Explorer and professional climber Leo Houlding has spent more than 30 years pushing into some of the world’s most remote places. One of his most ambitious expeditions took him across Antarctica by kite ski to climb The Spectre. These days, Leo is taking on a different kind of adventure, bringing his wife and two kids along to climb, hike, camp, and explore the world together.
Explorer and professional climber Leo Houlding has spent more than 30 years pushing into some of the world’s most remote places. One of his most ambitious expeditions took him across Antarctica by kite ski to climb The Spectre. These days, Leo is taking on a different kind of adventure, bringing his wife and two kids along to climb, hike, camp, and explore the world together.
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Leo Houlding:
I firmly believe everybody needs a little bit more adventure in their lives. Everyone, whatever walk of life you're from, whoever you are, it's good for you. And we've become extremely dependent on comfort. It's really good to put yourself into uncomfortable situations. It doesn't have to be for weeks on end. It can just be for a day or even hours, but you don't need that comfy sofa. You don't need that warm jacket or that air conditioning. You can survive. Humans are much more resilient as a species than we give ourselves credit for.
Shelby Stanger:
Explorer Leo Houlding is like the Indiana Jones of adventure sports. For more than 30 years, he's been a professional climber and appeared in British TV shows and adventure films. In 1998, at just 18 years old, Leo became the youngest person to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite. Since then, he's established new climbing routes on remote rock faces around the world, explored the Amazon rainforest, and led an ambitious expedition across Antarctica using kites to ski thousands of miles across the ice before scaling a remote granite peak called The Spectre.
While Leo is still chasing big adventures, these days he's bringing his wife and two kids along for the ride too. Recently, he and his family spent an entire year traveling the world together, hiking, climbing, camping, and exploring some pretty wild places.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Leo Houlding, great name for a climber. Welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Leo Houlding:
Thanks for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
Explain to me how you became an adventurer. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? How did you get into this?
Leo Houlding:
I grew up in a place called the Lake District in the northwest of England, right by Scotland, about an hour and a half north of Manchester. Yeah, it's like a little bit of Scotland in England. It's a national park. National parks in the UK are really different to here. They're not wilderness areas, people live there. But it's sparsely populated and there's lots of forests and small mountains and rock faces and lakes. And my dad was kind of a keen, he was a keen fell walker, like a hiker, and a friend of his was a rock climber. And it was him, a guy called Malcolm Cundy that got me into rock climbing as a child when I was about nine. And that was the conduit into all this other stuff.
The reason I fell in love with rock climbing is because it gives you this real fast track to adventure. You don't have to kite ski across Antarctica or skydive into the Arctic or hack through the Amazon rainforest. You just have to go 20 feet up and all of a sudden you have all the elements of adventure, the risk, the challenge, the sense of purpose that you get from going on big adventures. And I really love that about climbing and that's been the kind of guiding light to most of my life and most of the adventures. I never knew when I was a kid that I would turn it into a profession that would last three decades. I've been doing it virtually full time.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you remember that first time rock climbing?
Leo Houlding:
I actually do. I remember it very clearly because it was an absolute sort of revelatory moment when very, very early on, I fell in love with it straight away. We tend to like things that we're good at. And I was quite a late developer, so I was a really small child. I was one of the smallest kids in my year group. And so I never really enjoyed school sports, and you don't have to be told to be a good climber. There's a lot of technique involved.
And then the really, really formative experience was about six months after we started, we did this thing called the Old Man of Hoy in Scotland. It's a tower. They're a bit like the desert towers that you see out in Utah. It's sandstone, 450 feet tall, sticks up out the sea in a place called the Orkney Islands. It's offshore in the north of Scotland. And it's a wild place, just getting to the base of it is a wild adventure. You get these giant sea birds called fulmars, which can projectile vomit if you disturb them with surprising accuracy. And it's always windy in the waves.
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, what? There are these birds that can puke at you that are like terradactyl looking probably?
