Will Gadd can count how many times he’s come close to dying during his 30-year rock and ice-climbing career with the fingers on one hand.
Tonight (Nov.6) he gets to experience one of those finger incidents all over again in the dangerous and incredible tale of Frozen Titans on the big screen.
As one of Canada’s top extreme sports athletes, the 47-year-old Canmorite scaled a fiercely difficult 140-metre ice cave, with howling winds, frigid temperatures and death-defying moments, which can be seen during the world premiere of Frozen Titans as part of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
As Gadd spoke with the Outlook over Skype from Ethiopia after a two-week expedition to climb the remaining ice on Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, it’s obvious he’s not your average, run-of-the-mill kind of guy.
Gadd waited for a flight on Monday (Nov. 3) in hopes that if everything went well he’d arrive in Banff by 7:30 p.m. tonight to catch the start of his premiere.
The film follows Gadd up the icy Helmcken Falls in Wells Gray Provincial Park, British Columbia, where he routes one of the world’s toughest seven-pitch, mixed climbing lines in an unforgiving ice cave. To accomplish the feat, Gadd dropped everything for the intense training, and still, it was “barely enough” to keep him going up the ice and rock.
“I’ve been climbing at Helmcken Falls for about five years now; it’s an absolute unique place,” Gadd said. “What you do is you climb the spray that comes off Helmcken Falls – it’s about a 140-metre waterfall that’s never going to freeze, the wind blows spray from the waterfall onto the walls behind it … it’s an absolutely wild place to climb; it’s really like nowhere else I’ve found on earth.
“So is getting from bottom to top by the coolest possible line in that cave.”
On the waterfall, harsh temperatures and conditions cuffed Gadd and his crew so much that even a 30-year climbing veteran like Gadd couldn’t have predicted or trained for it. It was the first time that he and members of the climb suffered frostbite in their lives.
“Challenges are what make this life interesting. It’s pretty boring if you know what’s going to happen,” Gadd said. “For me this was, I think in some ways, the best I had to give with all the skills I’ve learned over the past 30 years of ice and rock climbing. The three weeks or so that we sort of put into this climb were some of the more interesting and demanding weeks of our lives. It’s obsessive and monumentally engaging in a way very few things in life are.”
Gadd recognized three Canmore residents – Katie Bono, Sarah Hueniken and John Freeman – who, Gadd said, “busted our butts and froze our feet” with him to make the unforgiving climb a success. From what was a “real bitch” of an ascent, when tough conditions weighed heavy on Gadd, he would look over and see the camera persons trying to film in those circumstances and said it was a huge testament to their ability.
“The climb was difficult, dangerous and incredible. It’s an incredible climb; it’s so far out there in many ways,” Gadd said.
Gadd is grateful the climb was done safely, but recalls some heinous stuff on the wall such as major problems with rope freezing into a giant icicle and his very own unforgettable close call.
“I’ve only felt I’ve come close to dying while climbing a couple of times in my whole career,” Gadd said. “I don’t generally take probably as many risks as people think I do, but on this climb, I had a situation where a piece of gear malfunctioned and I was too hypothermic and tired to recognize it as quickly as I should have.
“That was one of situations where I came reasonably close to dying and I regard that as a major screwup. It’s not something that’s a regular occurrence, but this climb was just so demanding and so tough that I didn’t have as much operating room to deal with as I would have liked.
“There’s a lot of opportunity to get killed at Helmcken Falls and to work with that risk in a manageable way, to recognize it and mitigate it effectively, and to pull off the climb and we did, was really meaningful to me.”
Ever since he was a child, Gadd remembered buying his admission to the Banff Film Festival and marveling over the outdoor wonders and accomplishments outdoorsmen before him had achieved. Now, to have a big premiere like this in Banff is a really significant moment for him.
He’s “stoked” to share and watch the film with friends and family in the Bow Valley, but the extreme athlete is also very anxious to view the final cut for the first time among the rest of the audience.
“I have a really hard time watching myself off screen,” he said. “I’m too nervous to. It’s one thing to do this stuff, but it’s another to kind of see yourself up there.”
From frostbite to friendships, overall, Gadd had a really positive experience with a strong team of like-minded people and “that’s one of the coolest things in life to have; when you get a team vibe going.
“It was magic and it’s something that’s going to bond all of us in that project for the rest of our lives. It was really hard, maybe it was like going to war or something, these experiences really brought people together,” Gadd said with a laugh.
