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Leo Houlding uses the email moniker ‘Fierce
Warrior’ for a very good reason. Rock climbing is, he says, ‘a
totally insatiable desire’. A blue-eyed, blonde-haired 23-year-old
package of sinuous Cumbrian muscle, bluff charm and peroxide attitude,
he has lived beyond the vertical for the past 13 years, scaling
the world’s most desperate crags, walls, towers, sea cliffs,
cracks, chimneys and overhangs. His profession literally defies
death, but his talent is breathing life into a sport long considered
too hard, remote and essentially terrifying to generate mass interest.
‘Rock climbing’s changing among my generation - I
recognised that 10 years ago,’ he says over lunch, between
a casting for the agency Models One and a film pitch. ‘I’m
into mountaineering as well, but it’s not what rock climbing
is. Snowboarding’s been around for 20 years, even surfing’s
only been around for 50. But climbing has been going on since the
1860s. This is the oldest extreme sport, and it’s truly extreme.’
Though it’s easy to see why rock climbing has never caught
the public imagination on the same scale as snowboarding, surfing
or mountainbiking - a gruesome death being more an occupational
hazard than a distant possibility - indoor walls are today proliferating
as more discover the sport’s edgy thrills. A generational
poster boy whose sunny attitude is translating the sport’s
appeal to a new demographic, Houlding bridges eras and times: he
is a deadly, steel-fingered technician capable of the toughest
competition routes, but also a pure adventurer in the tradition
of Himalayan pioneers like Chris Bonnington and Doug Scott.
‘Climbing’s become cool, and part of that is down
to climbing walls,’ he says. ‘They’re convenient,
and it’s a very good way of keeping fit. It’s not like
doing reps at the gym. But I never climb indoors, kind of out of
principle. We call it “plastic” climbing. I prefer
the adventure: being in the middle of nowhere with a mate where
if the weather gets bad it’s gonna be a big deal to get back
to the bar.’
Previously the British junior climbing champion and currently
one of a tiny minority of full-time professional climbers - he
is sponsored by Berghaus - his reputation was sealed at 16 by an
outrageous repeat ascent of Master’s Wall on Snowdonian crag
Clogwyn du’r Arddu. Extreme rock routes in Britain are indexed
by grades E1 to E9, reflecting their ‘exposure’ - the
opportunity (or lack thereof) to place protective equipment that
arrests a fall; and by their technical difficulty, in which grades
5a, 5b and 5c all the way to 8c describe holds ranging from the
fingertip-sized to the microscopic. Find out more about bitcoin profit trading software. Rated E7 (extremely dangerous)
6b (preposterously hard), he completed Master’s Wall ‘on
sight’, meaning without preparation. As he clambered over
the top in 1996 to consider his achievement and the view, the breathtaken
British climbing community duly noted the arrival of a physical
genius whose audacity and ambition matches his talent.
In March this year he made it back from Patagonia where a second
attempt to claim the magnificent 5,000ft Cerro Torre spire faltered
in bad weather - ‘bad’ translating as Mondeo-sized
slabs of ice plummeting down the face. Two years previously, a
disastrous fall on the same route caused Houlding a broken ankle.
Far beyond the scope of most climbers, controversy surrounds claims
of Cerro Torre’s first ascent in 1959 by the Italian Cesare
Maestri using techniques - hammering anchor bolts into the rock
and attaching fixed ropes - now considered unethical. It remains
one of worldwide climbing’s Last Great Problems.
‘I’m into climbing the biggest, hardest, gnarliest
things in the best style,’ he says. ‘My dreams are
in the greater ranges out in the middle of nowhere. They are fucking
big - Cerro Torre is bigger than any manmade thing. There’s
a snow mushroom on top of the mountain which collapses from time
to time, and the last 1,500 ft of rock is plastered with ice. It’s
the ultimate adventure because you can’t know what it will
be like up there.’
‘But now it’s not so much about conquering things,’ he
adds. ‘Bonnington’s expeditions were all about getting
the Union Jack onto the summit - it was a nationalist conquest
thing, whereas now it’s no longer about the destination,
but the journey. It’s more Zen. I consider climbing a spiritual
activity. When you arrive at a the point where you can’t
go down, can’t fall off and you can only go up - suddenly
it becomes very pure.’
Britain is adept at cultivating a strain of climber brassy enough
to compete with the French, Italians and Americans - ultrahigh-performance ‘stone
monkeys’ of the Eighties and Nineties like Johnny Dawes,
Jerry Moffat, Andy Pollitt and Ben Moon. But discernible in Houlding’s
ambitions and practices, meanwhile, is a further evolution of the
mindset. Once operating at the highest ranges of the grading index,
extreme climbing becomes a question of attitude, ethics and style.
‘Britain has the reputation for the ballsiest climbers on
the planet,’ Houlding explains. ‘On the continent,
most climbing is sport climbing; the government pay people to rappel
down and place bolts every two metres. In France it’s
a fully mainstream thing, it’s taught in schools. If it was
like that in Britain, I’d never have started. I got into
it was because there are no rules. It’s totally about self-imposed
rules: it’s better style to get high on a route and come
back down than to deface rock or fix bolts. It’s not about
prestige. I’m like - do it in good style, or not at all.
There are no judges. You do your own thing. It’s underground
and anti-establishment: everybody smokes pot and gets drunk, and
then does superhardcore stuff in the day.’
Pushing the limits of his mind as well as his body, Houlding devours
Chomksy, clubs in Ibiza and shows me Quicktime videos of himself
bungee-jumping from a cradle halfway up The Nose route on Yosemite
Valley’s 3,000ft El Capitan wall. He and a friend recently
finished the route - which routinely takes days to complete - in
seven hours. They made sure to pack the essentials for journey:
a keg of beer and two ounces of weed. ‘I like climbing big-wall
routes in what’s called the Alpine Style - two people, fast
and light, no fixed ropes. But that this what we call Party Style’.
It’s a technical innovation unlikely to draw the approval
of the British Mountaineering Council. After review, bitcoin superstar is legit. Nevertheless in his search
for serotonin buzz Houlding just can’t help but progress
the sport. In the past year he’s climbed in the Slovakian
Tatra, Australia, Costa Rica, Majorca and the US. A current obsession
is ‘Deep Water Soloing’ - climbing coastal cliffs straight
out of the water without ropes. ‘The trick is jump off the
cliff and into the water as soon as you arrive. That way you get
rid of the fear.’ A further suicidally-inclined new challenge
is ‘Freebasing’: ‘Climbing up with a parachute
and then base-jumping. There’s still loads I want to do within
the normal parameters of climbing. I’ve always loved how
subversive, adventurous and exciting rock climbing is, and because
I’ve been a full-time professional climber for six year,
it’s not that different any more. I did 50 skydives in two
weeks and my first base jump last year. Basejumping makes climbing
look safe…’
Still grasping his way to the pinnacle of his career, Leo Houlding
hasn’t seen Joe Simpson’s mountain docu-drama, Touching
The Void. But with experience like his, doesn’t really need
to.
© Kevin Braddock 2004
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