Leo Houlding:
Yeah, they're massive. The wingspan's about three feet and they can projectile vomit about 12 feet with this horrible fish bile stuff with remarkable accuracy.
Shelby Stanger:
That's amazing. What a cool superpower.
Leo Houlding:
Yeah. And they nest on the Old Man of Hoy. It's a full on adventure. It's a real inaccessible summit. There's nowhere to get there unless you climb. And I remember coming face to face with one of these seagulls and getting vomited on and then getting to the top of this thing in the wind and then having to get back down and you have to repel down. There's a big free hanging repel where you're just dangling in space for the last 200 feet. And when I got down, I just though that was the most amazing thing ever. This is what I want to do with my life.
And not just the experience, but the people that we were with, these kind of full generation older, but they were all lifers. They were people who'd committed their life to climbing. This life less ordinary very much on the path of what we're talking about here that to live a life full of adventure, to go to these wild places and do wild things with wild people.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, that sounds amazing. So 10-year-old Leo was just hooked. Then you became some sort of a little sensation though in your area. Is that correct? Right away, were you get picked up by magazines? How early did you turn pro?
Leo Houlding:
I mean, so that ascent, I was the youngest kid to have done it at that time, so it got some publicity. And then I did the competitions as a junior, so the national climbing competitions. I was a national junior champion in '96, I think it was, and did reasonably well in some of the international comps.
And then in the UK, you finish high school at 16 and you're supposed to go into two years of further education and then you go on to university. And I started what we call our A-levels when I was 16, having just had the most amazing summer in a place called North Wales, which is one of the real kind of heart and soul of British rock climbing and stuck about two months in college as a 16-year-old. And then with the full blessing of my parents, my parents said, "Okay, you want to be a professional rock climber? That does not sound like a brilliant career choice, but we'll pay your rent, which was 25 pounds, 30 bucks a week, but that's it. So you'll have a place to live, but you have to make it work. You have to be able to support yourself. And we'll give you a year and if it doesn't work out, then we'd like you to go back into education."
Shelby Stanger:
Leo took his parents up on the deal and managed to make it work, but those early days as a professional adventure were not luxurious. Leo lived cheaply, did a lot of hitchhiking, and pieced together just enough money to keep going. Then when he was just 17, Leo landed a sponsorship contract with the outdoor brand Berghaus. While getting a sponsorship was a big deal, it didn't mean Leo was guaranteed enough money to live on. So he started giving talks about going on outdoor adventures and took whatever opportunities he could to fund the next climb.
A few years later, the BBC did a documentary about Leo called My Right Foot, which followed the story of an injury that Leo sustained while climbing. That film led to more mainstream TV work. He once raced British TV host Jeremy Clarkson to the top of a 1,300 foot cliff in France. He also joined an Everest expedition with Conrad Anker that became the film The Wildest Dream. And eventually Leo hosted his own British series called Take Me to the Edge, where he brought other people along on wild adventures around the world.
On your adventurous path in life, you've done these expeditions, they've become movies, they've led to tours, but you've also done some TV shows. How do those come about?
Leo Houlding:
I haven't done a lot of TV in recent years. In my mid to late 20s, I did a lot, and I did all kinds of different things, adventure-based documentary stuff. And I made a lot of money. That was kind of a life changer because I think I made more money in five years of TV than I did in certainly 15 years of climbing. So that was good and I managed not to waste it all on fast cars.
But in the end, I sort of walked away from TV somewhat intentionally because it's not real. It really isn't. The whole point of adventure, in my opinion, there's three key elements. There has to be an element of genuine risk. There has to be an element of uncertainty. You do not know what's going to happen. When you set out on that adventure, it's not a foregone conclusion and there has to be an element of challenge. And in television, you really don't have that because there's no genuine risk. They don't really put people in danger. You can't for legal reasons. And there's no uncertainty. It's basically a foregone conclusion. And there's a narrative arc which is pretty much predisposed because they're not going to give you a million bucks to go off on some uncertain adventure and not get to the top. That's not how it works.
