overhanging section that will eventually collapse. Human activity Climbing The stack was first climbed by mountaineers Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie and Tom Patey in 1966. From 8–9 July 1967, an ascent featured in The Great Climb, a live BBC three-night outside broadcast, which had around 15 million viewers. This featured three pairs of climbers: Bonington and Patey repeated their original route, whilst two new lines were climbed by Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis and by Pete Crew and Dougal Haston. In 1997, Catherine Destivelle made a solo ascent of the Old Man of Hoy; she did so while four months pregnant; her climb is captured in the 1998 climbing film, Rock Queen. This climb was filmed and has often been credited as the first solo ascent, but the Old Man had previously been soloed in October 1985 by Scots climber Bob Duncan; like Destivelle, he backroped the second, crux pitch, though he also backroped the top pitch because "it looked harder from below than it turned out to be". Red Széll became the first blind person to climb the Old Man, despite suffering from retinitis pigmentosa that left him with 5% vision. With assistance from Martin Moran and Nick Carter, he scaled the stack in 2013. The youngest person to climb the Old Man is Edward Mills, who was 8 years old when he completed the climb in 4 hours 55 minutes on 9 June 2018, to raise money for the charity Climbers Against Cancer as his mother had terminal breast cancer. He was accompanied by his trainers, Ben West and Cailean Harker. There are seven routes up the stack, the most commonly used of which is the original landward facing East Face Route, graded E1 5b (Extremely Severe). A log book in a Tupperware container is buried in a cairn on the summit, as an ascensionists' record. As many as fifty ascents of the stack are made each year. Highling On 10 July 2017, Alexander Schulz completed a highline walk to and from the summit, at above the sea on a line long. BASE jumping Roger Holmes, Gus Hutchison-Brown, and Tim Emmett made the first BASE jump from the stack on 14 May 2008. Hutchinson-Brown died 11 days later during a jump in Switzerland. On 27 July 2019, two Poles, Filip Kubica and Dominik Grajner repeated BASE jumped from the top. References Citations Sources External links Catherine Destivelle's solo