Top athlete: Will Stanhope
A profile of one of Canada’s boldest climbers
The first time I was introduced to Will Stanhope, it was—how else these days?—through a three-minute online video. In it, he is attempting Cobra Crack, one of the hardest single-ropelength rock climbs in the world. The route, near Stanhope’s current home base of Squamish, B.C., is taken rather seriously in several other videos, though not in this one, and at that time had been successfully scaled by just four other people. “I can’t overestimate how much stronger those guys are than me,” Stanhope says, hamming for the lens. “Approximately twice as strong.”
You believe him, too. With his shirt off, Stanhope looks more like a kid skateboarder with growing pains than one of the most talented rock climbers of his generation. He’s pale in the way that’s only ever seen above the 49th parallel, and you wouldn’t say he looks muscular. His limbs are lanky; his abs are not of steel. Most noticeable is the cockeyed grin. He will soon be the fifth person on the planet to succeed on the notorious Cobra Crack, but for the moment he is still deep in doubt and obsession, and he seems to be enjoying it.
Then he floats up the overhanging wall, through those terrible, arduous moves—up to the hardest section, where a single finger he has inverted into a narrow slot pops loose with sudden violence, and he falls and is caught by the rope. He’d been holding the weight of his body on just a few square centimetres of skin and boot rubber, and the explosive fall has sliced open two of his fingers, leaving flaps of flesh hanging off of each. He shakes his head, looking at the day-ending wounds. “Self-abuse, self-produced,” he mutters, riffing on the lyrics of a local hip-hop band. Then he opens a can of beer with one bloody digit and says to the camera, “Stay in school, kids.”
Meeting Will Stanhope; why Southern Belle?
This Will Stanhope—the jokester, the prankster—is not the one who shakes my hand when we meet in a strip mall parking lot in Squamish. For one thing, his smile is shy; for another, he’s limping badly. There’s a recently discarded neck brace rattling around in the back of his eggplant-coloured minivan.
In a sport that’s known for boldness, it is saying something that Stanhope, who turned 25 in November, has made a name for himself as a bold rock climber. He eschews so-called sport climbing, in which the climber clips the rope into permanent bolts in the cliff that are spaced to prevent long, dangerous falls. Stanhope’s game is traditional (or “trad”) climbing, clipping the rope into removable cams and wedges inserted into natural fissures in the rock. On many trad routes, a skilled lead climber is as safe as if he was climbing on bolts—but those are not the ascents that Stanhope is drawn to. He is known for climbing spooky, sketchy, infamous routes, where the climbing is hard and the protective gear ranges from dubious to practically non-existent.
“I like the question marks, you know?” he tells me. “I love first ascents, and I love climbing in the mountains where it’s not necessarily 100 per cent certain what will happen. You get served whatever comes your way.”
To put Stanhope’s specialty in focus, consider the route Southern Belle in the Yosemite Valley of California. By the arcane grading scale that measures climbs by their physical difficulty alone, the route is classified as 5.12d—10 notches below the 5.15b routes that rank as the hardest on earth today. But on Yosemite’s towering granite walls, a climb isn’t legendary until it has cost someone most of their sanity or half of their teeth, and by that standard, Southern Belle stands out. The premier guidebook for the valley calls it “probably the most feared and difficult multi-pitch free climb in Yosemite.” (In “free” climbing, the climber relies only on natural features of the rock as holds, instead of using technical gear to make upward progress.) Scott Cosgrove, who in 1988 was the first to free climb Southern Belle with another Yosemite master, Dave Schultz, described his mental state on the route as “no thoughts, no fears, just pure survival.” In 1994, a climber attempting to repeat Schultz and Cosgrove’s achievement broke both ankles when the brim of his ball cap brushed against the cliff face, knocking him off the delicate holds. The route waited 18 years for a second free ascent, when two of the boldest climbers of the era, Leo Houlding and Dean Potter, teamed up in 2006. Potter, best known at that time for climbing hard routes with no rope at all, said, “On a fair bit of the upper ground, if you fall, you might as well be dead.”
“Something like Southern Belle, at 5.12, is not at the cutting edge in terms of grades, but in terms of the psychological element, it’s very demanding,” says Michael Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Alpinist magazine. “It’s as demanding as the hardest sport climbs or the hardest boulder problems.”