So I kind of ended up with quite a lot of contempt for what is so-called adventure TV. And I was finding it really difficult to put this presenter face on and kind of pretend that something was really extreme and really dangerous whilst at the same time having a much bigger part of my identity invested in real adventure where the uncertainty is real and the risk is real.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2009, Leo organized what he considers his first true big time expedition. He assembled a team of seven people and headed to Baffin Island, a remote island off the coast of Northern Canada, a few hundred miles west of Greenland. Their goal was to complete the first free climb of the north face of Mount Asgard, a mountain with two massive flat top granite towers rising out of the Arctic Tundra. The sheer rock walls stretched thousands of feet into the sky, but even getting to the mountain would be an adventure of its own. Leo's plan was to skydive into the wilderness near its base.
Leo Houlding:
Somehow managed to get a permit from the National Park, somehow managed to get the green light from the aircraft owner to skydive in and airdrop all our stuff, but we needed the blessing of the pilot. They're in charge, they're the captain. So this Indiana Jones plane shows up, the door swings open and this Canadian guy steps out with his cowboy boots on. Okay, this is a good start. And his name was Rob. And I remember asking him, I was like, "Oh Rob, yeah." He goes, "You're the crazy fools that want to do the airdrop?" And I said, "Yes, yes we are. And do you think it'd be possible to jump out of the aircraft as well, to skydive in?" And he said, "You guys want to skydive in?" We said, "Yeah, would that be okay?" And he was like, "Hell yeah."
And then we did and we flew off into this place that looks like something out of middle earth. It's unreal, some of the tallest cliffs in the world. And then we pulled around the corner and Mount Asgard is this incredible El Capitan sized double barreled citadel. It's just a huge castle. It is absolutely spectacular. And then we, one by one, threw all these barrels of equipment out with these little parachutes, which I got off eBay from a military surplus place for 20 bucks each that said, "Do not use for aerial delivery." But we modified them with the help of a rigger, a parachute rigger, and we threw all this stuff out and then we jumped out this plane and it was sick. We had no communications. We had no sat phone. We had no... This is 2009.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you find each other? And you're like geared.
Leo Houlding:
We landed right next to each other and the plane did one more pass. We got a broken communication. Okay, we're all good. And then there we were on this glacier underneath the massive northwest face of Mount Asgard, unable to see any of our stuff. I just remember thinking immediately, oh man, we should have put more stuff in our pockets. Anyway, we managed to find most of our stuff and then we had the most incredible month, five weeks in the Arctic, including climbing the northwest face of this really difficult wall and then jumping off the top of it with wingsuits to get back down and it was utterly mind-blowing.
Shelby Stanger:
After Baffin Island, Leo's adventures only grew bigger. In 2010, he successfully climbed the first ascent of The Prophet, which is a notoriously difficult route on El Capitan that he'd been working on for years. Then in 2012, he headed deep into the Venezuelan Amazon to attempt a first ascent on a quartzite tower in the middle of the jungle. In 2017, Leo headed to Antarctica for an expedition to a mountain called The Spectre, which is considered to be one of the most remote mountains on earth. Logistic expenses are so high that no independent expeditions have ever climbed in the region. Leo's plan was to kite ski there, using the wind to pull him in his gear across thousands of miles of Antarctic ice.
Leo Houlding:
I though, wouldn't it be cool instead of using a plane, get onto the continent and then be completely self-supported using the wind? And that's where The Spectre expedition came from. We did 2,000 mile wind supported trip. The start weight of the sledges was 215 kilos, that's about 450 pounds. That's massive. You couldn't move that without a kite, but it's sick.
Shelby Stanger:
It's not like the surface is powder or straight. So how does your ski not catch edges and then you go on ice and how do you not eat it 24/7?
Leo Houlding:
You do, but you try not to. There's a certain amount of skill. It's a very skill-based thing. It's quite a high skill level. It's a lot harder than it looks, especially in rough conditions. The closest place, which is 500 miles, is the South Pole. It's fair to say it's the most remote mountain in the world. It's a thousand miles from anywhere, but it's just beautiful. It's almost like a crystal of granite that sticks up out of this otherwise quite unattractive range. But it's prohibitively expensive to get there. You could fly in and fly out, but the costs become exponential. So to fly in and fly out, you'd be looking at the best part of a million dollars for an expedition like that.
