Canadian Dreamers: Brad Zdanivsky, Rock Climber

Imagine the following scenario: you are hanging five hundred metres in the air, suspended by little more than a few ropes. The granite rock face you are climbing lightly scrapes your shoulders, challenging you to stop fighting gravity’s desire to pull you down.

If you are like most people, you might start to panic, if not give up. But if you are a rock climber like 33-year-old Brad Zdanivsky, you get that familiar feeling that pushes you to climb even higher – bliss.

It seems like Zdanivsky was born to climb. As a child he fondly remembers climbing trees and hills. Slowly, those hills became boulders, and those boulders soon became mountains. By the time he was a teenager, Zdanivsky had scaled the 1420-metre Mount Pope in northern British Columbia. A car accident in 1994, however, changed Zdanivsky’s mountains. Left with a spinal cord injury, he spent months learning how to sit up, how to feed himself grapes, and how to move chess pieces around on a chess board.

Bishops and grapes were not enough, however. Zdanivsky needed to get back to the rock. Despite having lost control of his hands and legs, Zdanivsky set his sights on climbing the Stawamus Chief, a 650-metre monolith near Squamish, British Columbia.

Many obstacles tried to prevent Zdanivsky from getting there. Firstly, because of his injury, Zdanivsky experiences “autonomic dysreflexia”, a condition that means he cannot regulate the things most athletes depend on to keep pushing themselves – blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate. For Zdanivsky, a sudden increase in blood pressure could cause a seizure, stroke, or heart attack – all especially life-threatening when suspended in the air.

Secondly, no quadriplegic had ever climbed before – so Zdanivsky had to develop his own equipment and climbing methods, with the help of many friends and family members. The team went through a series of prototypes (“and a lot of duct tape!” Zdanivsky adds) to design a comfortable harness and counter-weighted pulley that Zdanivsky could use to pull himself up the rock with the shoulder and arm muscles he still controlled. Seven years later, on his second attempt, Zdanivsky summitted the Chief in 14 hours, becoming the first quadriplegic to achieve that feat.

Like any climber who has reached a peak, his sights are now set on an even higher goal: the 910-metre El Capitan rock in Yosemite National Park, an internationally-renowned climbing challenge. In working towards this goal, “I’ve had to be my own guinea pig,” Zdanivsky says, as so little is known about quadriplegic climber physiology and equipment design. Currently, Zdanivsky is working on technologies to support this challenging climb, such as devices to externally regulate his own blood pressure and breathing volumes. He publishes his computer science codes, devices, and equipment working designs, as well as data about their safety, comfort, and success or lack thereof at no cost, in order to help others hoping to climb.

Ultimately, Zdanivsky – who has also been sky-diving (“twice”, he exclaims says with a grin) – wants to open up adventure sports to other quadriplegics. “Right now, the only sport available to quadriplegics is wheelchair rugby. What if I don’t want to do that?” he asks. Eventually, he wants to share the benefits of climbing he has experienced through creating a program to help other quadriplegics try climbing.

To learn more about Brad Zdanivsky’s journey, visit his blog.

Posted by Ranita Manocha