ICE Climbing Écrins: Can a Festival Stay Cool Under Pressure?
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
In L’Argentière-la-Bessée, ICE Climbing Écrins still brings a few hundred people together every winter around ice climbing. From the outside, it looks like one of those mountain meetups that’s been there forever—steady, familiar, basically part of the local winter scenery. But the 2026 edition landed in a weirder moment than the postcard suggests: a new organizing team, shrinking public funding, and a warming climate that makes “ice season” feel less like a season and more like a gamble. So how do you build an event when you can’t fully predict what you’ll have to work with?
ICE Climbing Écrins has never been “spectacle” in the classic sense. No grandstands. Very little staging. Even fewer flashy promises. For thirty-six years, the point has been something else: give climbers from all backgrounds a way to discover or level up in ice climbing, rooted in the place itself and the people who live there.
Taking Over Without Breaking It
In 2026, that surface-level continuity hid a real handoff. After ten years led by Cathy Jolibert, the event changed hands. The takeover was quiet and collective—no dramatic “new era” messaging—but it forced the new team to look at ICE differently: not just through the participant experience, but from the ground up—its finances, its relationship to the practice, and the values it actually puts into action.
The transition wasn’t rushed. Julie Gégout, an osteopath from the Hautes-Alpes, had already been working on the event for years when she learned—along with Maëlle Le Ligné and Oriane Jouneau—that Jolibert was preparing to step away. “We knew it was coming,” she says. The handoff took shape gradually, forming a core group of five people, later joined by two guides, Octave Garbolino and Nil Bertrand.
They describe their structure as horizontal: no single director, no one public face. That choice slows the tempo, but it also sets the method—understand first, adjust second. “We knew a lot about what was on the surface, but not what was underneath,” Gégout says. In other words: people see the climbs, the clinics, the evening hangouts. What they don’t see is everything that makes those moments possible—partnerships, schedules, long-standing teams, and the whole logistical balance.
So 2026 became a year of observation. The team kept the overall framework, leaned hard on people who’ve been involved for twenty or thirty years, and avoided sudden shifts. But they still put their stamp on it. Registration opened first to people who had never attended before, and only later to returning participants. Gégout says close to three-quarters of this year’s participants were first-timers. Altogether, the event brought together about 500 people, including 70 invited guests welcomed through a solidarity-based program.
The message is straightforward: don’t let the festival shrink into a closed circle of regulars. And don’t pretend a mountain gathering is only about skill level or gear—it’s also about access: to a sport, to a place, and to the kind of story people come to the mountains to live out.
A Fragile Model—and No One’s Pretending Otherwise
Financially, ICE runs backward from what many people assume. It’s not primarily carried by private sponsors. Its balance rests on three pillars: registration fees, public subsidies, and—far behind—brand booths. The total budget is around €100,000. About half comes from registrations. Partners—mostly the brands present at the expo—bring in around €10,000. The rest depends on local public bodies.
That dependence is intentional, but it’s also stressful. “It runs on subsidies. Today it works. Tomorrow, we’ll see,” Gégout says bluntly. Grant applications go in during the fall. Answers often arrive in February or March—when the event is already underway. So ICE gets built with a built-in unknown: if funding drops—or disappears—you’re forced to adjust after the fact, on money you’ve essentially already spent.
In that situation, the options narrow fast. If subsidies fall, you either raise registration prices, start charging for concerts that used to be free, or cut certain budget lines. None of those moves are neutral. Each one hits the event’s identity: a gathering designed to stay accessible, even though ice climbing, by definition, requires time, travel, and a certain baseline cost.
That reality also shaped some 2026 decisions. To supervise the invited groups, the team relies on a partnership with several local guide offices, which mobilize instructors on a volunteer basis through internal agreements within their organizations. The setup opens the event to people who might not otherwise be able to participate, while limiting a cost line that, in previous years, weighed heavily on the budget.
So yes, there’s a solidarity message. There’s also a very practical truth underneath it: keeping prices low in a tightening financial climate means rebuilding the math.
Ice, With No Guarantees
The future of ice climbing sits in the room, whether anyone wants it to or not. Warming temperatures make conditions more uncertain, more variable, sometimes simply not workable. ICE isn’t trying to dodge that. “We don’t want to lie,” Gégout insists. Some years are great. Other years are not. There have already been editions where planned ice outings had to be replaced with other activities because conditions didn’t come together.
The team pushes back, though, on the idea that ICE is drifting into “ice-adjacent” programming as a replacement. The rough numbers they give are clear: around 300 people per day are out on ice outings, compared to about 50 total across all the other workshops. Diversification exists, but it’s still on the margins—more a response to specific needs (recovery options, activities for accompanying friends or partners, weather disruptions) than a plan to substitute something else for natural ice.
On artificial ice, their stance is cautious. Existing structures can serve as a fallback, especially for first-time instruction. But the team doesn’t want, at this stage, to systematically replace missing natural ice with artificial installations. “For now, we’re going year by year,” Gégout says. If the ice is there, it stays central. If it isn’t, the event adapts.
That philosophy shows up most clearly in the logistics. Vegetarian meals, local products, and a system where participants wash their own dishes: these choices—carried over from previous editions—are kept without hedging. The most debated piece is the “autowash,” the setup that asks everyone to clean their own plate and utensils, which Gégout says is “heavily contested.” Some criticism even comes from mountain professionals, irritated by what they see as an extra layer of constraints.
Gégout doesn’t try to sell it as a moral lesson. She points to the alternative. Serving 500 dinners each night means either mountains of disposable waste or a more demanding system. The line is framed less as virtue signaling than as consistency.
One Last Awkward Detail: The Name
There’s also a distinctly modern discomfort the event can’t fully shrug off: the acronym itself. In 2026, “ICE” doesn’t only mean frozen water. For part of the public, it also calls up U.S. immigration enforcement. Gégout smiles, then admits the awkwardness: “In 2026, can we still be called ICE? I don’t know. But we were here first.”
