Champion Ice Climber Rates 9 Ice-Climbing Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider

I have actually climbed ice with a steak knife once. I did it as a joke but there are already holes in there and stuff so no that dagger would not work. My name is Will Gadd and I'm a professional ice climber, Red Bull athlete from Canmore, Alberta and I've been ice climbing for almost 40 years. Today we're going to be looking at ice climbing scenes in movies and judge how real they are. You wouldn't be climbing together like this because if one person falls off you're kind of all going to die. Simul climbing is a tactic you use on relatively easy terrain like maybe 50-60 degree terrain and it's just in case something catastrophic goes wrong. It's high risk, it's not something you generally want to do and you definitely don't want to do it when you're scaling the side of like this immense piece of ice. You get cracks like that that go really frightening distances. I've had it fracture like 30 feet horizontally so it's a bit exaggerated but not that much actually. I saw that scene and I was like but most ice climbers don't climb and train like that. You kind of have to be weird to go there. Okay it's totally unrealistic in every other way but at least that part was kind of real. Stop, stop, stop. Okay so that rope does not stretch. They would be cut in half worst case scenario by the rope or they would break every major organ in their bodies. It's like a steel cable. Imagine hooking yourself off a building tied to a steel cable. It's just not going to go well. So modern climbing ropes are basically bungees and they elongate and absorb the impact slowly specifically so you don't break your internal organs. This is not a survivable situation and that's just assuming the person up top there could actually hold the impact which they can't. They would get yanked off so fast. When you're hanging on a rope in space it's really hard to generate lateral momentum like this. Pretty much impossible. I've tried it a lot of times so it doesn't matter how much you jerk and twist you just sort of end up going in a circle on the end of the rope. It's one. This is totally unrealistic and never gonna happen. As a mountaineer when you self rest you flip onto your stomach you dig your toes in which Buddy doesn't do when he's sliding down here. He would have stopped this really fast if he just dug his toes in right away. You know his pick is just ripping through the snow the whole time when he does self rest. Somehow it holds in that situation. I always love it in scenes like this when they say hang on. Like what are they gonna do let go? It's super sunny out why are her sunglasses on her head? She would be snow blind in like 10 seconds. There's so many things that are unbelievable but that's almost the most unbelievable thing. You definitely have your sunglasses over your eyes at this point. And when you break a cornice like that it breaks. When you get a fracture in snow like that it goes. You don't get kind of a second chance unfortunately. And having been in that situation where it broke I ran the other way at speed. Get away from them and she's like I'll just keep standing here. That's not really what you want to be doing there. Okay so that's not gonna work. You're not gonna put your pick gently into the snow and then have it hold anything. It's just gonna rip through like crazy. Maybe if you pounded it in with like a big hammer and it were ice you'd get you know a sort of okay emergency anchor but no that's not gonna work. I've done things like that jumping from one desert tower for example to another. You can do things sort of like that. What you can't do is fall like what looks like let's use the most conservative number we can. 30 feet vertically and stick your ice tools into rock and then not completely blow both your arms out of the sockets. Say you can hang on to the ice tools like let's say that somehow in your forearms you got the juice you can hang on to those ice tools. I keep picturing this set of arms on the wall while his body is somewhere thousands of feet below. That's what would happen. You would just rip everything out of like it's in the negatives. Like if the other ones are like one or twos there's not enough room in that scale to go low. This train is really cool. So if anybody knows where this is and it's real please send me an email. I'd like to have a go at that. She seems very nice but she is going to die. That dagger is not going to go into the ice like that. It could be kind of like trying to split firewood by pushing the axe head into the wood with your hands. You got to swing it and there's no force in that dagger. You just can't move fast enough. This is designed to swing really fast into ice. It's got a razor sharp point on it. It's a weapon. You want this not the ice dagger scene. That is just flat out not going to work. You certainly couldn't jump laterally stick it in and not die. All this metal that's got to be so cool. She's got