“I have seen the future of ice climbing, and it is sprayed on,” says Will Gadd, the world’s most prolific ice climber. About a week ago, Gadd and partner Tim Emmett pushed a new route up a massive, overhanging, 45-degree roof of mixed ice and rock that resembled a cottage cheese condo ceiling more than a frozen waterfall. The plastered ice is caused by mist and spray from 500-foot Helmcken Falls in Wells Grey Provincial Park, British Columbia, and it has Gadd raving about the potential for a new form of ice climbing.

“We stood on the rim and dropped our jaws,” he writes on his blog. “Helmcken is a stunning, complete bad-ass of a waterfall…As soon as were down at the bottom of the canyon our minds just flipped out. The scale is so hard to fathom in the pictures and even in person until you’re down in the canyon. A pretty good-sized river rips off the edge of a massive cave and falls about 500 feet to a pool below. You could play socceron the ice shelf behind the falling water. And the lower 100 feet or so were covered in the most insane ice formations I’ve ever seen.”

This from a guy who’s climbed in glacial ice caves and on icebergs floating in the ocean.

The roof the cave was littered with hanging daggers and blobs of ice that resembled giant bananas, all of which threatened to detach and plummet to the floor. “It was way too overwhelming to even think of climbing; we were afraid at first to even go into the cave,” Gadd said, but he and eventually threw fallen ice chunks to knock down the hangers and clear a safe path to the back of the cave. “We quickly figured out that a soft-ball sized piece of ice would knock multi-ton stalactites down, and carnage ensued as progress was made.”

Over two days, Gadd and Emmett placed four bolts for protection and pushed the climb about 100 feet–90 feet along the roof, Gadd said, to get about 40 feet of vertical.

“You had to…literally jump through space to latch a couple of blobs on the wall. Seriously, that was the mandatory start! I have never had so much fun climbing ice; sometimes you’ll get a big roof from a broken off pillar or something, but this was just mental. You had to be really careful to swing accurately in the blobs of ice, and test the placement each time. This is incredibly strenuous when hanging locked-off on a 45-degree wall. Poor placements would rip, which was funny if you were belaying but not so funny on the lead. I’ve been doing a lot of endurance training this year but not so much power training… I got so damn pumped my forearms are still hurting.”

By day three, temperatures were warming and ice bombs were falling off the ceiling, so the duo split. But Gadd told Planet Mountain, “You know what’s exciting here to me? The future. We climbed only 30m of a 150m wall. We had poor spray ice conditions according to the locals. That wall is also at least 500m across. Theoretically you could do something like 100 routes that were three or more pitches up overhanging icicles the whole way. Some would be drytool routes in places, but that’s cool too. How is that for a damn cool future!”

Gadd recently climbed 25,000 vertical feet of ice in 24 hours and raised $15,000 to $20,000 for the dZi Foundation. Check out the video of his training, above, or an account of the “Endless Ascent” at Alpinist.

Tagged as: ice climbing