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The Best ��ϳԹ�� Films of 2019 (So Far)

mlaplante — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Each November, a small campus nestled beneath the soaring peaks of the Canadian Rockies becomes the creative center of the outdoor-adventure world.�� celebrates some of the finest work in mountain sports and culture, and for outdoor films, premiering at Banff is the equivalent of premiering on Broadway. The most popular movies from last fall are sure to appear throughout the 2019 festival circuit, and while sizzle reels will showcase big air and crazy exposure, in the best films, physical feats are secondary. Sure, sick drone footage is nice (for a three-minute short) and gnar-gnar accomplishments are cool (we need a bumper sticker: “Nobody cares that you sent the gnar”). But neither ensures a quality film. The power of story remains king.

Earlier��I wrote about the festival’s grand-prize winner,��, a thoughtful documentary about blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer’s paddling journey through the Grand Canyon. My other favorites from Banff, reviewed here, also tended toward the contemplative while avoiding guilt trips and preaching—and they stayed with me long after I left the theater.

opens with the fierce landscape of Burren, Ireland, where lush hillsides and fairy-tale forests roll along the horizon, seemingly untouched by time. Burren is home to Mesolithic tombs, an astonishing diversity of flora, and the struggles of modernity. Development threatens the region, namely a proposed visitor center and parking lots that would allow more people to enjoy Burren’s national park. Opponents suggest less impactful methods of enhancing access. The government pushes ahead (with eager developers, naturally), dismissing concerns that their plans would diminish, if not ultimately destroy, the remoteness and ecological sensitivity that make the area special. Director Katrina Costello immerses us in the pastoral ways of Burren farmer and poet Patrick McCormack, who says, part tragically and part bemused, “There are whole generations of people who never saw something grow.” Indeed, everything changes. But should it?

The film’s sublime cinematography, also by Costello, is often overlaid with McCormack’s voice, reading his poetry. Costello leaves space for bigger questions to arise beyond any singular swath of land: Have we lost the humility and restraint to allow potential resources to exist unexploited? Can something be meaningful if we cannot experience it ourselves? Perhaps the questions themselves are��quaint notions in our hypercapitalistic world, but McCormack and his neighbors pour their every penny into a lawsuit to stop the inexorable march of “progress.” On the edge of his farm, bulldozers rev their engines.

A splendid scene in Grant Baldwin’s shows a nun on nordic skis, gliding across a pristine wintry landscape. “Silence is really an endangered species in the world today,” she says. The film is a series of stories about people whose unconventional lives are nourished by Canada’s snowy wilderness—skiers, climbers, a “snow artist,” hikers, a mother-daughter team on a six-month remote alpine traverse, and, yes, nuns who ski. The film rises above the astonishing absence of depth that somehow still prevails in many snow-based films (a.k.a. glorified music videos with story lines comprised of a bro hucking cliffs and said bro’s bros, clad in their obligatory flannel and trucker hats, articulating such lines as “Dude is so rad”).

Also beyond the traditional ski-flick vein—importantly so—is��, a terrific short by Colin Arisman and Tyler Wilkinson-Ray, about a grassroots organization for black skiers to unite on the slopes and support their youth. The group��formed in 1973, at the height of the civil rights movement—before its��first gathering, in Aspen, Colorado, the National Guard was put on standby. “I’d always heard the myth that black people don’t ski,” a recent participant says on camera. Such myths are dispelled with wonderful archival footage, and the film shines in its displays of empowerment, affirmation, and sheer joy.

