A video of an alleged 81-year-old scaling a crevasse without any rope is being shared on social media, claiming him to be a man named Nick Gardner. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: These visuals show an 81-year-old man named Nick Gardner scaling a crevasse.
Fact: Although there is a real person named Nick Gardner who, at the age of 82, finished climbing Scotland’s 282 Munros (Mountains higher than 3000 Feet), the man seen in this video is not him. He is a Russian rock climber named Andrey Andronovich Didukh. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To learn more about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes on the internet. This search led us to a few articles and videos (here, here, and here) that feature the same person who appears in the viral clip. His name is Andrey Andronovich Didukh; reportedly, he is a Russian rock climber who is in his 70s. In one of the videos available on YouTube, he can be seen scaling a rock identical to the one in the viral clip.
One user identified the location of the video as Krasnoyarsk. Taking this as a hint, we performed a quick Google search, revealing that the rocks in the viral video are known as the Rock Pillars (here and here). These are located near the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk. In one of the pictures Andrey uploaded on Instagram, he can be seen posing in front of the same “Rock Pillar.”
Further, we performed a keyword search on the internet to learn about the alleged 81-year-old climber Nick Gardner (his Instagram). This led us to several reports (here, here, and here) on this person.
As per the reports from last year, he was 82 years old. Nick lives in Scotland and completed a unique challenge last year: climbing the 282 Scotland Munros (mountains higher than 3000ft.) Reportedly, he started mountain climbing after his wife went into “full-time care” after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Osteoporosis.
The post misquoted him as the climber, while it was actually Andrey, the Russian climber who is featured in the video. You can see the difference between both of them in the following collage.
To sum up, the man in this video is not Nick Gardner, who climbed Scotland’s 282 Munros.
