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Will Gadd Shares Japan Ice and Near Miss Story

In the winter of 2015, Will Gadd, Sarah Hueniken, John Price and Ed Hannam met up in Japan for some ice climbing. Hannam is a local climber who runs IceClimbingJapan.com and had promised lots of new routing. The temperatures were too warm to attempt any of the potential routes where they were hoping, so the team went to the Zao Ice Garden instead. After plodding through deep snow, they had a close call.

“The van-sized icicle stopped half on Sarah, but stopped sooner than it might normally due to the deep snow,” Gadd wrote in a story for Arc’teryx. “It didn’t crush her because the snow was so soft she just wiggled out of the way. Eventually she was able to give me slack, and after I figured out she was mostly uninjured, I had time to look at what would have happened if the rope had of pulled me off.

“Before I started climbing I’d done what I always do and made a plan of where I would try to jump if the whole pillar collapsed, but in the heat of the moment I hadn’t been able to do that. I’d just held on–I always look for solid placements on lead, and fortunately they were this time.” Read Gadd’s full story here.

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