Leo Houlding, the trail blazing climber and first Brit to free climb El Capitan at just 18, has been a Linde Werdelin Explorer for 16 thrilling years. We have followed him and his team on Mount Everest in 2007, on Mount Asgard in 2009 and more recently on Mount Roraima, Guyana in 2019 and now again on Mount Asgard.
Today, we are honored to share the remarkable tale of his latest expedition – an awe-inspiring journey that has left us utterly impressed. Congratulations, Leo, on your unwavering spirit of adventure and accomplishment!
Leo Houlding, the trail blazing climber and first Brit to free climb El Capitan at just 18, has been a Linde Werdelin Explorer for 16 thrilling years. We have followed him and his team on Mount Everest in 2007, on Mount Asgard in 2009 and more recently on Mount Roraima, Guyana in 2019 and now again on Mount Asgard.
Today, we are honored to share the remarkable tale of his latest expedition – an awe-inspiring journey that has left us utterly impressed. Congratulations, Leo, on your unwavering spirit of adventure and accomplishment!
Asgard is the mythical home of the Norse gods, where Odin, Thor, Loki and the other deity’s decide the fate of men.
Fourteen years ago, sporting an early prototype of the original skeletonised SpidoLite, I led my first major expedition; deep into the wilderness of Artic Canada to climb the magnificent Mount Asgard, an extremely remote, vertiginously steep, twin-towered summit that looks like a medieval castle on a scale fit for a god.
Remember the opening sequence to James Bond’s 1977 movie The Spy Who Loved Me? The one where 007 skis off the massive cliff before deploying his Union Jack parachute? Well that is Mount Asgard and stuntman Rick Sylvester performing one of the first ever BASE jumps.
My 2009 mission would’ve made Bond proud though it felt like we were nothing but the play things of those Norse gods. It began by skydiving out of a chartered DC3 with my Linde Werdelin branded parachute to land on the glacier below Asgard’s imposing North West face, three times the height of London’s Shard. Then saw us shivering our way up that desperate, cold wall, living vertically for two weeks in hanging tents, suffering rockfalls and ice storms, marvelling at the northern lights and a fly by from an extremely rare snowy owl before finally reaching the summit only to wingsuit BASE jump off the top ourselves.
All captured in the cult classic adventure film – The Asgard Project – it was a life changing experience that charted me on a course that has led to many more serious expeditions to some of the wildest corners of Earth.
This summer I returned to Mount Asgard, this time sporting my SpidoSpeed Carbon and once again it seemed the gods were toying with us in particular Loki; the god of mischief.
The thaw arrived late this year and the fjord leading into Auyuittuq national park was unusually still frozen in late June. The sea-ice too thin and dangerous to support a snowmobile but access by boat wouldn’t be possible for at least another fortnight. Flights are no longer permitted in the park leaving the only option to walk that doubled our anticipated approach to almost 60 miles, that’s Greenwich to Dover!
A tidal wave of anxiety stuck me as I stumbled my first few steps across the treacherous land-fast ice carrying half my own body mass, some 40kg the same as a new born calf! The challenge ahead was utterly overwhelming. Just getting to the start of the climb seemed impossible, let alone to then attempt to climb a cliff of Yosemite’s, El Capitan in scale set in harshness of the high Arctic.
Back in April I shipped a small arsenal of climbing gear, polar survival kit and 30-days of rations packed into Polar Bear proof canisters to an Inuit outfitter in the closest community of Pangnirtung, Baffin Island. He snowmobiled it across the sea ice and up the frozen Weasel river to a cache 10 miles from Mount Asgard.
Within a mile of starting the hike we faced the first of the many river crossings. Swollen from recent rain we stripped and waded up to our waists through the raging torrent of icy water only to face another even gnarlier river a hundred paces later.
We covered just 6 miles on the first day. It took a week to reach our cache. Supposedly Baffin Island gets less precipitation than the Mojave desert but extremely unstable conditions plagued us throughout July with snow, sleet or rain every other day with not more than a few fine hours at a time. When we eventually set up camp right beneath the mountain, Asgard only revealed itself through the clag a handful of times while we festered beneath in the tent as days turned to weeks.
A month into the trip just as we were about to loose our minds and give up hope, Loki finally relented and summer arrived just two days before we had to leave. We snatched the opportunity and blasted up the gargantuan 4000ft tall east face climbing in a minimalist, ultralight weight style. We pioneered a new route up the lower half of the wall climbing 12 rope lengths of top quality terrain that had never been touched by human hand. We slept on a small ledge for a few hours only to wake like jack up the beanstalk above a sea of cloud, then joined an exiting route to climb swiftly the top.
It felt nostalgic to be back on that same elusive summit, such a different man to the one who stood there half a lifetime earlier. Now with two children and wealth more experience, a forty something’s body that begins to show the wear of a life of relentless adventure and who’s mind is less easily blown than before. And this time no (Linde Werdelin) parachute to speed up the descent! But it was no less fulfilling to have once again snatched victory from the jaws of defeat; to have realised an ambitious dream and seen the world from that unique, elevated perspective that can only be reached through the endeavour of self-sufficient suffering in a hostile yet enchanting wilderness and striving to attain something that is almost beyond reach.
A perk of climbing a first ascent is naming the climb and I had just the title – Loki’s Mischief.
– Leo Houlding