Voices of Ice: Will Gadd
Inteview with a mountain athlete and adventurer.
This segment of Cryophilia features professionals, artists and scientists who have a special relationship with ice.
Will Gadd is a prominent Canadian ice climber, mixed climber, record-setting paraglider pilot, and all-around adventurer. He has established the hardest mixed ice climbing lines in the world.
Q: Please introduce yourself and how you're connected to ice.
A: Will Gadd, ice storyteller, pro athlete, UNEP ambassador, sport/science expedition leader, guide, speaker, dad. I’m part of roughly a dozen different programs on ice/climate globally. I’ve climbed Niagara Falls, done first ascents globally, and climbed my first glaciated mountain around age 8 (Athabasca). I’ve been ice climbing for roughly 40 years now. You could say I helped invent modern mixed climbing.
Q: Do you have a location or two that are most significant to you?
A: Kilimanjaro’s glaciers! I did two documentation projects there along with helping a scientist rebuild his weather station and collect data. Greenland too. I did a science trip under the ice sheet to help understand how water moves from the surface to the bottom of the glacier.
Q: What does ice mean to you?
A: It’s the most visual measure of our warming planet and has huge effects on all of us. I’ve climbed and studied ice in Canada, Alaska, Europe, Africa, Greenland and Antarctica.
Q: What is so fascinating to you about ice?
A: Ice is normally the enemy — this frozen horrible stuff we fall on, but it can also be pure magic to climb, explore, skate, or ski on frozen crystals of water (snow). Frozen waterfalls are special; frozen in time each winter, falling down each spring, and reforming in beautiful new ways. There’s just something magic about crystal in any form!
Q: What's one impactful memory you have associated with ice?
A: Standing 100M down a moulin in Greenland and realizing how impossibly far I was from the normal world. I was in a place no one had ever been, and likely no one ever would be again. Our team were the only people ever to see this place, and it was amazing. Also realizing on top of Kilimanjaro that the fin of ice I was climbing was the last remnant of a glacier (see photo above). It’s gone now, of course, and so are most of the glaciers on Kilimanjaro.
Thanks, Will!
Really! The last piece of ice on Kilmanjaro? That’s so sad.
I really hope you'll turn these images and interviews into a big, glossy hardback at some point. I could read and look at this stuff all day.