RENAISSANCE GUY                                                                          

Will Gadd soars above the world of paragliding and climbing. But at 38, he’s nowhere near the end of his revolutionary career

by Justin Nyberg

Will Gadd may be the most accomplished, well-rounded adventure athlete in the world. But he still thinks he’s a couch potato.

“I slack a lot. Don’t tell anybody,” he laughs.

It’s apparently a big problem for him. So big, in fact, that he’s typed a reminder to himself at the top of a ten-page to-do list that includes dreams like “Paraglide over the Grand Canyon,” which he did last year, and “Climb icebergs in North Atlantic. No rope,” this summer’s chilly project. The message, in capital letters at the top, reads, GET SHIT DONE. STOP SLACKING.

It’s tough to imagine the 38-year-old Gadd having motivation problems. His admittedly short attention span, coupled with almost manic powers of concentration, a fitness level that would give Jack LaLanne palpitations, and a combustive competitiveness have helped forge alternative sports’ answer to the Renaissance man. In the summer, Gadd is the best long-distance paraglider in the world; in the winter, he’s one of the most accomplished ax slingers on ice. Tack on five years as a Wave Sport–sponsored kayaker, three consecutive reigns as Canada’s national sport-climbing champion, and forays as a stuntman, video producer, and author, and it’s almost impossible to wrap a Ritalin-focused mind around him.

“I joke about this in my slide shows, and somebody always comes up to me afterwards and goes, ‘Oh, you are classic ADD-HD-SBDCDA.’ The full alphabet gets thrown at me, you know,” Gadd says. “But I do think I get bored. Once I figure something out, I’m usually not that interested in it.” Still, before that happens, the jocular Canmore, Alberta, resident attacks it with such withering intensity, it puzzles even him.

Take a recent night at his local rock gym. Gadd is completely obsessing about the green boulder problem. (Gym routes are often color-coded.) It’s driving him nuts. It’s only V6, and the 17-year-old kid who nailed it a few minutes earlier is now watching the former national champ peel off the wall repeatedly. Gadd spends hours wrestling with the chalk-covered, plastic holds, unable to make his way to the top, forgetting about everything else. “I’m like, ‘Why did I care so much about it? Why am I in there until my fingertips are bleeding?’ ” he says. “When I finally figure that problem out, I’d be psyched for a few minutes, then I’d be like, ‘There’s the orange problem.’ ”

It was like that with sport climbing. After climbing as hard as 5.13c in the early nineties, while touring Europe with the world’s elite rock jocks, Gadd got sick of the predictability of bolted stone. At the time, he was also notching first descents of Class V creeks like Colorado’s Upper South Boulder Creek and Upper St. Vrain. But that, too, got old.

“The only way to push it further was to take larger risks. I wasn’t interested in that,” says Gadd.

So he turned to ice climbing. After nearly sweeping the world’s competitive ice circuit between 1998 and 2000, and in his free time putting up mixed routes (featuring both ice and rock) that often redrew the boundaries of the sport, Gadd felt his ax had gotten dull. Then, on March 7, 2004, in his garage, he took a hacksaw to his crampons and—raising the new battle cry “Spurs are for horses!”—hacked off the heel spurs.

Spurs are just what they sound like—piton-like points on the heel of each crampon that allow a climber to hook ice or rock with the back of a foot. For years, climbers have used them as a crutch to hang upside down on the ice and rest; Gadd and his disciples think this is cheating.

“It’s like hunting for fish with a shotgun in a barrel. What’s the point? You’re going to win,” Gadd says with disgust. That simple act, and Gadd’s relentless touting of his new “bareback” climbing style, has ignited a firestorm in the teapot-size world of ice climbers. Gadd, as usual, is at its center. “You can always reinvent these sports, eh?” he says.

A growing cadre of the world’s best climbers have followed his spurless footsteps, reclimbing the world’s toughest routes bareback. Others have suggested it’s just a publicity ploy from an athlete as adept at getting attention—and the attendant sponsorship cash—as he is at any of his sports.

Outspoken and supremely confident, Gadd has never shied from the spotlight—or controversy. Last February, after an elite climber named Rich Purnell claimed he’d put up the toughest mixed route in the world, high in Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon, Gadd made a point of climbing it several times over a weekend, once bareback. “The guy sprayed endlessly about it,” says Gadd. On Gadd’s Internet posting the next morning, he publicly trashed Purnell for overhyping the route. (For his part, Purnell believes Gadd was trying to “grab some more attention for himself.”)

“His enthusiasm is borderline fanatical. He’s a great guy; he can also be pretty aggressive with his opinion,” says Jared Ogden, a world-class ice climber and alpinist from Durango, Colorado, who was climbing with Gadd that weekend. “He’s seriously competitive.”

