I came to watch the show: The Alpinist movie

[spopepro]

Recently saw The Alpinist in the theater. If you can, I think you should. It has some of the most incredible visuals of any outdoor film I've ever seen and is outstanding on the big screen.



Anyway, I knew MAL's story a little before going in, but I didn't know how much he shunned fame until seeing the film. IMHO it was a little bit of a crutch for the filmmakers to talk so much about how hard it was to film the film, but when you have a subject that not only doesn't care about the spotlight but works really hard to avoid it how to do make the film any other way?

Pertinent to this crowd I started to think again about my part in "the show." Really intellegent discussions here made me uncomfortable with my role in perpetuating the pro-cycing landscape back in the day and ultimately resulted in me just not paying it attention anymore. That I couldn't be making any moral stances for others so long as I was a participant. I guess I'm struggling with this again. I'm in awe of what MAL did, and continue to be delighted by the way he moved on rock, ice, and snow. But if this is now the cutting edge of alpinism, it starts to feel like I'm buying tickets to the snuff show. Clearly though, MAL would have done what he did if there was anyone there to watch or not, but I'm not sure about the others. Potter always talked about "his art" and art *needs* an audience.

[AngryScientist]

That's cool. I went to see free solo in theatres too. it was fun.

[BBB]

I saw Free Solo at an iMax theatre...it was scary!

[Mabouya]

This week I'm wearing my Seiko "Alpinist." Is that good enough?

[zetroc]

But if this is now the cutting edge of alpinism, it starts to feel like I'm buying tickets to the snuff show.

I'm in the same boat. I've always loved climbing and reading books by the likes of Jon Krakauer and David Breashears. But this kind of extreme risk-taking, done for an audience, rubs me the wrong way. I did not watch Free Solo and probably never will, because I know that somebody will try to imitate that and lose their life, and I don't want to feel any culpability when that happens.

[Mark Walberg]

There must be a mutation that takes away fear of height.
I certainly do not have that mutation.
Just watching these pictures makes my balls rise to my throat.

Year ago, I recall hiking with a friend in the Tetons, terrified hiking along a dotted line on the trial map (i.e., not a real trail).
My friend Walt, up ahead of me yelled, "Walberg, there's horse shit up here!"
I knew I could make it then.

[Mabouya]

Year ago, I recall hiking with a friend in the Tetons, terrified hiking along a dotted line on the trial map (i.e., not a real trail). My friend Walt, up ahead of me yelled, "Walberg, there's horse shit up here!"
I knew I could make it then.

Unless he was confusing mountain lion scat for horse shit...

[lumpy]

This has been a live topic in our household recently, with the writer David Roberts passing away; late in life he wrote a memoir called "On the Ridge Between Life and Death" about (major paraphrase) the deaths that informed his climbing life and his coming to terms with the idea that climbing at that level just wasn't worth it. Roberts climbed with my dad and my uncle Pete at Harvard in the early '60s. He and Pete (and others) climbed the Wickersham Wall on Mt. McKinley in 1963; the route was never repeated. My uncle Dave was a serious mountaineer too; he did the first alpine climb of Cerro Torre in the '70s. We were all at a family wedding recently at which one of the groomsmen, an elite climber himself, was a young man whose father had died climbing. To climb at that level, you really have to believe that you cannot and will not make a mistake and that the objective hazards will not get you, but statistically, there are a lot of talented climbers who die. And the numbers get worse every year as standards get pushed further and further. Our family has been lucky, knock on wood. But my Dad wouldn't watch Free Solo and he won't watch this, either.

I do love the visuals, and I love the alpine environment. For myself, I knew from when I was a teenager that I didn't have the physical confidence to be a climber.

[spopepro]

This has been a live topic in our household recently, with the writer David Roberts passing away; late in life he wrote a memoir called "On the Ridge Between Life and Death" about (major paraphrase) the deaths that informed his climbing life and his coming to terms with the idea that climbing at that level just wasn't worth it. Roberts climbed with my dad and my uncle Pete at Harvard in the early '60s. He and Pete (and others) climbed the Wickersham Wall on Mt. McKinley in 1963; the route was never repeated. My uncle Dave was a serious mountaineer too; he did the first alpine climb of Cerro Torre in the '70s. We were all at a family wedding recently at which one of the groomsmen, an elite climber himself, was a young man whose father had died climbing. To climb at that level, you really have to believe that you cannot and will not make a mistake and that the objective hazards will not get you, but statistically, there are a lot of talented climbers who die. And the numbers get worse every year as standards get pushed further and further. Our family has been lucky, knock on wood. But my Dad wouldn't watch Free Solo and he won't watch this, either.

I do love the visuals, and I love the alpine environment. For myself, I knew from when I was a teenager that I didn't have the physical confidence to be a climber.

Woah that's rad. Was your family on the FA of the route on Mt Huntington? That route looks like everything I've ever wanted in a climb, but I doubt I'll ever be fit enough for it. The FA took 3 weeks! It now takes 2-3 days and can be done in a push if the conditions line up.

Which is kind of an interesting, related but separate, problem. When House and co took to defining the modern approach to big mountains as fast and light one of the commonly given reasons was safety. If you're fast, you don't get caught on the summit in a lightning storm, you don't have the weather change on you, less gear to fail and less reliance on it. And it makes sense, and you can see it in the film. Sorry for the spoilers for some folks, MAL fails on his (absolutely insane) winter climb of the east pillar of Torre Egger because he was too slow with the bivy gear and got caught in weather. He returned to do it fast and light, in a day, and summited. But Ueli Steck and to some extent MAL have taken this idea so, so much further and there's no way it can be about safety anymore.

[zetroc]

Roberts climbed with my dad and my uncle Pete at Harvard in the early '60s. He and Pete (and others) climbed the Wickersham Wall on Mt. McKinley in 1963; the route was never repeated.

I've read about that! I believe it was in Jon Krakauer's excellent "Eiger Dreams" - that's no mean feat.

[lumpy]

Woah that's rad. Was your family on the FA of the route on Mt Huntington? That route looks like everything I've ever wanted in a climb, but I doubt I'll ever be fit enough for it. The FA took 3 weeks! It now takes 2-3 days and can be done in a push if the conditions line up.

The 1965 route, with Ed Bernd's death? No, thank goodness. Pete spent something like 3 1/2 weeks trying to climb a route on Mt. Deborah, though. It snowed 10 feet in eight days.