Welcome to the Canadian Rockies, home of big ice, expensive beer and stoked people! I often get asked for information about climbing here, so I’ve written a few documents that I hope will help you have a good trip. For a general understanding of our season and ranges, check out this link. We reliably have ice from mid-October to early May or later. Yeah, it’s a great season! If you’ve read the “ice season” link then you kind of know the basics of what forms first and melts last, etc. There’s also a page on “Canmore Resources” with places to stay, eat, drink, etc. I’m not paid on any of those ..read more

Canadian Rockies Climbing Cycle: Ice, Alpine, Rock, repeat! By Will Gadd, November 2021 I’m often asked, “So, what’s the best season to climb in the Rockies?” I wrote the following so I wouldn’t have to keep writing it for people. Big Picture For Visitors: The Canadian Rockies are a relatively narrow (about 100K) band of peaks that run along the continental divide from the US border north for 1000K or so. Generally they are quite dry on the eastern side with a solid continental climate, and somewhat warmer and much snowier on the western side. Most of the “famous” ice, alpine, and rock climbi ..read more

What can I do about climate change? Why do anything? For me, it’s personal. In the last five years I’ve worked on glacial/climate research projects in Greenland, Africa and Canada, and personally watched radical change in the Rockies, Alps and other mountain ranges for decades. Rather than just reading about climate change, I’ve been swinging ice tools into it, and working directly with some of the smartest researchers in the world. Melt water in Greenland. Disappearing ice on top of Kilimanjaro, really massive change in less than 5 years. I almost died when some permafrost let go above me whi ..read more

“Well, I didn’t hit him the picks so I wasn’t trying to kill him!” Twenty years ago two enraged Colorado ice climbers in Boulder Canyon went at each other with their ice tools. One of the defendants used the “hammers, not picks” argument, which I’m paraphrasing roughly. As insane as this sounds, people get territorial over ice and rock climbs. Fortunately the vast majority of ice climbers share the ice well, but ice climbing is really different than rock climbing, and what works on rock doesn’t work on ice. Recently here in the Canadian Rockies we had a dangerous and odd situation ar ..read more

Three Sisters Traverse Notes.Will Gadd, Sarah Hueniken, July 4, 2017 Notes written September 12, 2017. Big thanks to Ben and Cia Gadd for the pickup, pizza and beer! The Three Sisters define the southeast skyline of Canmore like a black etch-a-sketch line across a blue sky. If you’re a climber the logical thing to do is start on the looker’s left, or north end of the traverse and head up and over the Little, Middle and Big sisters via technical climbing routes before dropping down off the backside of the Big Sister to the Spray Lakes dam. This summer Sarah Hueniken and I finally did it, a ..read more

Alpine climbing is awesome. Being up high, the sun rising, moving over vast amounts of terrain while feeling comfortable, deep experiences with friends, it’s just a great form of climbing. I’ve been alpine climbing for more than 30 years, and I learn something new every time I go out whether I’m guiding, filming or personal climbing. I can be a dense learner, but I think the complex and surprising nature of alpine climbing is what attracts me to it–just when I think I’ve got it figured out I’m wrong in a new way, and have to revise my model of how the alpine environment works. Here are a ..read more

Many years ago I was interviewing for a job I really, really needed, and the interviewer asked me, “So, you’ve got some strengths here, but what’s your greatest weakness?” I said something about being overly concerned with detail (surely that was the right answer for a job involving tremendous amounts of painstaking detail?) because that’s what I thought the answer was: A strength camouflaged as a so-called weakness. I was fully bullshitting the interviewer to get the job of course, and we both knew it based on my inability to sit still for more than six seconds, but I got the job because I re ..read more

Aw shit Ueli. I’m really sorry you didn’t make it. The last time I saw you we walked and climbed here in Canmore, and then you raced up the mountains I’m looking out at now with the demons of your last trip to Everest screaming at your heels. I could see the strain in your eyes and the sharpness of your movement, and it was clear you felt a terrible load. It was a measure of your character that you cared so deeply, always… With time you moved forward, but when I heard the news from Everest today I knew the demons had caught you. They will catch all of us in the end, but damn, I wish you had st ..read more

As climbers we love grades. The bigger the number the better, the closer to the line of personally possible/not possible the better, and the harder we have to fight to succeed the better we feel. And we often set our challenges based on climbing grades. This is where things get weird – I’ve thrown an all-in wobbler when I failed to onsight a route I felt I should have. I felt ripped off when I onsighted my first 7c+ because it felt too easy, and I was sure I was on the wrong route. The route and grade was what it was, it was me that was all wound up. To understand ice grades it’s wor ..read more

The local injury total so far this season is roughly six broken legs/ankles, a serious and unresolved head injury, a couple of lengthy whippers resulting in various other injuries, and a few falls that scared the hell out of people but didn’t do much.  This is higher than normal in my view, and prompted some thought on what I could do better to not fall off ice climbing. I respect the injured as climbers and people, and want to use their experiences to shape my own attitude and results. Note the ratio: about 2:1 for lead falls on ice that resulted in injury versus non-injury. That ra ..read more