Hi Ted,
This image conveys lots of emotion for me, from your perspective as well as the climber’s.
As the photographer, this had to be an exciting and welcome surprise to see someone climbing when all you expected to find was ice.
It would have been an adrenalin rush just watching the climber while hoping for a successful and uneventful climb.
I would have been nervous for the climber, it would have been an “At the edge of my seat” tensed up toes, fingers and butt cheeks kind of emotion. 
As the climber, I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been even with a safety rope in place, the climber clearly thought it through enough to anchor and cast a safety rope from above before executing the ascent. Of course the truly safe way would be to have a second person above watching and insuring the stability of the anchor point of the safety rope, that requires a lot of trust on the climber’s part.
A special moment for any nature photographer IMHO.
As for the image itself, I feel that the perspective and overall exposure is great!
The area on the right is bright and dominant in the frame, I think it belongs there but it seems just a bit too dominant as well as occupying a little too much of the scene.
In the example edit below, I cropped in from the right to the left of the dark triangle at the top, it wasn’t to eliminate the dark corner, it was to reduce the amount of dominant brighter and larger ice columns. The thought here was to help shift the viewer’s attention towards the climber.
Somehow the branches protruding out of the ice don’t seem to compliment the scale of the scene or the climber, they seemed to shrink the scale and maybe that’s just my perception of it, it at least gives the illusion of a smaller scale (probably just to me though). So, I spent a little time cloning them out with a small brush (about 10 pixels in diameter) at about 30% opacity and 0% hardness while very frequently resetting the origin point of the clone tool.
I did clone out the little dark spot at the lower edge of the frame just to minimize the visual weight there.
I like the dark triangle at the top because it defines the top of the ice columns where the snow is resting, without that triangle, there’s no definition for that shelf IMHO.
Then to balance out the brightness across the scene and to allow the climber to be “The center of attention”, I added an linear gradient exposure mask. I felt the darker dappled light on the left added to the scene and a slight sense of mystery. It feels like a tense scene from a good “Cliff Hanger” movie.
Finally, I added just a touch of saturation to the red, cyan and yellow channels to the climber only, just to bring him out more in the scene, it’s fairly subtle but from my personal preference point of view, it helped a bit.
Please keep in mind that the example edit as well as my thoughts are totally from my own personal perspective. It’s just something for you to consider. It is your image and your experience.
The one thing that isn’t clear here at NPN is that some photographers aim to replicate the scene as accurate as possible while others don’t mind doing a few artistic tweaks in their images, this is obviously the latter, but what do you prefer, accurate or artistic? Hmmm…guess I should have asked that question first!!
Maybe we should include that question in the image submission form, "Do you prefer Accurate Replication of the Scene, or, Artistic Tweaks? (Document or Art?). Something to think about I suppose.
The main point is, I don’t wish to offend or degrade your image, I only wish to provide an alternate view without offensive intentions.
Have an ICE Day, Ted! Love the title!