So what we did is we just took one flight, which was the point of no return, which was really close to the South Pole. We could have gone to the South Pole, but we chose not to because you often get a circle around the South Pole for the last degree or so where often there's no wind. So we decided to start just outside the wind shadow. And then yeah, we went on this harebrained adventure. We had food for 80 days and in the end we finished in 60 days because you never know how long it's going to take with wind.
But it didn't quite go according to plan. To put it bluntly, the first good day of kiting that we had was day 42 of the expedition. It was brutal. You'd do like 30 kilometers across this terrible sastrugi terrain, -40. We spent the first four days in the tent. We didn't even get out the tent for the first four days. We had a full on blizzard early season, the middle of November. It was brutal.
But then it came good and we didn't actually do what we wanted to do. We wanted to climb the south spur of The Spectre, which I'm loath to tell your listeners about because it's probably the best unclimbed line on the planet through my eyes.
Shelby Stanger:
Once they reached the base of the mountain, the team realized that they didn't really have the right equipment to climb the route as planned, so they had to choose a different route altogether. Even with those unexpected challenges, the expedition was a remarkable feat. It made headlines around the world and became a documentary called Spectre Expedition: To the End of the Earth. These days, after decades of pushing the limits on expeditions, Leo has been embracing a different kind of adventure, traveling the world with his family.
For years, Leo Houlding would spend months at a time in some of the most isolated corners of the world. But about 13 years ago, once he became a father, Leo's priorities started to shift. He was still a committed adventurer, but he was also a devoted father who wanted to spend as much time with his family as possible. In 2024, Leo and his wife made a bold decision. They decided to take their kids who were 8 and 11 at the time out of school for an entire year to travel the world.
Leo Houlding:
We did a back-to-back year around the world of various stuff. We started off in Northern Norway, which is one of our favorite places. And then we spent the second half of the year in Nepal, in Papua New Guinea and Kyrgyzstan going on legit expeditions that most adults would be way out of their depth on. And it was absolutely insane. We climbed El Capitan during that year. We spent a week on the wall with the kids.
Shelby Stanger:
Let's talk about that. So you spent a week on the wall with the kids. This doesn't mean you were going and staying in a tent at Camp 4 or you were at that hotel, the The Ahwahnee or the Hotel Majestic. You were not staying even in, what is it called? The Village?
Leo Houlding:
I mean, we were. We were there for a month, right? And so we were staying in the campgrounds.
Shelby Stanger:
You were, but for a few days.
Leo Houlding:
Seven nights.
Shelby Stanger:
Seven nights you were on a portaledge, right?
Leo Houlding:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
So you were in a tent on the side of the actual mountain, thousands of feet in the air?
Leo Houlding:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
How old were your kids?
Leo Houlding:
Jackson had just turned 8 by a few weeks and Freya was 11.
Shelby Stanger:
So your 8, 11-year-old and your wife and you.
Leo Houlding:
Yeah. And then two of my buddies, one of my main climbing partners, a guy called Wilson Cutbirth and another friend called Xander Bianchi. And so the three of us did most of the climbing and logistics, and Jess looked after the kids and the kids climbed the ropes. So we did it day on, day off. We would climb for a day and fix ropes, and then the next day we would move the kids and all the equipment up and have a camp, and then the next day we would climb, fix the ropes, and so that's how we did it.
Shelby Stanger:
So talk to me about just the basics, like eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom and how your kids adjusted.
Leo Houlding:
I mean, they loved it. We do a lot of backcountry camping anyway, so they're quite okay with living in a small tent. I taught them how to jumar in the tree in my garden at home.
Shelby Stanger:
What's jumar?
Leo Houlding:
Jumaring is climbing ropes. The jumar are the rope clamps. They're called jumars.