Director Nico Muñoz’s blends an air of melancholy and beauty as we admire the life of Martin Pueyrredon. He’s 83 years old and has recently lost his wife of 60 years, followed by his best friend and traveling partner, with whom his outdoor adventures had taken on profound meaning. Their deaths leave him empty, even as he declares himself a “happy old man.” He continues to work his engineering job, lays flowers on his wife’s grave, and trains for another long adventure—this time,��solo. It is important to have plans, he says. Amid the windswept plains, canyons, dirt roads and high mountain passes of the Argentinean Andes, Pueyrredon repeats the final journey he made with his departed friend, bicycling alone for five days to a viaduct at 14,000 feet, guided by his memory. The film’s most moving scene will challenge the dry eyes of even the sternest stoic. “I don’t feel they are gone,” Pueyrredon says of his wife and friend.

Given the reflective characteristics of these films, perhaps it’s fitting that my festival favorite wasn’t a premiere and had little to do with adventure sports. (Land of the Wind; look for it in the upcoming��), directed by Laura Belinky, transports us to the majestic landscapes of Patagonia through the eyes of fine-art photographer Eliseo Miciu. At a young age, Miciu fell in love with Patagonia, a place where the wind is the protagonist and everything else adapts. In his photographs, shades of light catch places and creatures, whether the vast steppe, the trees yielding leeward, or the mythical wild horses that he had long thought extinct. What we feel is as invisible as the Patagonian wind, yet equally real. Belinky blends sound, dialogue, stills, and motion with such immaculate restraint that the art and the places exist together, alongside their moods. Her resulting film is expansive, achingly beautiful, and only 18 minutes long.

If the finest art has the ability to convey the space within, as with Miciu’s stills, then Belinky has succeeded. After Tierra del Viento’s final images had faded to black, if only for a moment and if nothing more than forlorn hope, in my mind the bulldozers of Burren had ceased forever, and I saw wild horses running free, their manes blowing in the wind.

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Vision Matters More Than Sight in ‘The Weight of Water’

mlaplante — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Since biblical times, it has been said that the eyes are a window to the soul. But��human history is filled with false assumptions.

, which premiered in early November at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and ��for film, opens with sublime images of a magnificent natural world, where shadows and light sweep across walls rising from a canyon carved by the Colorado River eons ago. The water continues its course, and soon we see a person in a kayak, riding the tumbling rapids. His blank eyes stare outward. Something looks off. His face reacts with slight delays, out of sync with the waves hitting his tiny boat.

“I’ve climbed Mount��Everest, so why am I so fucking scared?” we later hear��asking himself. Given that he is blind, it strikes me as a fairly easy question to answer.

Emmy Award–winning director Michael Brown’s new documentary takes us into Weihenmayer’s journey as he paddles, in a solo kayak, the 277 miles of the Grand Canyon. Weihenmayer is joined by Lonnie Bedwell, who is also blind, and a crew of river guides and camera operators. Weihenmayer, now 50, didn’t start kayaking until he was nearly 40. The technical crux looms large in the film—the boat-flipping rapids of the notorious Lava Falls, a chaotic stretch with holes that can swallow kayaks and drown people.

Life probably would have been easier for Weihenmayer if he were born blind. In a heartbreaking early segment of the film, we learn that young Weihenmayer lost his eyesight slowly, the result of a rare condition called retinoschisis, in which one’s retinas gradually split apart. His mother, Ellen,��was ferocious in advocating for her son, going into schools and demanding that he be taught alongside the other kids. Weihenmayer has described her as the dustpan that swept him up when he was broken. When he was 13, as the remnants of his eyesight were abandoning him, his��mother was killed in a car accident, leaving him completely shattered. Soon after, he went totally��blind. He describes blindness initially as a prison.��His father, Ed, a former U.S. Marine, still has a crew cut and sits bolt upright, using direct language to describe that time in his son’s life. Ed even recites an old saying he had drilled into the boy, imploring him to never quit. But Ed’s voice cracks and his eyes grow damp when he says that he’s never figured out how, at that age, his son wasn’t destroyed by losing both his mother and his eyesight.

“I’ve climbed Mt. Everest, so why am I so fucking scared?” we later hear Erik Weihenmayer asking himself. Given that he is blind, it strikes me as a fairly easy question to answer.

