting probability that I mentioned in my first post, one which I had been researching with very little progress.

Today I received in the mail a book called Ouray Ice Park Guide, a guide to ice routes in a man-made ice climbing park in Ouray, CO (pronounced you-ray).  The book is great.  It makes me want to learn how to do this.  I've seen a couple of mentions of this feature in other blogs but hadn't given it much of a glance until I looked up the meaning of the river on which this park sits, Uncompaghre River.  Depending on one's preferred reference, Uncompaghre is presumably a Ute word for unca (hot), pah (water), and gre (spring).  Further reading about the Ice Park suggests the creators have made a deal with the local government to allow them to tap into the reservoir on a dam of Uncompaghre.  This deal allows them to spray the water into the canyon at night allowing it to freeze to the canyon walls.  This attracts ice climbers.  Warm water seems to be halting everywhere here in taking this canyon down.  And Brown Mountain is a prominent peak near Ouray, with a very visible angle from the park up the Million Dollar Highway.  You can see this from Google Maps street view.  Water high and worth the cold is a bit obvious.

I couldn't find a clear list of route names in my research.  I wanted to see if anything meek, wise, or wood related might appear.  The book lists all of the routes.  Almost 200 of them.  Many of them are themed from the South Park cartoon, meaning if you have certain beliefs about foul language, you'll find this place a bit discomforting.  My kids and I just laugh like juveniles who aren't supposed to be watching "that trash".  Of the 200 names, maybe 1 or 2 qualify for potential matches in the poem (Jesus is synonymous with meek and wise, and I suppose a Sh*thouse is made of wood), but I'm pretty well convinced now from this list of route names this place is also just coincidental.  It's just hard to imagine Mr. Fenn abseiling down an ice wall to hide a 10x10 inch box inside a finger crack, and then climbing back up with ice axes and crampons... twice.

And so I post it here.  It doesn't mean I won't stop there to have a look on my path to where I think it is now, one of 5 spots just reduced from 6.   The fifth spot will be my last place I will look.  I know a lot about Ouray now.  I've keenly searched the names of the trusts and landowners nearby from the free Ouray County Google Earth plot records.  I wondered if Mr. Fenn might have purchased a plot.  Not that I could tell.  Plus the town is known as "Switzerland of America".  How could I skip it?  I lived in Switzerland for a while and blogged about that experience, too.