Shelby Stanger:
Got it. Okay.
Leo Houlding:
And jumaring is how you ascend ropes. And the kids, that's what they did the whole time. Climbing El Cap, the rock, it's really hard. So they jumared the whole thing. But they did it under their own steam the whole way. But you do get used to... It is a confined space, right? Clearly there's a really funny scene in the film we made of Freya talking us through, here's the bathroom and here's the kitchen and here's the dining room and here's the bedroom all in the same six foot by three foot space of the portaledge.
But they aced it. They Loved it. They didn't get scared. We've built up to this. I wouldn't recommend that you take your children up El Cap unless you've done a lot of other stuff and you're pretty competent yourself. I mean, we had a full-on winter storm. It was early November, so we had a full-on winter storm on day six when we were high on the wall. It snowed six inches. And they were so excited, Jackson was so excited making snowballs and having an inter-portaledge snowball fight.
But it's a powerful bonding experience as well. Another part of the reason we decided to take the kids out of school for a year is because once they start school, you barely see them. They're in class from 9:00 AM till 4:00 PM, and then they have afterschool sports clubs, and you hardly have any time. You have the holidays, and we've done all this amazing stuff in the school holidays, but a lot of these adventures, you can't choose when to do them. For example, climbing in Antarctica, you can only do that in December and January. In Baffin Island in the Arctic, you can only do that in July, depending on what you're doing. So you can't do it in the August summer holiday.
Shelby Stanger:
Leo and his family spent the winter of 2024 to 2025 skiing in Japan, they attempted a 17,000 foot peak in Nepal in the spring and traveled on horseback into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan in the summer. Between expeditions, they even spent a couple of weeks kayaking between tropical islands and Oceana.
Leo Houlding:
The wildest thing we did by miles was we went to this incredible corner of earth, which is called the Calvados Islands, which is an archipelago of tropical islands in the South Pacific. And there's a coral reef around this whole archipelago that kind of protects it from the big ocean swells, but then there's this chain of islands that runs for 100 miles. None of them are more than about five miles apart, and so you can kayak between them, and that's what we did.
We flew out there with inflatable sea kayaks and inflatable standup paddle boards. We chartered a ship that took us 200 miles from the tip of Papua New Guinea out to this island, and then we paddled between these tropical islands, half of which are uninhabited, and the other half are inhabited by basically tribal people that live in this other world. They don't have money. It's a non-monetary society. They trade. There's no shops, there's nothing to buy, so they don't use money. And they speak English because over the decades and centuries, the missionaries have been out there and they've done a lot of work in Papua New Guinea. So they all speak English. So you'd rock up in an inflatable sea kayak on this beach and everyone on the village would come out.
And then we brought loads of fishing gear, fishing hooks and fishing line and snorkeling gear, masks and snorkels and swimming goggles, stuff that we could fit in our kayaks that we would trade with these islanders mostly for fish or crayfish, lobsters. We also brought loads of reading glasses, which was an absolute winner because they have no healthcare out there. We spent two weeks, the family and two friends, and then two other guys. There was eight of us, and we paddled across these islands and just had this wild experience, and then the boat picked us up at the other end.
And it was just another world. It's tropical paradise on the one hand, it looks like the Seychelles, but on the other hand, there's no infrastructure whatsoever. There's no showers. There's hardly any fresh water. You're eating basically fish stew with a few vegetables every night, cooking on a fire. It was a really powerful experience to be out there with these people in that environment.
Shelby Stanger:
How did the locals like your kids?
Leo Houlding:
They loved them. Particularly Jackson, my son, he's really good at making friends. He was on that island where we spent a couple of days. There was this one kid, they traveled around and dug out canoes, and he was surfing it. He was fully catching waves on this little point break. And he took Jackson out and they're fully catching waves, kayak style, get going, paddle really hard, get on it, dig the ring, go across, staying on the face of the wave the whole way. And that was why we went on this year of adventure to try and nurture experiences like that.
