Your ‘Everest’ may be found much closer to home

Look up ‘popular leisure pursuits for people in their 70s’ and you will find gardening, walking, swimming, painting and travel high on the list.

Rock climbing? Well, you might have to turn the page and the next one and a few more, but that is exactly what 73-year-old Ian Elliott does for fun.

His interest in rock climbing has taken him on adventures, transported him to legend status in the sport and put him on the big screen.

A short film about his age-defying exploits, simply titled Ian, made the line-up of the 2025 Banff Mountain Film Festival: a prestigious international film competition focusing on sports, mountain culture and the environment.

For the retired Sunshine Coast cane farmer, the attention is all a bit of a lark.

After all, rock climbing is something he has been doing for years, although he was a bit of a late bloomer.

A keen bushwalker who had done four- and five-day treks with his partner Jeanette through rough, trail-less back country, he progressed to rock climbing in middle age, doing his first serious climbing with ropes and harness at Girraween National Park, near Stanthorpe, about 1996.

“We’d gone out to the Sphinx, that area of Girraween, and met some people there who were rock climbing and they said, ‘Do you want to have a go? Here’s a harness, a pair of shoes and off you go’ sort of thing,” he says.

“They were top roping. They had a rope up and belayers underneath. The rope’s always going up to an anchor above you so you can’t really fall. That’s how I started.

“I thought, ‘This is fun. I like this. This is good’. That’s when I started doing a bit more and it just sort of kept going. It’s one way of going places and doing things.”

By 2004-05, Ian was seriously into climbing. He was travelling to Thailand for a month to climb with climbers all around the world.

Ian climbed several times a year with the son of friends but when that person was drawn towards a different activity,  Ian looked for other climbing options  such as Mount Coolum, just down the road from his home at Yaroomba, on the Sunshine Coast.

“I’d been overseas and climbed over there in South Thailand, and I came back here and didn’t have anyone to climb with anymore,”  he recalls.

“I looked up ‘rock climbing on the Sunshine Coast’ and there was a comment in there on one of the web pages about Matt Eaton bolting routes at Coolum cave.

“I’d been up there in 1998 and we hadn’t seen any sign of any climbing there at all. This was 2005, maybe early 2006.”

Ian went along, met Matt and another nearby resident, Frey Yule, who both climbed several times a week. And so he began climbing with them regularly at Mount Coolum.

All climbs are named and graded. Just before his 70th birthday, Ian tackled a  long and hard climb at Mount Coolum called Call of Duty: an extension of another climb known as Weapon of Choice and graded at 28, which is regarded as reasonably difficult.

“The grades are open ended. It’s up around 37, 38 now,” he says.

“There’s only about two or three climbers in the world who climb at  those grades. You’re getting a lot more younger climbers now who are spending a lot more time in the gym.

“When I started climbing, very few people climbed those grades. That’s a whole different story: the evolution of climbing around the world and … the levels of difficulty people are climbing now and the amount of training they’re doing to do it.

“People are climbing much harder stuff.”

Ian tries to climb at least once a week.

“There’s a group of us around the Coast who climb there regularly,” he says. “We all know each other so you can go virtually any time.

“We have a contact group so you know who’s going to be there and when.

“You just rock up and go for a climb.

“You only ever do two or three (climbs) because it’s hard work.

“It’s also very social up there. Coolum is one of the most social areas you’ll find.”

One of the major attractions of climbing for Ian is the opportunity to forget about the rest of the world for a while.

“The most enjoyable are climbs of what I call mid-range of difficulty,” he says.

“They’re not particularly physically challenging but more mentally challenging, some of the longer ones. But it’s just an enjoyable thing being out there.

“It’s something about the focus, climbing. You’ve got to focus on what’s in front of you.

“That’s a similarity with bushwalking as well. If you’re bushwalking in hard country, you’ve got to focus on your walking all the time. You can’t be thinking about anything else.

“You’ve just got to focus on your walking, where you’re going to put your foot next, while trying to look around and enjoy the scenery.”

Years of practice mean Ian slips into the mental zone for climbing.

“The switching off, the focus and the control of your thoughts become much easier the more that you do it,” Ian says.

“I don’t find it stressful. If you’re on familiar territory, it’s much easier because you know how everything’s going but even unfamiliar climbs that I’ve been on, you know your ability.”

Ian regards his age as an asset as a climber: “I’m a lot older and more cautious than a lot of younger climbers. That comes with the territory. I analyse the risks much more than younger people do and work out where it’s all good.”

His only injuries to date have been to a finger tendon, a partially torn hamstring and some bursitis behind a knee.

“The thing that stops you climbing, basically, is injury and I haven’t had any injuries that have been significant enough to stop me climbing,” he says.

Regular climbing helps Ian maintain his core and upper body strength, as do plenty of pull-ups.

“In any sort of climbing, it’s good to have that strength,” he says.

“Everyone really needs core strength because if your foot slips or something like that when you’re walking, that’s what stops the whole of you going.

“That strength in there allows you to control your whole body. That’s one of the advantages of that sort of training.”

Ian hopes Matt Raimondo’s documentary, which focuses very much on his climbing at Coolum cave, will help others realise what they can achieve.

“Matt just thought it would be an interesting story because there’s not that many 70-year-old climbers,” Ian says.

“There are a number of them around the world but it’s not that common: 70-year-old climbers climbing that sort  of difficulty. Some of the younger climbers have said that they can see that their bodies don’t have to stop them from climbing if they want to keep climbing.

“There’s not an end date. There probably is an end date but it’s probably not until you’re well into your 70s.”

Ian subscribes to the ‘use it or lose it’ theory when it comes to fitness and ageing.

He says physical activity such as rock climbing assists with maintaining bone density and balance, reducing the risk of falls, and being outdoors is good for mental health. Although weIl aware that everyone has an end date, his is not in sight yet.

He remembers a group of four  Japanese, the youngest in his mid-60s and the oldest in his 80s, whom he saw climbing in Thailand.

“They would come and climb quite difficult climbs, even the old guy. I’d seen him climb,” Ian says.

“He might have to have a rest. He wouldn’t fall but he might have to have a rest on a rope.

“He was in his 80s and still enjoying climbing, so it’s really just a matter of ‘if you want to do it, you can’.”