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 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, ah!
But most ice climbers don't climb in terrain like that.
You kind of have to be weird to go there.
OK, it's totally unrealistic in every other way,
but at least that part was kind of real.
Oh! Stop, stop, stop.
OK, 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 hucking 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-arrest,
you flip onto your stomach, you dig your toes in,
which buddy doesn't do when he's sliding down here.
He would've stopped this really fast
if he'd just dug his toes in right away.
You know, his pick is just ripping through the snow
the whole time when he does self-arrest.
Somehow it holds in that situation.
Hang on!
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 are so many things that are unbelievable,
but that's almost the most unbelievable thing.
You'd 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.
You're like, "Get away from there."
And she's like, "I'll just keep standing here!"
Not really what you want to be doing there.
OK, so that's not going to work.
You're not going to put your pick
gently into the snow and then have it hold anything.
It's just going to rip through like crazy.
Maybe if you pounded it in with a big hammer
and it were ice, you'd get, you know,
a sort of OK 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.
Like, that's what would happen.
You would just rip everything out.
It'd be like, pew!
It's in the negatives.
Like, if the other ones are one or twos,
there's not enough room in that scale to go low.
Galadriel: And the threat at last was ended.
This terrain 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.
Galadriel: I wish I could be one of them.
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 gotta 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 gotta be so cold!
She's got, like, chain mail on her head.
She's going to get frostbite from that.
OK, where's, 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 gonna want to use it.
But I just loved how the ice tool is just dangling there.
It's like, "Ah, we don't need ice tools."
That's something that's 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 gotta 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 they're like, "Oh, mate,
you hit me in the face with ice!"
It's like, don't stand in the way of the falling ice.
And then in terms of the technology or believability,
yeah, we're down in 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 then 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 gotta 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 2 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'd 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 gonna 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 cliff.
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.
OK, 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 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 then 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,
you know, kind of realistic.
Ice-climbing instruction level was poor.
I'm gonna 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 them, you know?
That's 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 gotta have skills on rock and on ice,
different sort of mediums that you travel on.
But in terms of the technique and tactic to use,
this is all pretty realistic.
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
'cause 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 Lho La icefall in Nepal.
[phone rings]
Hello?
Phone: Ms. 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 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 the general rule,
but you want to use much better technique
and tactics than is going on here. This is sketchy.
Phone: Represent Weyland Industries.
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 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!"
'cause 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 them in that deep,
he's probably never getting them out.
Like, he's going to 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 gotta 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.
He's not hanging 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 an ice climber.
OK, 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 snowfield.
That's what you wear in the mountains.
Just, like, your Timberland
or whatever they are hiking boots.
That's what you want for this type of situation.
You know, obviously not really.
You probably want something with a bit more support
and maybe some crampons, just as a thought.
That'd be helpful.
You 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 subsport.
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 the ultimate combination
of parkour and ice climbing.
This one hit the climber forums out there,
and everybody started talking about it right away
'cause 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 downclimb,
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 downclimb and safely go another way."
So it's a really good skill to have
and, honestly, it's not practiced enough.
That's probably a nine.
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, 'cause it's a pretty obscure sport.
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