Chaos (XS, 45m) was the last large unclimbed sea stack in Ireland when Miller made the first ascent in 2019 with Canadian Will Gadd, who described it as the “best and worst rock I’ve ever climbed, all within one hundred feet.”
Salty Peaks
On the coast of Ireland, a Scotsman is obsessed with the singular pursuit of climbing sea stacks
Iain Miller has spent thirteen years climbing alone and without protection on the sea stacks of County Donegal, on the northwest coast of Ireland, but when asked how the quartzite spires on that weatherbeaten stretch of sea compare to better-known climbing venues, he’s temporarily at a loss.
“Let me ask you the question,” he countered after a lengthy pause. “Can you name any climb in the world in which you can swim with a basking shark during the process of doing that climb?”
In a conversation of more than an hour, we never did come back to how the Donegal stacks compare to Yosemite’s granite walls or the pocketed limestone of the Gorge du Tarn in France or even whether Miller has bothered to visit those climbing meccas.
“If you’d lived in two places and both of those places were almost entirely untouched by other climbers and you could just pick new rock faces and new lines
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