In high school,��Weihenmayer discovered rock climbing, a slow and methodical activity where his hands and feet provided him a tactile map of his environment. Soon his internal prison opened into a new world. “This is the opposite of what I thought blindness would be like,” he says.��He’s climbed the Seven Summits, the Nose on Yosemite’s El Capitan, the 2,300-foot ice route Losar in Nepal, and completed the Leadville 100 bicycle race.��

And still, blindness presents very real obstacles—no matter our feel-good cliché of barriers existing only in the mind.

“I hate it when people tell me anything is possible,” he says.

We see him at home��with his family, preparing for the Grand Canyon trip. He can’t seem to sit still. His teenage daughter helps him sort gear. He tries to not bump into things.��He’s good-natured when told that he put his shirt on inside-out.

On the river he bumps into thunderous rapids as his friend and river guide, Harlan Taney, shouts on-the-fly instructions via wireless headset: “Left, hard right, hold that��line, hold that line, charge charge ��󲹰��!”��Between Taney’s directions and the ambient soundscape, such as reverberations from crashing waves and echoes off the walls, in his mind Weihenmayer develops a complex mapping system of the rapids and their deadly traps.

No wonder he’s scared.

“I hate it when people tell me anything is possible,” he says.

Throughout the film it becomes apparent that Weihenmayer shares insecurities familiar to most humans, regardless of his superhero list of accomplishments. His inability to see his objective is inconsequential; rather, what matters is the freedom that comes from finding self-control amid the darkness of the world. Like anyone, he grapples with failure, worry, and ego, and the difficulty of being present at critical times, yet something deeper pushes him forward, as if he is incapable of quitting. He says that he wants to be the bravery that others see in him.

We gain glimpses of an inner world perhaps similar to our own, under circumstances incomprehensibly different. How fascinating that a theater full of people watched breathtaking scenes from the life of a man unable to see any of it himself, and who cannot see us watching him. Although I have always been drawn to the natural world, I couldn’t help but wonder what this says about the limitations of the sighted, who so often need to venture afar to explore the depth that lies within.��

Erik Weihenmayer’s eyes serve as a naked and beautiful metaphor for the vast potential of the human experience. And while he is correct about some barriers being real, in The Weight of Water, Brown and Weihenmayer also show us that vision is more powerful than sight.

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Even Tommy Caldwell Questioned the Nose Speed Record

jversteegh — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Tommy Caldwell had a lot on his mind on June 4th.��He and Alex Honnold were in Yosemite National Park, where they’d been gunning for the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan, which, to me and to many, seems a dangerous endeavor. The line rises 3,000 vertical feet from the valley floor in an unbroken, elegant swoop.��

The host of techniques employed at hyper speed are complex and risky, and include long stretches of simulclimbing and short fixing. (In both cases, the climbers are roped together, moving continuously with protection, but without a proper belay.) A fair comparison might be redlining a sports car on a winding mountain road without a seatbelt: everything’s fine unless you crash. In a pursuit where millimeters of precision matter, introducing a stopwatch generally means cutting corners and eschewing established practices.

But to embody the physical and psychological competency to race up the most iconic wall on the planet in a couple of hours must feel like flying.

Tommy and Alex started with some rehearsals in mid-May, perfecting their systems and proficiency with each ascent. Most modern parties take three to five days on the route; they were aiming for Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds’s record of 2:19:44, set last October. On May 28 they did a relatively casual lap in 2:25. On May 30 they shattered the record, going 2:10:15. The climbing world buzzed with the thought of the previously unthinkable: is a sub-two-hour ascent possible?

In the early morning of June 4, they went 2:01:50. A stuck rope had cost them a couple of minutes. They topped out and Tommy ran down to the valley floor to say goodbye to his wife, Becca, and their two young children, Fitz and Ingrid, who were flying home to Colorado. Tommy was staying for another week, but he was torn about trying again.

