Last night I went to the Edmonton Section ACC (Alpine Club of Canada) monthly meeting which featured guest speaker Will Gadd, from Canmore, Alberta. For those of you who don’t know, Will is a professional outdoor adventure athlete. This means he thinks up cool, crazy stuff to do (mostly involving paragliding or ice-climbing, his two specialties) and then gets funding to do them. He then makes money from the outdoor films he makes, the sponsorship/gear testing he does, the competition wins, the books etc. Will holds the world record for distance paragliding, among many other things. Check out his full and rather impressive biography.

Will has both a website and a blog…and after having a quick scan through both of them I would say he comes across a lot better in person than he does on his blog. I think some of what he writes sounds a little bit conceited, but honestly he comes across as a really nice guy in his talks! I would thoroughly recommend going to check him out if he ever does a talk near you.

His recent escapades have featured climbing ice-bergs, paragliding across the Grand Canyon and ice-climbing in abandoned Swedish mines. It’s absolutely crazy what this guy gets up to, and you can’t help but feel motivated and inspired by his passion for what he does. One of his future trips he mentioned is paragliding from Vancouver to his home in Canmore. He’s already done Golden to Canmore.

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