Ice Climbing
Go inside the Greenland ice cap with photographer Christian Pondella
Get the inside track from ace photographer Christian Pondella as he shoots Will Gadd climbing in giant caverns of ice in Greenland.
In the remote, icy wilderness on the Greenland ice cap, a gaping hole marked the spot where climber Will Gadd and his support crew and film team would descend into the unknown.
“My first thought was this thing looks f**king scary,” recalls photographer Christian Pondella. The American has been shooting adventures with Gadd for nearly 20 years – but this one took things to a different level. Literally.
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Dream Project – Christian Pondella
Christian Pondella delves deep inside a Greenland ice cap for this magical photoshoot.
A moulin is basically a giant hole in a glacier, created when surface water finds its way into a crack in the ice and melts through. And in this dream project, the plan was to climb into one and go deep inside the Greenland ice cap to a place nobody has ever been before.
Gadd takes a drop into the unknown
© Christian Pondella
What they discovered was a sparklingly beautiful, but terrifying 90m-deep cavern, with a roof made of hundreds of tonnes of cracking, creaking and groaning ice.
Descending into the ice cap
© Christian Pondella
It took skill, experience and knowledge simply to come back alive. Let along to get THE shot. Here’s Pondella’s story of their adventure.
Red Bull: So, the first time you saw the moulin was a bit scary.
Christian Pondella: Yeah. We were walking along this little blue stream on the glacier when suddenly it just dropped into a big black hole and disappeared.
Time to go to work. Pondella readies himself to enter a moulin
© Christian Pondella
Water was gushing in and all I could think of was falling in, sliding along unable to stop and plummeting into the abyss. It was kinda horrifying.
Water rushes down the moulin as Gadd descends
© Christian Pondella
How did you get your head around that?
To be honest, I never really did. We couldn’t get down very far on the first trip because of the water, so we had no idea what it was going to be like when we came back – a tiny, narrow hole snaking through the glacier or a huge opening with overhanging ice that could fall at any moment. Either option was pretty scary.
The challenging conditions meant caution had to be taken when dropping down
© Christian Pondella
What made you choose this particular spot?
Wherever there’s surface water on a glacier there will be a moulin nearby, but this one was special because it had a big opening facing the same way as the prevailing wind. That meant the snow wouldn’t block up the entrance while we were inside. Obviously, that was pretty important.
Wherever there’s surface water on a glacier there will be a moulin nearby
© Christian Pondella
So, how did it feel to finally go there for the shoot?
Just getting out there was an adventure. It was a half-hour heli flight from Ilulissat with amazing views and then we were dropped off in the middle of this ice desert. Just flat ice, as far as you can see. Totally surreal.
Light enters from the moulin entrance
© Christian Pondella
When we first dropped into the moulin, we found this giant amphitheatre. It was stunning, with tonnes of overhanging ice. We were in the fall zone most of the time, which was pretty nerve wracking.
Gadd reaches ground level
© Christian Pondella
Especially considering you had a lucky escape when ice fell on you on a previous shoot – that must have been at the back of your mind?
Yeah. I was on a trip with Will to Sweden in 2007 and we rappelled into some mine shafts, same sort of depth as here, to climb on ice formations. One day, the temperatures heated up and an icicle the size of a truck melted off the rock, dislodged and fell. It just missed us.
Gadd climbs out from the darkness
© Christian Pondella
We had very similar hazards here, but when you spend as much time as I do in the mountains, things happen and it’s good to have a short-term memory. It’s important to learn from things, but then it’s just as important to forget the experience and move on. Going into this Moulin, of course, it was at the back of my mind, the reality is there, but you make that choice. Once you’ve decided to do it, you’ve just got to do it.
So, did you have any close calls this time?
Almost. One day there was a big temperature drop and you could hear cracking around us as we stood on the ice cap. When you go into a cavern like this you’re extremely exposed, so you’ve got to continually look for signs of instability. We all saw them, so we took the day off.
Knowing when to call it a day can be a big call in this environment
© Christian Pondella
Seeing the northern lights so vivid was a welcome benefit of this trip
© Christian Pondella
The camp for the trip. No luxuries here
© Christian Pondella
It turned out we made the right call. The next day, when things got more stable, we went back in and at the bottom, where we’d been standing two days before, there were huge chunks of fallen ice. Massive. That was eerie and scary. If we’d been down there the day before, well...