Shelby Stanger:
What advice do you have for parents who want to raise adventurous kids? I kind of liked your advice of just forcing them to do it.
Leo Houlding:
Yeah, I mean, it definitely takes encouragement, but again, everyone benefits from a little bit more adventure in their lives, everyone. And it is difficult. Certainly the first part is the most difficult, getting going is the hardest part. But once you get going, keep going. Children are so much more capable than most parents give them credit for. Jackson did a 14-mile hike with a 13,000 foot pass, 3,500 feet of elevation in the Wind River Range when he was four. He was four years old, and Jess was holding his hand and she wasn't carrying a load because she thought she might have to carry him, but we though we'll see how far he can go, and he did it. I had no idea that a four-year-old child could do a day. It's a big day. Any of us would find that a challenging day. And he was four years old, and yeah, he was knackered at the end of it, but he pulled it off. They are so much tougher and more resilient and capable.
And as parents, your primary task is to make sure they make it to adulthood, right? You have to keep them safe physically, and we're good at that, but a lot of the buffering that we do puts them in a dangerous place psychologically. So learning how to manage fear, being exposed to manage fear to dangerous situations within reason early in life, I think is really, really important.
And my advice to people would be, obviously, you've got to start within your capacity. If you're doing stuff, especially with young children, you have to be within your own comfort zone. You can't be operating at your own max with a young family in tow. But adventure is very much a relative thing. It doesn't have to be this crazy stuff I'm talking about right here. It's go backcountry camping, even if it's just for one night, but it has to be backcountry. Car camping's cool, but-
Shelby Stanger:
I would argue that for some people, car camping is a huge adventure.
Leo Houlding:
You're right, it can be. And the car camping in the western states is off the hook, but it is different when you get away from roads. Roads are infrastructure. Roads are quick access for rescue, quick access for help. Once you get an hour or two away from a road, there's a much more sense of independence and commitment. And yeah, just to engage with it and to start low and build up.
And then there's a couple of practical tricks, which number one is hiking is quite boring. And one of the things that we've found doing all these big missions with little kids is they get bored, but we do a lot of hiking because that's how you get into the backcountry, that's how you get to the climbs. So there's a few tricks. One, especially when the kids were really little, we play games constantly, 20 questions. And then our absolute secret weapon is we listen to stories, audio stories, and I have a little speaker that I have clipped in my bag, and we've listened to the whole Harry Potter sequence. Harry Potter, Stephen Fry accompanied us all the way up El Cap, and we've been on many backcountry adventures. And I have the speaker on my pack. So if the kids want to hear the story, they have to keep up. And it just makes it a bit less boring. They get lost in the story and they wonder, and it really works. It's a trick that keeps them going.
You have to keep them fueled as well. We try to avoid the sugary snacks thing, but the odd bribe, it does work too, but you have to keep them fueled up. We did a 15-hour day last week with a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old, which that's a big day.
Shelby Stanger:
I think I'm going to have to start listening to some audio stories because a 15 day would be huge for me.
Leo Houlding:
Yeah, no, it is. It is. It was a long old push. But it helps, and then keep them fueled, keep them moving. And it's really cool now because they're really starting to engage with it on their own terms. It's part of their own identity. We tend to do it together, but they don't need so much force or encouragement anymore. They're stoked, they're ready to go.
Shelby Stanger:
Along with his family's adventures, Leo is still doing big time expeditions and is even coming out with a few new adventure films this year. His three-part family series, Big Adventures, Small People, is now live on his YouTube channel along with Spectre Expedition. We'll link to his YouTube channel in the show notes. Leo has also written two books, Closer To The Edge and Exposed, that you can find wherever you buy books. To see what he's up to now, follow Leo on Instagram @leohoulding. That's L-E-O H-O-U-L-D-I-N-G.
Shout out to Shane Wallace at Berghaus for recommending Leo for the show. We ran into Shane at Outside Fest in Denver, which was an awesome event. Hope to see some of you there next year.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It was created by and is hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby.
Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love it when you follow the show. Take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.