Talk by Leo Houlding - March 12th 2008

Organised by Eden Valley Climbing Club held at Rheged

Jane Metcalfe

If you couldn't make it you missed a treat. Rheged's big screen was packed for Leo's fascinating almost three hour long talk. He is an entertaining speaker and his climbing adventures are awesome and varied.

We saw pictures of him 'slack lining' at 3,000 feet, climbing in Yosemite, one of his favourite places, successfully climbing the Verdon Gorge faster than Jeremy Clarkson could drive to the top of it and a host of other climbing adventures. He has recently added a new outdoor pursuit to his repertoire, base jumping off the top of climbs to save doing all those long walk offs, or dangerous abseils. I think I would rather do the walk off myself!

He has also been working on a film. For this he teamed up with another famous mountaineer Conrad Anker. The idea was to climb the route that Mallory and Irving took on Everest where they died and try to solve the mystery of whether or not they reached the summit. Mallory and Irving were last seen alive around the second step, an area that is today well protected with ladders. For the film these ladders were removed and Leo and Conrad did the climb as Mallory and Irving would have done it. After doing the climb, Leo thought it doubtful that they could have got passed this difficult pitch and reached the summit. For the first part of the climb Leo and Conrad climbed wearing the same sort of gear Mallory and Irving would have. When it started to get really cold they went back to modern mountaineering equipment. Neither wanted to risk frostbite and the old style boots were not very effective.

Preview videos here from Ueverest

The talk finished with Leo successfully base jumping into what looked like to me, a fairly small opening into some kind of large underground cavern. He was obviously quite nervous himself and I certainly was just watching.

An enjoyable evening.