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Climbing

Filing this Niagara Falls ice climb under "things only Will Gadd can do”

Get a closer look at how Will Gadd ascended the world’s most spectacular waterfall.
Written by Josh Sampiero
2 min readPublished on
After Will Gadd ice-climbed up the world's most famous waterfall in 2015, we get a chance to take a closer look at his incredible (and incredibly chilly) achievement in the film at the top of this page.
“I went through three pairs of gloves because my hands were getting so wet,” says Will Gadd. “I literally had to warm up my ice tools and scrape the ice off them – that's how much spray was coming off the falls. It's such a violent place.”
At the time of Gadd's climb, sharp-eyed visitors to Niagara spotted the unusual activity on the falls and reported it to local news outlets. Not long after word got out about what was really happening Gadd was swept away on a whirlwind tour of talk shows and news outlets to talk about the historic achievement.
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Find out more about Will Gadd

If you thought the Niagara Falls climb was impressive (you'd be right, it was), then it's worth your while tracking down some of Gadd's other projects. For example, in 2014, he headed to the African heat of Tanzania to make breathtaking first ascents of some of Kilimanjaro's remaining ice stacks. 2019's Beneath the Ice project saw him collaborating with a climate research project to explore glacial caves under Greenland's ice cap that no human had ever seen before. 2020's moving The Last Ascent followed him on his return to Kilimanjaro to climb the ice again and track its shocking disappearance.