The Dangers of Climbing Helmcken Falls | Edge of the Unknown on Disney+
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Yeah. [BLEEP] [CHUCKLING] From here, it's hard to tell the scale. Yeah, it's so-- it's so big.
WILL GADD: If you aren't scared walking into Helmcken Falls, something is wrong with you. Imagine a covered sports stadium, and you cut it in half. And coming out of the ceiling, there's a waterfall. And it hits the ground, sprays all over everything behind it. At the bottom, there's this giant caldron out of ice. We called it the caldron of doom. And if you went into the caldron of doom, they aren't ever going to find you.
SARAH HUENIKEN: There's this huge cliff with thousands of big hanging icicles. These are falling. It's an ever-changing environment.
WILL GADD: You have freezing mist on you continually. It's the most complicated environment I've ever been in in my life.
MAN: Helmcken Falls is outrageously difficult. Just the physical act of climbing in that kind of terrain, it's akin to doing hundreds of pull-ups, but also doing a highly choreographed ballet at the same time. No one's ever tried or climbed a route of this scale before.
WILL GADD: The first time I went to Helmcken Falls, I saw this line. But it was probably about 10 years of climbing all over the world and a half dozen other trips to Helmcken to make that climb happen. The idea was to do a line from the bottom of the falls to the top of the falls, take the path of, like, steepest maximum resistance. And I wanted it to be kind of the culmination of my ice and mixed career.
MAN: The hammer and the ratchet I just put on the sternal attachment to the harness.
MAN: To do a first ascent on something like Helmcken Falls requires a ton of work because you have to establish the route. You have to equip the route, which means you need to find it, then put in bolts for where he can clip in the rope. This is a massive undertaking. It can take weeks. The other aspect is that it's in a dynamic environment. Temperature and weather have a lot of impact on the route. So Will is racing against time because as the season warms up, the route might not be climbable.
WILL GADD: We've got two teams of two working full time to get it done.
SARAH HUENIKEN: Yeah, that hold feels sketchy. Yeah, you got to get your pick in right.
SARAH HUENIKEN: [GRUNTING] Any trip you do with Will is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Let's make as much progress as we can. Like, if you're not psyched to go up, I will. But I also know that it can be very dangerous. And there's a lot of things we don't control. And that can be hard to be his partner-partner in life and his climbing partner. But leading up to it, I saw everything he did to be ready to climb.
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