Climbing The
first ascent of the stack was by the 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 1968 Christine Crawshaw became the first woman to reach the summit of Hoy. 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. In 2014, Chris Bonington made the ascent again to mark his 80th birthday and to raise funds for research into
Motor Neuron Disease, from which his wife Wendy had recently died. In 2019,
Jesse Dufton became the first blind climber to lead an ascent on Old Man of Hoy. The climb was the subject of the 2020 film
Climbing Blind. The youngest female to climb the Old Man of Hoy is Sophia Wood, who was 10 years old when she completed the climb in just over 3 hours in June 2023. She traveled from the southeast of Virginia USA to Hoy Scotland UK and completed the climb with her two guides Edmund Hastings and Alex Riley. Sophia used this climb to start a fundraiser to help introduce climbing to kids with the "Boys and Girls Club" in her local area. Aden Thurlow (born 2013) is a Scottish climber known for becoming the youngest person to lead climb the Old Man of Hoy at the age of 12. He completed the ascent on 24 September 2025, supported by safety climber Jim Miller and second climber Alan Thurlow, as part of a family expedition that also included Lynn Thurlow. Aden Thurlow is additionally recognised for being the youngest climber to lead all three of Scotland’s major sea stacks for charity —the Old Man of Hoy, the Old Man of Stoer, and Am Buachaille—before the age of 13. His earlier achievements include leading the Old Man of Stoer and Am Buachaille at 11 years old, making him the youngest known lead climber to complete all three routes. 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.
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. ==See also==