2024 in the Rearview: Looking Back on a Year-Plus of Ice Ice Beta

Issue #20

Friends, climbers, country(wo)men, lend me your ears.

Ice Ice Beta is a year and a half old

In that time, we’ve produced 36 episodes plus an additional 9 mini-episodes. By the end of Season 2, we’ll have released another 7.

Also! We are no longer just a podcast — we launched The Cooler, our online magazine, in November. A big thanks to Daniel Kay who is leading this effort as the Online Editor.

I wrote a recap of how things have gone ('tis the season), but will share a tldr version below:

They say "there is no one so pious as the new convert."

I’m no zealot, but ice climbing hooked me pretty good from the start and I wanted to learn, do, read, and watch all there was about it.

The issue was, there wasn’t much out there... so I created Ice Ice Beta.

From the jump, I wanted to interview climbers as a way to record individual stories. What consistently surprises me is just how many people are doing interesting things in this space — there just isn’t coverage of it.

The original intent has evolved into exploring broader and integral themes of history, gear innovation, developments in style, ethics and technique, along with other concepts that help tell the story of ice climbing.

Going forward, we want to be the home base for what’s going on, featuring personal essays and adventure tales, in-depth gear reviews, discussions about ethics and techniques, some news, longform narrative and journalism.

Here's the catch:

Producing a podcast is time-intensive. Before our audio editor, Andrew Salomone, came on board, soup-to-nuts, episodes took me over 15 hours each. Now, it’s still around 10.

It’s also not a cheap-cheap operation. From paying for editing to hosting the podcast and website to the various tools we use, it ends up costing around $10,000 to run for the year.

Plainly, I’m uber grateful for Aniiu and Furnace Industries for supporting the podcast. It’s because of them that this can exist. And of course, we also have a great group of paying members too. Thank you all!

We hope to keep the online magazine and podcast public, but as a listener-supported podcast and publication, we absolutely rely on the community to help keep this going. We started as an independent, climber-owned operation and want to keep it that way.

So this is my appeal: If you like what we’re doing and you want to see this continue, become a paying member.

Your contribution will help keep Ice Ice Beta going as the only ice climbing, mixed, and drytooling-focused publication and podcast.

New on The Cooler: You Shouldn’t Be Falling on Your Tethers (Or Should You?)

By Greg Barrett

Although it’s a leashless world, ice tool tethers still have a place. Learn how some of the best are adapting these basic tools to some off-label uses.

If you feel you have something noteworthy to share, we probably have a place for it on The Cooler. Read the contributor guidelines and get in touch at editor@iceicebeta.com