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A couple weeks ago a co-worker of mine, Rob, asked me a couple questions about work. While we’ve both been at UB for a while, up until recently we’d been in different groups within our department & hadn’t talked much. I’d heard from another co-worker of mine that Rob was into the outdoors and rock/ice climbing - eventually we ended up talking about Zoar Valley, how I’d like to explore more of it & how he was hoping to find some frozen waterfalls he’d seen pictures of. We started looking through maps & I sent him some photos of some falls & ice I’d seen while out a couple weeks ago in 18 Mile Creek at a place a friend of mine from high school, Brady, showed me.

The falls from 18 Mile Creek interested Rob, so we headed out there bright and early yesterday morning to scout/potentially do some climbing & then the same in Zoar Valley.

Rob descending down a waterfall in 18 Mile Creek.

Additional photos are viewable in my photo gallery & Rob’s facebook gallery.

I got off to a little bit of a rough start with difficulties finding the area we’d decided to meet at - it turns out there’s two road with the same name (South Creek Road) in the area around the creek, but they’re on different branches of the creek. We parked at an area near the creek different from where I’d entered previously - it was across the creek & required a short hike through an undeveloped park in Hamburg, but we had no issues finding the falls. The only negative of parking where we did was that we had to cross the creek & then climb the cliffs on the far side to get to the top of the falls. Staying dry while crossing was pretty challenging when we first arrived and much more so on the way back since the ice we walked across melted quite a bit & the creek rose from everything else melting.

The ice we’d both hoped would be there was nowhere to be found (it’s on a South facing sloop), but the falls opposite of it was in nice shape. After crossing the creek and climbing to the top of the falls, Rob tied up ropes and showed his friend Neil and I how to rappel down to the bottom. (The falls was probably about 75 feet tall.) This was quite a bit of fun & quite easy. Once at the bottom, we all took turns climbing the ice a couple times and belaying for each other.

After we finished up at the falls, we had a quick lunch at the parking area. Neil brought some venison summer sausage, which I’d never had & was excellent. I’m definitely going to look into what’s needed to make some.

We packed into my truck & head down to Zoar Valley. We check out Forty Road & Valentine Flats, but didn’t find any climbable ice. I’d never been to either of these areas - even without finding any climbable ice, it was well worth the trip - especially for the view from Peter Point.

It was a great day outside. The ice climbing was a blast, new parts of Zoar beautiful & the company a ton of fun!! A special thanks goes to Rob for outfitting us with gear & showing us both how to climb & the new parts of Zoar.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.