ELORA - Frederick Schuett's climbing exploits have come a long way since his start scampering down the sides of small Guelph hills using a beaten-up extension cord his dad was throwing in the garbage.
These days Schuett is ziplining over lava lakes with Brazilian celebrities, lowering a Middle Eastern princess into a volcano crater, ziplining high-end Japanese clients over volcanoes and helping make movies, commercials and documentaries.
Between those exciting adventures he teaches people to ice climb and rock climb, hosts corporate team building exercises, teaches mountaineering courses and a summer zip line over the Elora Gorge through his company, One Axe Pursuits.
“I like exploration and I like challenging myself," Schuett says. "Climbing and heights kind of scared me, not enough to paralyze me, but enough that I got a lot of adrenaline from it. I got a rush from it.”
One Axe operates out of a 19th-century former church just north of downtown Elora that doubles as home for him, his wife, Christa, and their three children.
One Axe opened for business 18 years ago and the company had 6,000 customers last year through its various offerings.
Occasionally you will find people rappelling out of the church tower.
“The business has continued to grow and grow,” he says. “It’s been a lot of fun.”
Schuett was around 10 when he and some friends rescued an extension cord from the garbage.
Along with friends, they used it to climb small hills in the neighbourhood. Eventually he purchased cheap ropes from Canadian Tire and would bike out to Rockwood Conservation Area to navigate the bigger cliffs there.
His love of climbing blossomed.
He took his first rock-climbing courses at 16, teaching himself a lot from a 1940s book on climbing he found in the high school library at Guelph CVI.
“I signed that thing out every day. That was my book. I studied that thing like crazy,” Schuett says. “That’s where I learned all my skills from.”
One Axe is the name of the business and it’s also Schuett’s nickname.
During an ice-climbing course in the Rockies when he was 18, Schuett expressed disappointment to the course instructor that they weren’t climbing up a more challenging glacier. The instructor promptly took one of Schuett’s two climbing axes away from him.
"That made it a lot more difficult," he laughs.
Schuett can also credit his love of climbing for meeting the love of his life.
He was teaching a climbing course at Guelph’s The Grotto climbing gym when he met Christa, who was taking the course. The couple now have three children.
Schuett was working at Guelph General Hospital when he was asked to help develop a business plan for an outdoor climbing business someone was planning to open.
When their plans fell through, Schuett and his wife decided to open the business themselves and One Axe Pursuits was born.
As the business has grown, so has Schuett’s reputation for the more exciting adventures.
They started when he helped a friend film a documentary for National Geographic in the Crater of Fire in Turkmenistan, a natural gas field collapsed into an underground cavern that was ignited by geologists 45 years ago to stop the spread of methane gas.
He took a Brazilian television personality ziplining over lava fields, lowered Japanese businessman into a volcano and filmed a nine-day trek through the mountains of Peru.
Those trips involve special ropes and custom-made fire suits.
“Sometimes, just trying to get there is the biggest problem,” he says of his international exploits that have taken him to Turkmenistan, Hawaii, Ethiopia and a small island off the coast of New Zealand to name a few.
“We’ve done hundreds of TV shows and commercials,” Schuett says.
Everything from setting up stunts for reality TV shows to making sure a tree limb was secure so a movie scene can be shot of someone swinging off it.
“Sometimes it’s for safety. Sometimes they need a cameraman to hang off the side of the building.”
Schuett knows he is lucky to be able to make a living doing something he enjoys so much.
"I have a bucket list,' he says, adding that there are other projects in the works that he can't say much about at this point.
"A couple of more lava lakes and a couple of more cool stunts that I want to perform that I can't say what they are because they would be more 'world firsts' stuff," Schuett says. "Then there's a couple of more mountains that I'd like to climb.
"It's definitely a dream job, really."