like chain mail on her head. She's going to get frostbite from that. Okay where what are they hanging on to? Hang on stop for a second. But that person has their hand on the ice and then look where the left ice tool is there. It's just dangling like that is not the way forward. You want to have that in your hand. You're not just going to latch onto the ice. You can climb ice without an ice tool. But if you have one you're sure going to want to use it. But I just love how the ice tool is just dangling there. It's like ah we don't need ice tools. That's something that's like a really big hazard in ice climbing. Is you have to think about where the ice you knock off is going to go. That's like ice climbing 101. I have seen this happen in real life. It's usually involving ice climbers from warm places. You got to put the belays out of the way of falling ice. It's really important. And then they get hit in the face with ice and like oh mate you hit me in the face with ice. It's like don't stand in the way of the falling ice. So and then in terms of the technology or believability. Yeah we're down in the the one two kind of range here. So I really like this one because this one actually happened. Base jumpers have hucked themselves and gotten stuck on cliffs regularly. You know my friends on the search and rescue crew here where I live and in other places. They deal with this not you know it's not never. It's like a couple times a season somebody's going to do this somewhere. This has got to hurt your foot like there's a knife in there. I can't see this going well kicking the ice. This is not a good idea. But yeah and I have actually climbed ice with a steak knife once. I did it as a joke but there are already holes in there and stuff. So no that dagger would not work. You need about two centimeters or an inch of ice to climb it in a vertical setting. If you're really good. I'm pretty sure with like throwing knives you probably need a bit more than that. That ice looks more like almost what we would call verglas or just very thin ice. And yeah that's not going to work. But I love the creativity. I've actually had this happen. Sheep do show up in climbing areas and they're a real hazard because they knock rocks off on you. I actually almost got killed this way. This herd of sheep showed up at the top of the cliff and they're running around up there and they're knocking rocks off and we all had to run into the cliffs. The sheep don't move like this in this terrain. They don't have crampons on their feet. They're not moving like this. They're really good but they're not that good. All right hold up hold up. What he's just found there is actually one of the biggest hazards that you can't see in ice climbing. You kind of have to develop a feel for it and it's called an onion skin. And what happens is you get snow on a ledge like that and then the water from the ice climb keeps falling on top and it makes a new layer of ice. So it's got snow underneath and it's got ice on top of it and it'll make like layers just like that. And this is a little overdone. Ice doesn't just fail like this but it's sort of plausible. I actually had something like this kind of happen where an onion skin broke and kind of wound up running in place as this onion skin shot out from underneath me. So it's not exactly like this but it's kind of realistic. Ice climbing instruction level was poor. I'm going to go three. You can tell by their movements. These are people that have actually ice climbed. I think one of them is my friend Barry Blanchard. It's pretty old school and they're hamming it up hard for the camera. Legs are out like this to the side. You don't normally ice climb like that. But it looks good on television. I have done that exact move more than once on camera where I can hear the director yelling get more limb separation to him you know. That's like the classic line. But their feet aren't blowing. Their feet are generally about shoulder width apart and underneath them. It's like in any sport when your feet go way out to the sides bad things are going to happen. So I think in this scene they're training for the ice climbing part of climbing K2. Mountaineering is about getting to the top of mountains. But you got to have skills on rock and on ice different sort of mediums that you travel on. But in terms of the technique and tactics to use this is all pretty realistic. You know you might not be doing this form of steep climbing on K2 but you'd be doing something similar to it. The whole camera is tilted to make it look steeper. And you can tell because you can see the pack straps hanging down. They're not hanging down the right way. They're hanging down toward the ground on this one. They're kind of using weird combinations. And so they've got a technical tool in one hand and a longer mountaineering ice axe in the other. And the technical ice climbing tools tend to be very organized for the pick to go into ice well. Whereas the mountaineer axes tend to be longer and more focused on snow and softer mediums generally speaking than hard water ice. But it's just tools of the trade and they're all meant for ice and snow. It's not a huge stretch. If I had to rate it I'd give it like a nine. It's pretty accurate. That is in France and it's one of the coolest ice climbs in the world. So they chose a good ice climb but it's definitely not the Lula ice fall in Nepal. Miss Woods. