It peers out from the Uncompahgre Gorge like a swan with a body of rock and ice, daring climbers to reach its head.

Rooted at the foot of the gorge, a slab of rock is sandwiched between two distinct sections of ice. Its crown jewel is a 32-foottall, man-made spire fitted to the edge of the cliff and decorated with knobs and holds for climbers to swing ice axes into, pulling themselves to the top.

Below the tower on Tuesday morning, a man dangled from a rope on a harness bearing power tools and an ice climbing axe.

He orbited the section of ice below the tower, practicing falls to ensure the ice could bear his weight and hacking away at unstable ice.

All week, the Ouray Ice Park’s new livestream cameras pointed at the structure were turned off while Marcus Garcia was at work formulating the forbidding competition tower.

Garcia is responsible for creating two routes for the Ouray Ice Festival, one for qualifiers and one for the official competition.

Competitors won’t know what the official competition route will look like until right before they climb on Saturday morning.

Only once Garcia climbs the tower Friday – after dark to remove holds he placed there as a ruse – will his composition take its final form.

Climbers will get to see a video of a climber ascending the qualifiers route before they take their first whack at it.

Garcia has spent hours studying competitors, building and rebuilding sections and coordinating with the Ouray Ice Park’s ice farmers to execute his idea.

If it turns out how he imagines, there’ll be only one person who makes it to the top.

“It’s my artwork in the end,” Garcia said.

Marcus Garcia, courtesy photo

The Durango-based climber, route setter, coach for both the regular and youth USA Ice Climbing teams, speaker and writer took on the role in 2020 after retiring from competing himself.

Garcia was brought in when the Ice Park started hosting International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) certified competitions that year, as he is a route setter certified by the organization, said Ice Park Executive Director Peter O’Neil.

He’ll also craft the routes for the UIAA Ice Climbing World Youth Championships at the park in February.

This year’s competition route is an homage to one of the festival’s earliest and hardest competition routes and the first-ever ice climbing route Garcia completed on-sight, meaning he led the route without any prior knowledge, and he did it without falling.

Devising the Ouray Ice Festival competition tower is about as challenging as the world of route setting gets, Garcia said. It’s typical for route setters to study video footage of the more than 40 climbers set to compete. The spire structure functions as Garcia’s canvas for placing holds. He also worked with the park’s ice farmers to craft the challenges present in those segments. All sections and climbing moves he built into the official competition route are carefully tailored toward both the strengths and weaknesses of the top eight climbers slated to compete this weekend, with the idea that one will be able to finish it.

There’s only one way up and it should take climbers about 10 seconds per each rock, ice or dry tooling hold until a climber moves on to the next.

Route construction usually happens in a contained environment, like an indoor climbing gym. But at the Ouray Ice Park, Garcia is constantly thinking about ice forming on holds, the weather and making sure not to drop anything. If he has to go to the bathroom, it’s a 30-minute trip to come down from his hanging workstation.

This year he has an intern from Canada who reached out to him through the UIAA Ice Climbing network, helping him with the final stages of building.

After about two weeks of work, Garcia has swung, kicked and reached through each move dozens of times. He has to work section by section so he doesn’t tire himself out.

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Beyond the physical labor, there’s a lot of emotion involved, Garcia said.

“It’s always hard because it’s my job to make people fall off the routes,” he said.

And those people are his friends, peers and climbers on the teams he coaches.

“I challenge the climbers but also want them to learn and accept their failure as part of the continuation of growing in the sport,” he said.

Garcia has climbed for two decades and is familiar with managing the fear that comes alongside the sport. He dealt with his first big bout of anxiety while making his first Ouray Ice Festival competition tower in 2020. He remembers returning to his truck the night before climbers took to the route, and calling a friend who walked him through his first panic attack.

“There’s a lot riding on it. It reflects back on me if someone doesn’t do well because I stopped everybody,” he said. “That comes back to me, all that work comes back to one move, one second.”

In those moments he brings himself back to the hours of work he spent analyzing climbers and tells himself he did the best he could.

In the past, he’s constructed a competition tower that no one could finish. That wasn’t his goal.

“I have to understand, like, maybe they’re not ready for that kind of movement, but now they can rise to the occasion and learn from it,” he said.

As he’s become more of a public speaker and writer in recent years he’s focused on helping others lean into vulnerability.

Climbing is about learning to accept failure as part of strength, he said.

“For the most part, people have a really good mindset. That’s kind of what’s awesome about this sport is that people support each other, so there’s no, like, me against them. We’re here together as a community,” he said.

Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.