mountaineering

I like the close-ups in climbing movies to the extent that they show spots that are so impossible to see irl: high in the Himalayas, etc. The Meru film, for instance. I can take or leave the actual climbing and alphaness.

Freeskiing movies are even worse. The accomplishments are generally not as impressive and the skiers are just blasting through the terrain. Best part of big-mountain ski movies tend to be the slow ascent shots imo. When I watch one I often wonder why/how they get made. Who is financing this stuff and why?

I love skiing and find climbing insanely hard and not so much fun, fwiw.

I liked Free Solo a lot! It was a nice look at "excellence" and how that relates to normal human relationships. Like I can admire Honnold's ability and focus, but those ex-girlfriends who thought he was impossible to deal with weren't wrong. It was interesting compare Honnold to Tommy Caldwell, who has off-the-charts danger tolerance by any normal metric, but at this point isn't trying to die for his art, while Honnold is basically okay with that idea.

NB: I have basically zero exposure to climbing culture and have found in the handful of times I've tried anything more than scrambling up rocks that I get freaked out very easily.

There's plenty of GoPro-on-a-head mountain climbing videos on YT, but this one got my attention. Probably because there's no background music, no annoying editing tricks, just the sound of breathing, coughing, wind, and climbing. Watch it full screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhBzhi9jPFs

Was waiting for the traffic jam on the lhotse face, was not disappointed.

whoops, i meant the hillary step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpYNr7es0Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpYNr7es0Y

yay finally saw Free Solo, it was a really satisfying piece of work. i enjoyed how they identified the key difficult pitches and allowed you to see them enough to understand them visually and as elements. and THEN they sorta surprise-introduced the arete/whatever that crazy, exposed, external overhang in the final effort was- it was visually stunning and comprehensibly hard and ~felt~ like a perfect climax, to me.

Part of me is like, it can’t be easy to find someone who’s a bit of a weirdo socially, who also comes across as nice and smart, but who ALSO has superpowers. If Stan Lee was still alive to review the storyboard, i think he’d be, “cool character, but this guy is not very realistic. he’s in the uncanny valley of superheroes, my dudes.”

(even if u hate armstrong it’s worth watching the interview he did with honnold recently- i enjoyed honnold’s “my neighbor’s are used to my shopping routes” a lot).

“neighbors”

I will have to watch Free Solo. I've got an appetite for this stuff (literature and film) that outweighs my dislike of the characters involved. Recently watched The Dawn Wall, which documents Tommy Caldwell's fucking mental attempts to free climb in Yosemite. It's not the most cinematic film and is overlong but it's compelling all the same.

My favourite books of this stuff are probably David Roberts' The Mountain of My Fear and the first chunk of Harrer's White Spider.

Part of me is like, it can’t be easy to find someone who’s a bit of a weirdo socially, who also comes across as nice and smart, but who ALSO has superpowers. If Stan Lee was still alive to review the storyboard, i think he’d be, “cool character, but this guy is not very realistic. he’s in the uncanny valley of superheroes, my dudes.”

otm

also man ueli steck was something else, rip dude

re books, i'll make a shameless plug for my pal freddie's book "one mountain thousand summits," notable largely because much of the focus is on the experience of the sherpas working on K2 who are every bit the incredible athletes (or more) as the alpinists they're working for

i watched Free Solo recently and speaking of something else, wow that guy is something else

https://enormocast.com/2017/07/episode-133-alex-honnold-kind-of-a-big-deal/

Long, interesting interview with Honnold on the Enormocast. Definitely a lot of inside baseball, but that's also sorta the point (it's a climbing-specific podcast). Good complement to the documentary, and actually makes Honnold seem even more affable?

he is pretty charismatic, will check. hey gbx, do you get DMs off ilx? didn't know how to ping you on bike stuff, so i tried a ilx-o-gram a few days back. my email off here is from 2002 i think, still exists apparently. "yahoo"!

i don't think i've checked my ilx-associated email in....many years?

take my govt name as shown on strava and concatenate without punctuation and geeee mail it

i thought he was kind of a sarcastic ass to his girlfriend

In the documentary? For sure

you mean free solo guy?
i didn't think he was sarcastic but he was definitely acting selfishly

yea honnold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA

dude presents as so megacharismatic to my type imo, even as a non-climber. im at min 7 and just 👀 lol

"Whoah that's not a thing." LOL

"Oh well he just died, that sucks."

Very surprised that he said sliding down a rock face and catching the lip of an overhang IS a thing!

I assume he means in free-climbing when you're roped in but what do I know.

i watched the whole movie, and tbh i find this guy difficult to watch
he reminds me of grizzly man only more together :( watching him makes me feel sad & worried for his girlfriend who seems to be a beautiful young good person who is way in love with him :( :( :(

My wife came home a couple nights and says "oh, we had some sad news at work." What happened, I asked? She said a co-worker's future brother-in-law died in an avalanche. That's terrible, I said, how did that happen? And she said he was an extreme snow sports athlete, and I said that's still terrible, but, well, yeah.

eat shit

That was definitely in poor taste, and I apologize.

I did find out more details. It was near Aspen and I think he and someone else were readying for some kind of ski race? Anyway, it sounds like there has been record snowfall out there (just saw a picture of friend's porch, which got 12 feet dumped on it while they were away). Heard another report where this means there are a number of towns and areas at serious risk of both fires *and* flooding.

*shit-tons of hunt3r fatality takes deleted*

there's a lot of fun snotel nws pages, but this one is pretty well cleaned up:

https://www.weather.gov/source/crh/snowmap.html?sid=bou

even more than usual, this storm was weird and aspecty and hyperlocal, from reports and maps.

steamboat sez 'what's up!' wish i was there.