Only two days earlier, in a terrible reminder of the fine line we sometimes trace, Tim Klein and Jason Wells, both highly experienced climbers, were killed while speed climbing a different route on El Capitan. A few weeks prior, previous Nose record-holder Hans Florine fell during a planned one-day ascent of the Nose and��broke his legs. Last autumn, a good friend of mine and Tommy’s, elite climber Quinn Brett, was going for the women’s speed record on the Nose when she fell more than 100 feet and hit a ledge. She is now paralyzed from the waist down.

While such a tragic spate is unprecedented in speed climbing on El Capitan, recency forces contemplation. From the outside, speed climbing seems unjustifiably dangerous. Maybe it is. Many in the climbing world think that the game has gone too far.

Yet no two ascents are identical, and few observers completely understand the risks. Who does? When confronted with what we don’t understand, we instinctively resort to assuming that if it looks crazy, it is.

Thousands upon thousands of El Capitan ascents occur without incident, years often pass between serious accidents, and there have been only about�� on El Capitan, total.

While anybody who climbs El Capitan in a single day is elite, Tommy and Alex are the best pair to ever tie-in together in Yosemite’s mecca. They’ve honed their approach on the Nose to balance the risk. Quinn fell from high on the Boot Flake, a spot everyone who speed climbs the route knows is dangerous, because many parties opt for a huge run out to save time for the follower. Tommy devised an ingenious solution that allows him to protect that section without slowing the team. On the hardest technical portions, which come when Alex is leading, they’ve synchronized their timing so that Tommy has him on a real belay.

They’ve made it safe. “Safe.” For them. Which may not be safe for others. It probably isn’t.

Skill alone fully insulates no one, but skill plays a role in the nebulous, unsolvable equations of risk. Climbing is filled with permutations. Climbing history is filled with great dead climbers.

So, Tommy had a lot on his mind after he and Alex climbed the route in 2:01:50. He took his family to the airport, and then called me to talk.

We joked and exchanged the usual pleasantries. Although I’m nowhere near his level in climbing, he’s one of my closest friends. We became acquainted more than a decade ago, neighbors in adjacent cabins here in Estes Park, Colorado. Over time we wore a social path between our houses, and when his first marriage dissolved he cried on my shoulder, literally. My surly alpinist heart doubled in size when he found new love, and I greeted their firstborn 12 hours after he entered this world. Together, Tommy and I worked for two years on (I was his cowriter), endlessly discussing life, love, philosophy, and—always—risk.

“It’s been pretty heavy lately,” he said, and we dove in. “After all that’s happened—Quinn, those guys last weekend—everyone’s gripped.”

“How sketchy does it seem to you? Does it feel like you guys are really pushing it?”

“That’s the thing, it doesn’t. We did a slow lap yesterday, just re-evaluating everything, working the bottom section to dial it in, and it felt really safe. Even when we topped out today, it didn’t feel out of control at all. Got a rope stuck but that’s it.”

In the span of one week they had shaved nearly 24 minutes off their time and shattered the record. It took 79 years for the marathon world record to shrink 24 minutes.��

“Both Alex and I dedicate so much of our lives to El Cap, and this feels like it’s bearing that fruit a little bit. It’s so exciting and engaging, the combination of logistics and the physical puzzle.”

“What does Becca think?”

“She’s supportive, but honestly she’s scared. I’m just so sick of people dying, and their families left grieving,” he said, before creating distance, perhaps subconsciously, with a second-person pronoun. “Then you think of it happening to you….” ��

In the pause that followed, I thought of my lost friends and the void that slowly fades but never dies.

“Otherwise, like if it wasn’t for my family, in the moment it’s no big deal.”

He’s told me before that he’s never feared death, that to him it’s an abstract notion.

