Professional Ice Climber With Four Decades of Experience, Talks About a Scarily Realistic Scene in the Otherwise Fictional Show ‘Game of Thrones’

If the idea of climbing tall peaks of rocks wasn’t hard enough, imagine the strength and durability required to claim ice formations. Will Gadd from Alberta, Canada, has been doing that for around four decades now. A professional ice climber, Will Gadd, is also a paraglider pilot with a world record to his name. Recently, he sat with Insider to break down ice-climbing scenes in movies and TV shows and distinguish the real from the fictional. When it came to judging a scene from S3E6 of one of the world’s biggest shows, Gadd did find a single realistic scene in this otherwise overtly dramatic show.

On re-watching the scene with Insider, Will Gadd recalled the time he saw it for the first time. He was slightly taken aback by its authenticity. Here’s what he talked about.

Will Gadd authenticates the extent of the ice-crack scene in Game of Thrones

HBO’s popular series, Game of Thrones, during its run, was undoubtedly one of the biggest shows in the world. It’s season 3, episode 6, very appropriately titled ‘The Climb’ gets its name from the climbing of the wall by Jon Snow, Ygritte, and the Tormund’s party. The wall is no ordinary rock wall, but instead a thick ice-covered one, in the middle of a snowstorm. Ygritte accidentally causes an avalanche that kills some climbers but leaves her and Jon Snow hanging by a rope.

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The exact moment when Ygritte initiated the avalanche by mistake, scary as it is, was authentic enough to Gadd. He said, “You get cracks like that, that go really frightening distances. I’ve had it fracture like, 30 feet horizontally. So it’s a bit exaggerated, but not that much, actually. I saw that scene, and I was like, ah!! But most ice climbers don’t climb in terrain like that. You kinda have to be weird to go there.” Ygritte used her mountaineering axe to get a grip, but unfortunately, that led to a crack that extended and caused the avalanche.

Gadd, who has had 30 years of experience in guiding climbers as well, wasn’t the first professional climber to break down scenes in pop culture. Rock climbing legend Alex Honnold, too, once broke down a famous climbing scene in a Tom Cruise movie and found an error.

Much like Gadd, Honnold once called a movie scene far from reality

Alex Honnold once debunked a popular myth propagated by Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. In a famous scene in the movie, Tom Cruise is climbing atop the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Since the exterior of the building is all-glass, Cruise is wearing magnetic gloves that enable him to get a better grip on the glass surface. However, Honnold immediately brushes it off by saying, “There is no such thing as magnetic gloves.”

Honnold, whose previous interaction with other climbers such as Adam Ondra left him once stunned at his recovery time during speed climbing, has also interacted with Will Gadd on his ‘Climbing Gold’ podcast. He posted on Instagram praising Gadd for pushing the risk-taking boundaries and about their intense discussion on climbing.

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Gadd has hosted the documentary series “Fearless Planet” and became the first person to ascend the ice-covered rock beside Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls. So what do you think about Will Gadd’s take on GOT’s scene?