John Price/Supplied
As a child, William Joseph Stanhope earned the nickname “Impossible Boy.” His parents used the name so often that they shortened it to “Imposs.”
The boy was always willing to do a task that left others stumped, whether it was unclogging his grandfather’s well by hanging down a rope in a wetsuit, or climbing high up a tree to clear a dead branch.
Sometimes those “impossible” feats were simply for the thrill, such as jumping off his parents’ roof into the pool.
“He was always willing to do what nobody else was,” his mother, Shelley Stanhope, said.
That daring spirit led Mr. Stanhope to become one of the world’s premier rock climbers, a figure who developed close relationships with other celebrities in the sport like Alex Honnold and was featured in movies and magazines around the world.
Mr. Stanhope died at age 39 on April 23 after suffering a brain injury from a fall 10 days earlier while climbing on the Stawamus Chief, a granite monolith in Squamish, B.C. His rugged life led to great accomplishments, but it also contributed to his depression and addiction in recent years.
He established notable first ascents across the Americas, regularly climbing in South America’s Patagonia region, California’s Yosemite Valley and across B.C. On occasion, Mr. Stanhope would climb free solo (the high-risk method of climbing alone without a rope).
But his real specialty was alpine crack climbing - a form of the sport that takes place in hard-to-reach glacial landscapes with towering cliff faces, where climbers follow a crack in sheer, vertical rock and follow it to high-altitude peaks. They use a rope and wedge pieces of metal gear into cracks to catch their falls. On longer climbs, they will bring a portaledge (a small, hanging shelter), which they use to camp on the wall for days at a time.
Instead of using handholds, crack climbers jam their fingers, fists and toes into the crack and twist them, using the friction to lock them in place. It can be painful and bloody. Mr. Stanhope wrote about losing feeling in his toe for two months after one ascent.
Perhaps his greatest achievement in rock climbing was establishing the first unassisted ascent of the Tom Egan Memorial Route in 2015 in the Bugaboo Provincial Park in B.C., a vaunted alpine climbing destination deep in glaciated backcountry. (It had previously been climbed with tools that allowed climbers to get past the hardest sections.)
On a rainy day in 2017, Will Stanhope cruises up the Apron Strings climbing route on Stawamus Chief, a massive granite monolith in Squamish, B.C. Mr. Stanhope was climbing Stawamus Chief on a different route on April 13 when he fell and sustained a head injury that proved to be fatal.John Price/Supplied
The route followed a crack system up Snowpatch Spire, a mountain peak that is roughly 3,000 metres above sea level. The difficulty rating of 5.14 (on a scale that goes from 5.0 to 5.15) made it the hardest alpine-crack climb in the world at the time.
It took four years of attempts alongside his partner, Matt Segal, until they finally were able to power through the climb’s hardest sections without falling.
Every summer, the two would make their pilgrimage to a campsite beside a glacier and live in the wilderness through July and August – the only months where weather in the area co-operated. It was an all-consuming project.
A short film about the ascent, called Boys in the Bugs, chronicled Mr. Stanhope’s unusually lighthearted and goofy approach to climbing. He never took himself too seriously, and there were always antics, like polishing off a bottle of Jameson Irish whisky with Mr. Segal and the camera crew after the bottle’s cap fell from their portaledge.
But Mr. Segal says the film didn’t show how they often wondered if they were throwing away years on something impossible.
“It was an emotional rollercoaster. There was a lot of doubt, a lot of time toiling and dealing with weather,” Mr. Segal said.
“It was this time in our life where nothing else really mattered. That’s where most of [our] friendship lived.”
Mr. Stanhope’s goofy, humorous and caring nature made him popular in the climbing community, especially throughout his 20s.