In a sport where climbing the highest grades is the surest path to media attention and corporate sponsorships, making the third ascent of Southern Belle is an unusual choice: a risk of life and limb for nothing much more tangible than a few approving nods around Camp 4, the historic Yosemite climbers’ campground. Yet Stanhope’s resumé is littered with such routes: the Bachar-Yerian in Tuolumne Meadows, California; the second ascent of East Face of Monkey Face in Smith Rock, Oregon; the first free ascent of Cannabis Wall, in Squamish; the first ascent of the DNV Direct in the mountains of Patagonia. At grade levels that haven’t been cutting-edge since the year Stanhope was born, these route names are meaningless even to most climbers. But to that small cabal that still prefers climbs that test the soul as much the body, they are spoken with respect, if not awe.
“It’s just the stuff he likes to do—some people like hard bouldering, he likes scary trad routes,” says Alex Honnold, an American climber who was Stanhope’s partner on Southern Belle last November. “He’s just a real climbing dude, the kind you want to have sitting around the campfire. You know, a real climber.” It all sounds casual enough, but then, Honnold himself is an emphatic case study in how rare an ability it is to be able to tolerate terminal risks. Dozens of climbers can match Honnold’s pure power on the stone, but he is alone at the top when it comes to the death-defying arena of ropeless ascents.
Ask Stanhope what attracted him to Southern Belle, and he talks first about the beauty of the route—“about a mile long and totally golden”—up Half Dome, a massive granite monolith that has been a Yosemite icon since the days of Ansel Adams’s black-and-whites. Most of all, though, Stanhope talks about the history, the story behind the line. “I just had to stop reading about it,” he says. “Something like Southern Belle, most of the battle is in the head, you know, just really sitting down and thinking about it. At a certain point, you just have to go up there and see what it’s like.”
And what was it like? “Terrifying,” says Stanhope. During the long stretches with sickening fall potential, he remembers “internal music” kicking in—Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” in particular. Reaching the summit at sunset, he and Honnold were so mentally and physically fried that they sucked stale rainwater from the puddles they found.
For Stanhope, though, the erasing of one question mark only leads to another: What next? A few months later, in March of this year, he was looking for answers on another fabled route. The challenge this time could not have been more different—Parthian Shot ascends a crag near Sheffield, England, to a maximum height of about 50 feet. What Britain lacks in jaw-dropping topography, however, it makes up for in the sheer density of beer-hall myths and outright lies attached to even the smallest dimples in the stone. In the case of Parthian Shot, the whole history of the Empire seems at times to revolve around a single, flake-shaped block of rock in the middle of the climb.
That flake is the last place where a climber can place protective gear before scaling the blank upper headwall of the route, which juts over the moors like some dark ship’s prow punching through a storm wave. More concerning is the fact that this crucial flake itself seems barely attached to the wall. British climber John Dunne, who claimed the first ascent of Parthian Shot, in 1989, considered it a death route, believing the flake would not hold the weight of a fall, leaving the climber to plunge to the ground. Since then, the dozen or so climbers known to have succeeded on Parthian Shot have proved Dunne wrong—every one of them has fallen, and the flake has saved their lives. But as any gambler can tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
“Saddling up for these big objectives, you really have to ask yourself the big questions,” says Stanhope. Then he channels the words of Yosemite climbing guru Jim Bridwell: “It’s good to be badass, but it’s no good to be a dead badass. There’s a fine line between badass and dumbass.”
Stanhope worked out the moves on Parthian Shot—which are serious, at a difficulty of about 5.14—from the safety of a top-rope set up above him, pulley-style, to catch his fall. When he was sticking the hardest move fairly consistently, he decided to lead the route from the ground up, with the full risk of the fall.
He fell. A split second later, the weight of his plummeting body pulled the rope tight against the gear crammed in behind the flake. And this time, it didn’t hold.
The great convenience of history is that enough hindsight can make any event seem to have been inevitable. That said, if Will Stanhope had decided that his passion was dentistry, or even sport climbing, he would never have ended up free-falling off a black wall above England’s green and pleasant land. Questions of pattern and trajectory do matter.
Stanhope first tried climbing at age seven at the Edge Climbing Centre, an indoor climbing gym near his family’s home in North Vancouver. Andrew Wilson, who later coached Stanhope and is now the interim director of Competition Climbing Canada, still remembers young Will from a summer climbing camp. “He was probably the dirtiest kid I’ve ever seen after that day,” says Wilson. “He was just a dirty face with this big smile, these white teeth shining through.”
Stanhope’s skills soon matched his passion for the sport. He was a fixture at the gym, and alongside his Edge teammate Sean McColl, who is now North America’s best competition climber, Stanhope became a perennial top-10 threat on Canada’s junior circuit. A bigger milestone, though, came in the form of a huge box of old climbing magazines dropped off at the gym by a patron.
