The last few years I've been fortunate enough to shoot ice climbing with a great group, Veterans Expeditions (https://www.vetexpeditions.com), in both Ouray and Lake City Colorado. This year was Lake City, where there are fewer people and bigger walls of ice. VetEx a wonderful group and I highly encourage checking them out to see how you can help.
Ice climbing is a little intimidating at first (at least to me) as you are using metal spikes strapped to your feet and a metal ice pick (actually called an ice tool) to go up sometimes vertical walls of ice. So it can take some getting used to....This trip I didn't do any actual climbing as I was shooting most of the time but did rappel down on a rope one day to shoot between 40-60 feet off the ground.
After shooting the ice climbing trips several times it becomes challenging to shoot new angles and interesting images. Thats's where getting on a rope or getting on the ground can help, different angles of climbers at different focal lengths.
I'll have a few more blog posts about this one so stay tuned!!