But he had his demons, too. Many of his closest friends died in the mid- and late-2010s, from mountain accidents. One of the toughest losses for Mr. Stanhope was the death of Hayden Kennedy, who killed himself after his girlfriend, Inge Perkins, was fatally buried in an avalanche. She was unable to be saved because her transceiver was turned off. Mr. Kennedy had been skiing with Ms. Perkins when the avalanche happened.
“With every lost friend it took a really big toll on Will and it came out in the form of addiction,” Mr. Segal said.
Mr. Stanhope’s parents said he became deeply depressed and heavily addicted to alcohol for years, and went to rehab multiple times. He was facing multiple charges, including assault, sexual assault and criminal harassment, for alleged incidents in 2024 and 2025. None of the allegations have been proven in court, where he was due to appear later in the year.
Will Gadd, a legendary Canadian ice climber and a friend of Mr. Stanhope, said that although he couldn’t excuse Mr. Stanhope’s alleged bad behaviour, the cycle of addiction, mental health troubles and hurting others has played out before in the climbing community.
“Will’s struggle and death encouraged me to look at hard living in climbing. … There’s a lot of people who walked in those struggles as well,” said Mr. Gadd, who said climbers are used to living rough lives in stressful environments, and turning to substances to cope.
“A lot of climbers have had serious mental-health strain, but in our culture you’re supposed to be hard men and you’re not supposed to deal with it, and it’s not productive.”
Mr. Stanhope wrote about the difficult emotions he felt while climbing at times. He was an avid reader and writer, and wrote in the American Alpine Journal about a near-death experience on Smoke and Mirrors, a route that Mr. Stanhope established alongside climber Tim Emmett in the Waddington Range in B.C. It was one of his last great ascents and is in contention for the tallest rock climb in Canada, standing at 1,400 metres tall, roughly the height of two and a half CN Towers.
He described feeling “dangerously tired” after a two-day push to complete the climb, and upon descent, the team didn’t tie a knot in the end of a rope they were rappelling on (a common safety practice to prevent rappelling off the end of a rope).
His partner only realized the error right before he was about rappel off the rope into a potentially fatal fall.
“The weight of the experience felt heavy after Tim’s near-miss at the end of a long and at times risky climb,” Mr. Stanhope wrote in 2025, saying that he was “wracked with guilt.”
“We got lucky.”
Despite the criminal charges and addiction in Mr. Stanhope’s life, his friends and family said he influenced many others in the climbing community, and tributes poured in from around the world upon news of his death.
“The unsavoury stuff, you cannot look away from that, it’s there,” Mr. Gadd said. “But we also have to remember and celebrate the light.” And Mr. Stanhope had a ton of light, he added.
His mother said that aside from climbing, reading was the other obsession in Mr. Stanhope’s life. As a kid, he dove into crates of old climbing magazines and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of history in the sport.
He was constantly gifting books to people, including his favourite: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean. Half of his bookshelf was climbing-related. The rest were classics.
“Everybody who knows him got a book from him,” Ms. Stanhope said.
The fall that led to Mr. Stanhope’s death happened on a relatively easy route – one that his father said Will could have easily free-soloed in the past. His parents say years of alcohol abuse and struggles likely left him off his game.
His father, Robert Stanhope, said his son likely flipped upside down after his foot was caught on the rope during the fall - something that is a particular risk on the crux of the route he was climbing because of the position of the rope.
However, Mr. Stanhope’s parents said, their son was in good spirits on that day, had a renewed energy about trying to recover from his addiction, and fell from Stawamus Chief on a beautiful day while pursuing his life’s passion.
They were glad that he was climbing with a partner, and they were told when they reached the hospital that he had no alcohol in his blood.
“We can take solace from that, that he died [from] doing what he loved,” his father said.
Will Stanhope leaves his parents; his younger sister, Emily Gair; brother-in-law, Trevor Gair; and two young nieces.
The Tom Egan Memorial Route in the Bugaboos, where Mr. Stanhope completed his famous ascent, was destroyed in a massive rockfall event in 2022. The climb will never be repeated.
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