I'm sorry for being rude, JiC, I had literally just seen a friend post something on instagram about their friend they lost in a slide some years ago --- that shit will take out even the least extreme ppl if the conditions align.

odds are they were prepping for the power of 4 race, which was held in aspen, yesterday

snow can be scary stuff, and a lot of ppl go into the backcountry totally uneducated and come out unscathed, not fully realizing just how close to the sun they were flying (looking at you, 24yo gbx)

“too close to the sun” is def the correct title for a high-risk outdoor life bio/autobio- *checks*

fuck that, yeah def done by some imperial brit.

https://www.outsideonline.com/sites/default/files/styles/width_1200/public/2019/03/04/mera-sending-it_h.jpg

The First Dog Ascent of a 7,000-Meter Himalayan Peak

On November 9, 2018, a dog named Mera became the first of her kind to reach the summit of Baruntse, a 23,389-foot peak in Nepal’s Himalayas, located just south of Mount Everest. The peak, often overlooked as it lies in the shadow of some of the tallest mountains in the world, is a steep, challenging climb in its own right. Other than a brief human-aided zip line down a short section of fixed line, Mera made the ascent completely unsupported.

“I am not aware of a dog actually summiting an expedition peak in Nepal,” says Billi Bierling of the Himalayan Database, an organization that documents climbing expeditions in Nepal. “I just hope that she won’t get into trouble for having climbed Baruntse without a permit.” According to Bierling, there have been a few cases of dogs at Everest Base Camp (17,600 feet) and some who’ve followed teams through the Khumbu Icefall up to Camp II (21,300 feet), but this is perhaps the highest-recorded elevation ever reached by a dog anywhere in the world.

Mera, age unknown, is a 45-pound Nepalese mutt who appears to be a cross between a Tibetan mastiff and a Himalayan sheepdog. She possesses an extraordinary level of confidence relative to her small frame. Though slight, she’s lean, with muscles likely honed by years of travel over rough mountainous terrain in the Khumbu Valley. She has soft, close-cropped black fur, with legs and a snout dipped in golden yellow, small ears that flop forward, and kind eyes.

:)

started a yellow snow joek then realized i had to read about that pup and snark it went away cuz dog, aw.

[back in ilx after long spell away, hullo peeps!]

just saw "free solo" last night. for me, watching it was an emotional experience. i was intensely into climbing at one point in my life, decades ago, when 'sport climbing' was not a thing yet, rock gyms were a rumored curiosity, and shoe selection involved a choice between just two or three brands.

my climbing was mostly done with two good friends. we lived in montreal, so spent most of our time in the adirondacks. all granite. climbing was the first sport in which my gangly body felt gifted and graceful. i had a lot of difficult things going on my head in those days, self-hatred, terror, stuff that has taken me decades to get on top of, but the slow vertical dance on those vast granite faces, the rhythm of crack climbing, the controlled exhilaration i felt when leading a pitch, the feeling of setting up secure anchors for my partners, ...purified me deeply, and after topping out, the sense of feeling, not just okay, but exalted, was incomparable.

some years into this, i had a bad accident. not climbing: a car accident. i emerged with nerve damage in my left hand. could no longer oppose the thumb (i'm only half human now!), grip strength rendered negligible. i've continued climbing, but nowhere near at the same level. mostly bouldering, some indoor stuff.

for me the star of "free solo" was el capitan. i couldn't take my eyes off it. like many climbers who haven't even climbed the big wall i suspect, the profile of el cap, the great crack systems, flakes and roofs -- much of it is imprinted in our mind, from simply looking at so many photographs, topos, and whatnot. hell i went twice to the ansel adams exhibit that recently closed at the museum of fine arts, just to stand in front of those exposures and feel the storm clearing out of the Valley. i don't know, i just love granite. and el cap in "free solo" presented so many facets. massive and terrifying, yes. but on a small scale: textured, multi-colored, intimate even. above all predictable, when it counted.

i was just struck by the beauty of the wall and of the climbing. in some ways honnold's ascent is the supreme way to pay homage to all of what that is.

nice post! will have to watch free solo asap...

cg that post is fantastic, thanks for sharing.

Beautiful post!

thanks so much guys :-)

really great post

granite is so wonderful, but i think my heart belongs to desert sandstone?? for sentimental reasons, many great memories from red rocks nv

i just started climbing again (ie going to the gym) after a several year long hiatus and i have become obsessed with going to indian creek (finally, after a couple decades of fascination), but am a) out of shape b) not an owner of 500000 cams and c) without partners :(

wonderful post cg - welcome back!

free solo is airing on demand on NatGeo channel at the moment

watching it now & lol i didnt even realize that Jimmy Chin was one of the filmmakers! I saw Meru for the first time just last year so it all just clicked for me just now

maybe not everyone is familiar with mark twight, but the most recent enormocast with him is really good, definitely broke down some notions i had about him. he was the prince of darkness when i was reading climbing mag every month, interesting to see him come out the other end of the tunnel

finished the movie. so good!

i am not a climber
i have never climbed
but my god that climb was so incredible it made me cry

just amazing


i do feel bad for his girlfriend. i mean in general to paraphrase kenny rogers “dont fall in love with a climber” but also she seems lovely & i see so much hearbreak ahead for her.

but also i think his perceived dickishness is a function of his flat affect & a by-product whatever the untreated issue is that he clearly has going on. not to give him an easy out but he just doesn’t seem to generate emotional responses in a “normal” way. his family backstory was pretty o_O

i want a minute by minute no soundtrack film of his climb

yes!

i was kinda annoyed by the high-speed section, i would have liked less lead up if it meant being able to see the whole climb

*sections