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. That is just anatomically not where you would stop to take a phone call. Like ever. It just makes no sense. You'd be like either pulled into the ice or swinging. And her tool is junk. Like if you're soloing that is not an acceptable tool. Most ice climbers will solo to some degree or another. Meaning not use a rope. The difference between soloing and using a rope on ice is a lot less than the difference between using a rope and not on rock. Ice climbing the goal is very very much not to fall off even with a rope because you've got all these sharp things on you and if you fall off they tend to catch and either impale you or break your legs or flip you upside down and then you break your neck or your head. So you don't fall off in ice climbing is kind of a general rule. But you want to use much better technique and tactics than is going on here. This is sketchy. Ice is really strong. If you've ever tried to chip ice off your sidewalk it's really hard to get off. It doesn't all just like break and catastrophically fail all the time. So yeah it's a good medium to climb. So she's not hitting in very good places and I can hear the director saying hit the ice one more time and make some spray go sideways because I've done that a lot. Ice climbing in movies always looks really dangerous and it is dangerous but you can make it reasonably safe. You know wear a helmet, use ropes, get qualified instruction. It's a lot of fun. In terms of technique and tactics it's like a two. Not happening. Interestingly I think they actually got some coaching on how to ice climb. Their tools are staggered vertically. His tools are completely buried. If he put him in that deep he's probably never getting him out. Like he's gonna have to work for a very long time but if you look at his right hand there it's not on the bottom of the tool. It's on the handle of the tool. It's really really hard to just hang on to the straight pipe of the tool. You got to get down to the bottom where that hook is. That's what is for your finger. So quite clearly there is no ice climbing getting done in this sequence. Like he's not hanging on that off that tool. He's just standing there having a conversation. The ice climbing tools are real so we'll give it a two. This is just like eyes glaze over move on as a nice climber. All right stop stop stop. I love this one because it's not even an attempt to be realistic. There is a thing in climbing you do called a self-arrest. But you do it on like a snow field. That's what you wear in the mountains. Just like your your timberland or whatever they are hiking boots. That's what you want for this type of situation. You know obviously not really. Probably want something with a bit more support. Maybe some crampons just as a thought. You know that would that'd be helpful. Use your tools on rock all the time. So mixed climbing is where you climb on both rock and ice. And it's a natural part of climbing in the mountains. You have to do that to get up peaks. And it's become its own kind of weird sub sport. I've climbed huge overhanging caves of rock and icicles. That's totally legit. People do that. That's fine. You just don't get to do that after you've been free falling for like 10 seconds. I love this scene. This is like the ultimate combination of parkour and ice climbing. This one hit the climber forums you know out there. And everybody started talking about it right away. Because it's totally completely ridiculous. And at the same time it's so ridiculous it's just kind of awesome. Like it's ridiculous and it's laughable. But it's not even trying to be real. What he just did there that's athletic. He's having to deliberately blow his feet and make it look bad. I've taught a lot of people how to move on ice. And if you can climb a ladder you can ice climb. I have not found that pushing my students or guests off the top is the right way to learn. When I teach ice climbing to people who want to get good at it. I teach them to down climb. Because often you'll climb up say 10 feet 3 meters. Go the wrong way and be like this is not working out. I can either hurl myself off the ice climb. Or I can down climb and safely go another way. So it's a really good skill to have. And honestly it's not practiced enough. Like that's probably a 9. My favorite ice climbing movie is probably K2. I think that does a pretty accurate job of showing it for the most part. Honestly I'm just stoked when I see ice climbing in a movie. Because it's a pretty obscure sport. If you enjoyed this please click the link above for more videos.