High on Ice
A UNI instructor invents a new extreme sport in Cedar Falls and invites everyone to give it a try.
Story and Photos by Dan Weeks

There it stands: a shimmering, crystal tower. A frozen waterfall. A spire of ice.

That's if you look at it from the north side. From the south, it's just a grain silo.

Eighty-five feet tall, built of concrete blocks with reinforcing steel hoops and a domed roof, it resembles any of tens of thousands of Midwestern feed towers-except for the feathery blue-white ice on the shady side. The frozen water is four feet thick at the base, tapering off to just a trace at the tower's top. Its surface is roiled like whitewater.

Today, the ice is this silo's reason for being. Like most such structures, this grain tower has outlived its original purpose. There are no animals left to feed here in this barnyard of a rural Cedar Falls farm as the cattle and pig operations were shut down years ago. The grain raised here is now stored in low, tin-can-like corrugated metal bins. Other than for decorating the horizon, the silo is now useless. Or is it?

One fall evening 10 years or so ago, Don Briggs, an instructor in physical education at the University of Northern Iowa, was plowing a cornfield for his friend Jim Budlong. Running back and forth in the tractor, he kept looking at the silo, lit bright orange by the setting sun. "You know, I bet I could climb that thing," he thought during one pass.

Briggs is an experienced technical climber who has scaled mountain peaks on several continents. In the past, he occasionally lamented that the highest you could get off the ground in Iowa was the top of a silo. He was about to turn that lament into a brainstorm.

"It's going to get cold here pretty soon," he thought on his next pass with the tractor.

"Hey!" he wondered. "What if we iced it down?"

Get the rest of the story
"High on Ice"
in the 2010 January February Issue: