Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Cheongsong, South Korea. Champagny-en-Vanoise, France. Longmont, Colorado. What does a city at the eastern edge of Boulder County — occasionally and not-always-affectionately referred to as “Longtucky” — have in common with villages nestled in the snow capped Alps and Korean Ice Valley?
Not much. But on the last weekend of February, it will transform into an international destination hosting more than 100 of the world’s best alpinists. From Feb. 22-23, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) is bringing the Ice Climbing World Cup to Longmont, where athletes will compete for the first time on U.S. soil since 2019.
There’s Boulder, a climber’s playground 30 minutes to the west, painted against the unmistakable Flatiron skyline. Forty-five minutes south, the Mile High City boasts a tourism industry that handles 20 million overnight visitors a year. There’s no shortage of quaint and perpetually snowy mountain towns, with backyard access to some of the toughest routes in North America calling out to climbers around the world. With so many Colorado destinations, Longmont seems like a head-scratcher to host this international event.
So for this edition of our Weekly Why column, Boulder Weekly set out to understand why Longmont is hosting the Ice Climbing World Cup. It might surprise you just how much sense it actually makes.
From the ground up
The 2019 World Cup in Denver was the last time the event, which is hosted in five cities around the world each winter, was in America. When Bryan and Shauna Hylenski, owners of this stop’s host facility Longmont Climbing Collective, attended the Denver event, they saw an opportunity.
“[Bryan] was just saying to me, ‘Hey, we could do this. This would be so amazing to have in Longmont,’” Shauna Hylenski, the gym’s director of programs said. “It would bring such notoriety to our town, and bring more awareness to this event.”
“It’s definitely a huge undertaking for anyone. A lot of businesses probably wouldn’t want to take on an event of this magnitude.”
When the American Alpine Club hosted the 2019 event in Civic Center Park, they literally built everything from the ground up. They constructed a 60-foot dry-tooling structure — a climbing wall clad with plywood that climbers can sink their ice picks and crampons into without needing any actual ice — on the lawn in the park.
Building a structure just to break it down year after year is cost prohibitive, and weight constraints for the wall in Denver made the structure particularly complicated to build, according to Robert Adie, the UIAA event coordinator for the World Cup.
“I just think that the idea of doing that year after year was not very appealing to the people who put it on initially,” Hylenski said.
The Climbing Collective didn’t have to bid for the event. In fact, they were one of the only locations in the country being seriously considered since the 2019 World Cup. A few cities have shown interest, “but nothing that has come to fruition,” Adie said.
A large part of that is the gym’s existing structure. In 2024, the Climbing Collective converted their 60-foot outdoor wall to a dry-tooling wall for the winter, and changed the routes every six to eight weeks. In October, they hosted their own dry-tooling competition, Picks and Pitons, on the wall.
“There are some other outdoor walls in the United States, but from what I understand they’re not set frequently,” Hylenski said, which makes their wall unique. With the only outdoor dry-tooling wall on the Front Range, the Climbing Collective is an ideal host for the World Cup.
“The crux with a lot of these events, especially for ice climbing, is always going to be the structure,” said Adie. “If you already have a structure, you’re streets ahead of any organizer that doesn’t have one.”
Cool, keen and collected
While it doesn’t carry the same weight as the Climbing World Cup — which drew 560 athletes and 17,000 spectators to Innsbruck, Austria, in 2024 — the ice climbing world stage is getting bigger. Around 150 athletes will compete in Longmont, and the 25,000 attendees at the 2019 Denver World Cup made it one of UIAA’s most well-spectated climbing events ever.
Without Denver’s population and a giant, spontaneous wall catching the eyes of unsuspecting passers by, Longmont likely won’t see those numbers. Between 400-1,000 people are expected to attend the free event each day, according to the city.
With manageable attendance numbers and a ready-made dry-tooling wall, there’s still one formidable peak to summit for the Climbing Collective: the ice.
“I would definitely say that ice wall has been the most complex aspect of putting together an event like this,” Hylenski said.
In addition to the dry tooling, the World Cup holds a speed event on a pillar of ice — a challenge in a city that averages high temperatures of 47 degrees in February.
The 40-foot frozen wall is built around scaffolding and rebar, with refrigerant lines running through it to keep the ice from melting. Building this wall, too, can be a huge financial burden, Hylenski said. But existing materials from Denver’s one-and-done event set the route to the top for the Climbing Collective.
“If we had to start from scratch like they did, it would have been very daunting,” Hylenski said.
“If we had to start from scratch like they did, it would have been very daunting,” Hylenski said. Even with an existing wall and a hand-up from the Denver event, it takes a dedicated person to put all the pieces of a World Cup together.
“You just don't know how to do that. You have to learn all of those things,” Hylenski said. “Bryan really has this ability to learn new skills and apply them. That is something. We've been married for about 25 years, and I've seen that again and again.”
The Hylenskis aren’t strangers to daunting ascents. Bryan has summited peaks in the Himalayas, and they have strong connections to climbing communities in South Korea — another stop on the World Cup circuit — where they lived abroad before returning to the U.S. in 2015. This passion for ice climbing is a rock solid foundation to build an event like this on top of.
“That’s what a lot of these events need,” UIAA’s Adie said, “keen individuals and keen organizations to come, and are motivated to put these cool events on in various places.”
Small town, international stage
The World Cup isn’t limited to major metros. Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Champagny-en-Vanoise, France, have populations fewer than 2,000 people. After Edmonton, Canada, Longmont is the second-largest city on the circuit.
“Venues vary massively,” Adie said. “We don’t have to be in cities. We can be in ski resorts. We can be in the mountains. And I think that’s what is unique about the sport of competitive ice climbing, is we can build the structure literally anywhere.”
While the city quietly attracts over 600,000 visitors each year according to Visit Longmont, the World Cup presents a unique opportunity to share its small town charm on an even bigger stage.
“I think this event is an opportunity for Longmont to show why we're different, but [also] complement our friends in places like Denver and Boulder,” said Sarah Leonard, CEO of Visit Longmont.
The Climbing Collective expects to host the World Cup for at least the next five years, along with Winterfest, which will bring food trucks, local breweries and activities for the whole community to the event space. For Hylenski, it’s a chance to bring ice climbing into her community and show Longmont to the world.
“We want to highlight what’s really great about Longmont, what’s really great about Colorado, what’s really great about the United States, because we are the only stop in the U.S. for this entire tour.”
Read more: Lafayette athlete Catalina Shirley's ascent to Ice Climbing stardom on the Ice Climbing World Tour.