But in person Gadd seems genuinely humble and self-effacing, his confidence reinforcing an easy graciousness. “Anyone who fails as much as me can’t help but be humble,” he says. He opens his home to visiting climbers and credits friends like Ben Firth, Jim Grossman, and Chris Santacroce with making all of his climbs and flights happen, in one way or another. And he’s deeply humble about his one true nemesis, gravity.

By his count, Gadd has lost more than a dozen friends in accidents. Most recently, it was longtime buddy and fellow Red Bull teammate Chris Muller, who slammed into the ground at an April 22 hang-gliding competition while reaching for a sack of prize money set atop a traffic pylon at the finish line. Gadd, who says he’s agnostic, knows it’s one small mistake and he’s done. It shows in the meticulous research he puts into planning his epic stunts and his fastidiously cautious approach to flights or climbs.

“If you die, you lose. It’s pretty clear. You don’t get another life, you don’t get another go. You’re done,” he says. “If I don’t feel like I have a reasonable chance of living, a good chance of making it work, then I’m not going to do it.”

But even as he climbs into middle age, Gadd says, he’s not going to stop “throwing dynamite” anytime soon. In his paraglider, he is set on breaking the 500-kilometer barrier—more than 310 miles—for a single flight. In October, he’ll try a single-push ascent of a virgin 6,000-foot icefall in Nepal,  applying the fast, technical skills of competitive ice climbing to the Himalayas. And while Gadd won’t share what else is written on his life list, the mountains and deserts have no shortage of green problems to keep him occupied for years.

“I’m not looking to be the first six-foot skinny guy to wakeboard across the Sahara or whatever,” he says, then hesitates. “Actually, that’s pretty interesting. I wonder if you could do that. It actually seems like a pretty interesting idea,” he says, pondering it for a moment. “But anyhow . . .”

SIDEBARS

GRAND TRAVERSE

Will Gadd’s goal was to be the first to

paraglide across the Grand Canyon. It’s

not as simple as it sounds. A paraglider

beneath the rim of the canyon would

be like a leaf in a gale—subject to violent

crosswinds and eddies that could

slam him against a vertical mile of

rock. With few flat spots, a forced landing

in the canyon would be treacherous—

if not deadly. “It was the first time

I ever made a will,” says Gadd. On September

7, 2004, Gadd was towed into

the air by a truck about 15 miles south

of the South Rim. He then rode the

thermals to a dizzying 17,900 feet—as

high as he could get to avoid dropping

anywhere near the wild air below the

rim. For more than three hours, he

coasted north, steadily losing a foot of

altitude for every nine feet forward—

eventually just skimming over the

heavily forested North Rim and landing

exhausted in a meadow. It was perhaps

the boldest thing anyone has done yet

in a paraglider. David Glover, past

president of the U.S. Hang Gliding Association,

puts it simply: “It kind of

rock ed the world of our little sport.”

—J.N.

MIX MASTER

Ice axes ar e built with sharp, slender

picks and lever ed geometry to help

drive the tip deep into frozen waterfalls.

But in the mid-nineties, after

discovering that their tools could

also delicately grip bare rock, Will

Gadd and friends began setting

routes where there was very little

ice to be found.

“We would get mocked. Just

mocked. People would laugh at us

and say, ‘Why are you scrabbling

around on the rock with your ice

tools?’ ” Gadd says. “I didn’t really

have an answer—it was just cool.”

What the hecklers didn’t realize

was that they were witnessing the

beginning of a winter evolution for

climbers, and from that moment on,

Gadd would be its Che. Taking cues

from veteran alpinists like Jeff Lowe,

Gadd perfected a new form of cold-weather

cragging that came to be

known as “mixed climbing.” Up until

then, the use of ice tools on rock

was reserved for mountaineers in

extreme high-alpine terrain. But

Gadd and his cadre adapted the

technique for crags in the Colorado

Rockies, tooling their way across 30-

foot overhanging roofs en route to

dangling icicles and frozen curtains

previously inaccessible from below.

Though many of the hecklers eventually

became disciples, none could

match Gadd’s lead as he set and

reset the world’s hardest mixed climbing

routes, including Musashi

(2002) and the Game Reloaded

(2004), at least five times over. “Will

Gadd is one of the most visionary

climbers of our era. Period,” says

Ryan Nelson, 25, an elite mixed climber

from Durango, Colorado. “His

influence on modern ice climbing is

matched by no one.”

But the real impact of Gadd’s

achievements may extend far

beyond the Rockies. His next goal?

Introducing the lightning speed

and gymnastic moves of mixed

climbing to their ultimate testing

ground, a 6,000-foot ice route in

the Nepalese Himalayas. —J.N.

Fa c e s : Will Gadd

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Text copyright Outside 2005

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