good sound. My mind is always listening very carefully when I’m
climbing, to what’s going on.”
The second is how the ice looks. “Is it aerated?” Meaning
does it have a lot of oxygen in the ice, and will it be less stable, or is
it hard and blue? Unfortunately, most of the ice at Niagara is not
hard and blue. It’s filled with air that makes it soft and easy to break.
“I’m trying to find ice that is somehow well-bonded to the rock
underneath it. And I’m looking and listening for the sounds trying
to find ice that isn’t going to fall off.”
It’s nearly impossible to wrap my head around what the
experience would be like. Even when they’re not frozen, the falls
are monstrous. It seems like climbing them would be terrifying. Yet
fear wasn’t on Will’s radar. This kind of focus and execution isn’t
unusual for high sensation-seekers. Their ability to be unruffled
and focused allows them to act and rely on their training.
By the time he started climbing Niagara Falls, Will had done
a tremendous amount of work to be there, and he said he wasn’t
afraid. “Fear is usually a sign to me that you’re in a place,” he
explained, “maybe that you don’t understand, or that you have
legitimate worries. If you’re afraid, then something needs to be
addressed or changed. And by the time I started climbing Niagara
Falls, I had real concern, and probably still some pretty good adre-
naline. But the fear was gone. Now it’s time to act and to execute
and to do something at a high level and do it right.”
But real life is always different than the plan.
“The ice was much worse than I expected. The falls
were much steeper than I thought they were going to be.
I thought it would be more vertical or maybe slightly less
than vertical.”
Will picked his way up 148 feet (about the height of a 15-
story building), and once at the top he let out a victorious yell.
“People often think that ice climbing is mainly a physical
sport. That’s the easy part,” Will explained. “It’s all the mental stuff.
And staying on top of that, it’s much more difficult. And then finally
having fun, I wouldn’t do any of this if it wasn’t fun, right? This is
pretty awesome.”A Lousy Drug
Many people might consider Will to be an adrenaline junkie who is
in it all for the thrills. He sees it another way. It’s part of who he is
and honestly adrenaline can get in the way.78 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge