“Everywhere I go in the world, it’s warmer — people say, ‘Well we used to have six months of winter, now it’s three.’ I was in Ilulissat, Greenland and they’re building a skateboard ramp for the kids cause now they get five months of skateboard weather… IN GREENLAND; they used to get two.” – Will Gaad
There definitely is something to be said about the whole “you have to see it to believe it” thing. While most of us feel that way merely out of cynicism born from the replacement of true hard-news cycles with rampant, wavering rumor mills, adventurers and explorers and photographers don’t only feel that way, but know from they’re own experiences that reading someone else’s account doesn’t hold a candle to seeing it for themselves. But not all of us have the opportunity to travel the world. That is where these adventurers and explorers and photographers come in. They are our eyes.
Ice climber Will Gaad, most recently known and celebrated for his first ascent of a frozen Niagara Falls, is one of the lucky few who has made a life of travel. In these travels, he (like his contemporaries) sees what is happening first hand: “I don’t need to read reams of scientific research. You can just look; and in my world it’s dead clear that things are changing at a radical rate.”
That being said, seeing is one thing, understanding is another thing altogether. And whereas the adventurers and explorers and photographers are our eyes, glaciologists and climatologists are our minds, or at least the mentors or teachers who lend a hand in opening our minds into fully comprehending the present circumstances and potential consequences. Working with these glaciologist and climatologists, Will plans to return to Greenland and utilize his ice-climbing prowess to access the deepest reaches of certain ice caps in an effort to collect never-before-collected samples for analysis. Hopefully this will lead to an even better understanding of what exactly is happening.
How did this all come about? For Will, it is a lifelong journey, really. He grew up in the Canadian Rockies to a family of climbers and skiers — but it was his father who introduced him to ice climbing when he was 16. He pursued it “part time” for awhile, but soon realized he needed to commit; therefore he sold everything he owned and moved into a van. The next year he won the X Games. Talk about a high return on investment. Over the years he continually expanded his travels.
Soon he found himself climbing an ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, an ice cap that promises to be nothing more than ice cubes in less than 10 years.
That proved to be the final push. Now he is focusing on visiting places that are disappearing in order to document them and share these chronicles with whoever will lend their eyes and ears to learn more about climate change and its disastrous effects on our planet. I, for one, am glad he is.