So, with all that going on, how do you stay calm and do your job?
I’ve photographed a lot of crazy things – people free soloing, jumping snowmobiles 300ft in the air, base jumping, skydiving without a parachute and landing on a net. So I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit, people right on the edge and, thankfully, always getting away with it.
Pondella is used to unusual working conditions
© Christian Pondella
I guess maybe those of us that do this might be slightly more wired than the average person, our heart rate doesn’t go spiking at the first sign of danger. We can process information in a calm, smooth way.
That’s good, but once you’re calm how do you get THE shot?
In this kind of environment pretty much anyone with a camera or a phone can take a really amazing photo because it’s such an amazing place – so as a pro photographer you’ve got to find ways to exceed that.
Gadd scales a massive ice mass
© Christian Pondella
You’ve got to be dynamic, evaluate the situation and give depth, use foreground, middle ground, background, try to do something that evokes emotion, puts the viewer into the picture, use dramatic lines and shadows, and draw them into the subject.
The head torch was an important source of light
© Christian Pondella
You’ve got to know light and how to play with it. Often, you see what you want to shoot but the light’s not right. If you can dictate that, great, but if not you have to use your creative eye, use your lenses and figure out what’s the best way to showcase what’s happening.
On a shoot like this nothing is ever perfect. You just have to adapt
© Christian Pondella
On this shoot, sometimes it was just a matter of hanging on a rope taking photos, going up and down to line things up differently, shooting into the light to make it dramatic, moody, bright and colourful. You always have ideas before a shoot, but you always end up changing your plan.
Be imaginative and you never know what you'll capture
© Christian Pondella
Every shoot is different, every photograph’s different, and you’re always learning. I’m my toughest critic. I can come back with the most amazing image I’ve ever shot and I’ll still be sitting there thinking I could have done better. And I guess that’s good. It keeps you hungry.
It’s not the easiest environment to work in – how do you get in the right place for the shot?
I don’t have to climb exactly what Will’s climbing but I do still have to do some serious climbing and a lot of hiking. I’m mostly just going up and down a fixed line, so it’s not so physically hard – although I’ve got to carry all my gear up and down, so that’s pretty tough. I try to stay as fit as I can. I do a lot of backcountry skiing, biking in the summer. I’m pretty much an endurance athlete kinda guy, so that helps.
You've got to have no fear to do this job sometimes
© Christian Pondella
You’ve shot with Will Gadd for more than 20 years, so what do you like about shooting with him?
We’ve travelled together to five or six continents and almost 20 countries and we see eye-to-eye on things. We’re a good combination – we're both loose and like to have fun, but not loose cannons taking unnecessary risks.
Pondella and Gadd have been adventuring together for more than 20 years
© Christian Pondella
We both push it but we also know there’s a time when you’ve got to pull the plug. When it’s serous it’s serious. But when it’s really serious, sometimes you screw around to keep things a bit more at ease.
So, what are your top three images from the shoot?
That’s a tough one and if I was to answer this question again next week I’d probably have three different photos. There are lots of shots in there I was proud to have been able to get. One favourite right now is nothing to do with the moulin, it’s just a scenic, beautiful sunset shot from Ilulissat that encapsulates Greenland and brings back all the memories.
Sunset over Ilulissat
© Christian Pondella
There’s one moody shot looking up as Will’s rappelling into the moulin that I love. It shows the blues and blacks and whites and he’s silhouetted. It’s a surreal shot that stops you and makes you think, ‘What is going on there?'
Looking up as Gadd's rappelling into the moulin
© Christian Pondella
The third is a photo of Will climbing out of the moulin on the last day. We got some proper ice climbing in and I was super excited to shoot that kind of stuff. It’s just a classic ice-climbing shot, colourful and beautiful.
The perfect ice climbing shot
© Christian Pondella
So, you were pretty stoked with the whole trip then?
Every time I do a project with Will it turns out to be wild and adventurous. I knew this one would be a tonne of fun and produce some amazing photos and it turned out to be one of the coolest adventures I’ve ever been on. No pun intended.