I understand. The feeling of control in wild situations and spectacular environments draws you in, it changes you, and you begin to learn about yourself. I remember the years when I lived for alpine climbing, before serious injuries forced me to stop—the only reason I stopped. The paradox, of course, is that the farther you push the better you become at surviving, and so you push again, and again, and again. I had friends tell me that I was going to die climbing. They were probably right. It was worth it then, and I miss it now. But I don’t have children.

Before he and Alex climbed the Fitz Traverse in 2014, a futuristic enchainment of seven alpine peaks in Patagonia, Tommy grappled with similar questions. In his book, he wrote: “Becca also knew that I wouldn’t be me, the person she loves, the father of her child, without the core elements of who I am. What do you do if your one God-given gift, the thing you seem preordained to do, the thing without which you might become a hollow shell, is something that could kill you?”

On the Nose, stable weather and perfect granite means that the danger comes not from external hazards, but from within. “I truly feel like we’ve been analyzing every situation and making it safe,” he told me on the phone, “whereas in mountain climbing you can be the most competent, and an avalanche could wipe you out anyway.”

Still, how safe can it be to average fewer than four minutes per pitch on a wall as daunting as El Capitan? In high-end speed climbing, even as you improve with every round, the margin for error shrinks with each second saved.��Which he knows.

Tommy began climbing with his father when he was three, and is as sober and rational a climber as I’ve known. A run-in with a table saw while remodeling his home has been Tommy's worst accident, costing him an index finger.

We kept talking, contemplating the unknowable, neither of us stating the obvious: that he has nothing to prove and that love and mastery exert a powerful pull.

“Man, I think of the wingsuit community,” he said, “how at first people were like ‘If you’re super precise in packing your chute, and only fly in these conditions, only fly in this terrain, it’s actually safe.’ And now, everybody knows that it’s just dangerous, no matter what. I wonder if speed climbing is the same. Am I fooling myself?”

I told him how much I trust his decisions, and that if he steps aside, he'd have my full respect.��And if he went again, I knew that it would only be because he absolutely believes that they were making it safe. That he can tell Becca, Fitz, and Ingrid that he was making it safe.

“I don’t know how I would feel,” he said, about the allure of sub-two. “I don’t know if I would just��keep it quiet, I don’t know if I would celebrate it. For now, I think I’ll just��let it be. It needs a little more space.”

As the climbing world swirled with opinions, perhaps space in the shadow of speed mattered most. Nobody else could decide.

“True,” Tommy said, “but it’s easy for us to justify things in our own minds.”��
��

I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend’s dilemma, and two days later I called to check-in. It was Wednesday morning, June 6. When Tommy answered I could hear the sound of the wind. He put me on speaker phone so that Alex could say hello. I asked how he’s doing. “We’re stoked, it was a lovely morning out.” They were casually working their way down the East Ledges descent off El Cap. They had just climbed the Nose in 1:58:07. (Though Honnold later said he thinks the true human potential is 1:30 or even 1:15.)

For making history, they sounded remarkably calm. Tommy and I talked for another 20 minutes. “It felt great,” Tommy said, his voice steady. “Really, we did everything the same as before in terms of safety, and it always felt OK.”

For them. And if it felt OK, how do you stop there?

“It was a truly amazing experience, but I don’t want to stress people out anymore. Speed climbing is in fashion now, and I want people to know that it should be dealt with properly.”

No more?

“Totally done. I have no inclination to race the clock anymore. We did it in kind of the best venue, and I’m done. I still love those missions like running around with friends in the mountains, linking up lots of climbs in a day, but it’s way different than racing up El Cap.”

Good. I told him that I’ll be ready to remind him, in case he forgets.

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Kelly Cordes Archives - ���ϳԹ��� Online

The Best ���ϳԹ��� Films of 2019 (So Far)

Vision Matters More Than Sight in ‘The Weight of Water’

Even Tommy Caldwell Questioned the Nose Speed Record

Kelly Cordes Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

The Best ��ϳԹ�� Films of 2019 (So Far)