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Happy to find this thread. I've been fascinated by the extreme mountaineering on both K2 and Everest. Read a few books, seen a few docos and it never stops being weird or addictive. I think the documentary The Dark Side Of Everest probably sums up the madness: the morality of the death zone isn't settled, and gets tested every year, because the addiction is equally strong. Personally I'm on the side of Cathy O'Dowd and friends when they say it's mostly too extreme a place for altruism, much as it might be desired. The Summit, although about K2, illustrates much better the confusion when a group of people are fiddling about in 30% oxygen starvation and try to explain what happened later. Imagine the carnage if the tourists figure out where the real fun is.
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Jan 22, 2017 12:08
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 18:52 |
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DumbparameciuM posted:Good news mate  Of loving course. I hope the entire loving serac falls on them. Just moronic, not simply not learning from Everest, but not learning from 2008, the utter failure to coordinate some of the best mountaineers in the world on a perfect climbing day and a traffic jam under the most dangerous serac on the most dangerous mountain. It does rather sound like the Chinese want to cash in, doesn't it.
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Jan 22, 2017 14:37
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Lunsku posted:Now just color that cast neon green and we have We need a yellow parka too.
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Jan 24, 2017 12:24
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Of course they would. Everest was crowded anyway.
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Jan 26, 2017 04:32
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I hope you put Serak's cartoon in the OP, that is mandatory.
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Feb 2, 2017 09:30
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First movie in my little mountain DVD festival, Meru. Overall rating:  There's a certain amount of self-dramatisation (and fundraising) in this one, not least because Jimmy Chin is the mountaineering photographer (and director here), but also because that's what mountaineers are. There's two DVD extras that may come on netflix, Spirituality and Finding Your Calling which are worth watching before the main movie. Because you may find it difficult to believe otherwise. What am I saying, you'll still find it difficult. Unusually, it goes into more about the personalities of the climbers than the technicalities. There's an insight into their journey and their partners, and there's a certain helplessness about mountains, like that between Mallory, Ruth and Everest. But as Krakauer, who semi-narrates, says, they really have no idea what these men are doing to themselves. I don't think this movie improves understanding a great deal more even from an insiders's view. Mountains are just this...thing with them. There's no better explanation after watching this, because I certainly don't understand it, even as I am fascinated by it. Next up: Everest - Unfinished Business.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:06
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I'll just say this about Conrad Ankers, what's with adding the degree of difficulty on every climb?
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Feb 14, 2017 07:54
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Everest - Unfinished Business (2007) Overall rating:  This is an Australian documentary. Four policemen plan to scale Everest. If you've never seen Australian current affairs shows, there's some unintentional comedy you'll miss. Female reporters on these shows all copy the cadences of Jana Wendt (as do many comedians), and this is narrated by an alumni of that school: Jennifer Adams was a news reader who married a footballer, now freelance presenter who clearly insisted to be brought along. Now the drama begins by retelling the tail of the boss who went off to scale a mountain for training but forgot to take his St Christopher medal. *horror chords*. Died of a heart attack from altitude. Somehow he was brought home through the efforts of the state police commissioner who got the Chinese to fly him out. Of course this made the other three policemen determined to "finish the job". Cue heroic music. Cue colourful shots of the trek in. The cops bring their spouses along. As a side venture, they also raise $130k for the Make A Wish Foundation with the climb. But things get tough. One cop gets the flu. Another carries a skiing injury but refuses to leave. They're all suffering from altitude already. Adams frequently does pieces to camera and bemoans her own altitude issues. She does one at the Everest memorial area. This doesn't deter anyone. Adams finally gets ordered back down after a nearly fatal incident.. 8 other people die from altitude in the area. This doesn't deter anyone. They all get to base camp, and Adams returns. The team concentrates on acclimatising for two months. One cop gets frostbite. Another misses a high avalanche by a whisker. Then Camp 1 gets avalanched (this is 2006/2007) and a helicopter crashes on landing. Finally it's time for the push, up the Khumbu icefall on the South route. They get to camp 3. A north side expedition ends in disaster with 3 dead and 4 missing. This doesn't deter anyone. But the wind is picking up. And its too windy now to fix ropes so they have to get down to camp 2 and hope the weather. By now they're all sick, one has bronchitis, another has a virus, the third has laryngitis and his frostbite hasn't healed. They head up to camp 3. One needs oxygen to make it through the night but refuses to give in and they get to camp 4. They start for the summit at night, in 40 kph winds. They summit in a gale. There's a loss of focus for a montage of summit joy and then per functionary climb down scenes until they reach base camp. They leave a message on a rock for their lost leader. And suddenly its over. Perhaps mindful of the unfocused ending to the doco, a Special Descent Video on the DVD is included which is nothing more than the guys co-narrating over a confusing shoulder minicam video of part of the descent. And they relate the dangers of the climb down which clearly didn't resonate enough with the documentary makers, climbers who had died, the steepness, and the deadly tiredness of the death zone - for almost an hour, slightly longer than the documentary itself, and is frankly more interesting. The video itself seems agonisingly centred on a section below the Hillary Step. They agree the hardest part of the climb was getting down, much harder than the going up. Towards the end, they're talking mystically about getting permission from the mountain and giving their fate into its hands. Overall it's not a documentary that engages you emotionally, it's triumphal and shallow. Adams inserts herself repeatedly on the way in and disappears to leave the guys themselves to film the climb and return. The blandness might be due to a TV presentation focus, but you're left with a Boys Own Adventure view of a climb that was much more dangerous and foolhardy. Skip it in favour of the descent video if you can find it. Next up: Everest - The Mountain At The Millennium. ewe2 fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 16:33
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Everest - Mountain at the Millenium (2001) Overall rating:  A Nat Geo documentary, introduced by Sting for some unfathomable reason. You probably know the style, quick history of Everest expeditions, profile of the main climber Pete Athens, and the campaigns goal: sixth ascent by a Westerner and GPS measurement of Everest's height. They take the "safer" South route. At the same time, on the North side, the Mallory & Irvine expedition is searching for evidence. The doco is a good overview of the South camp system and the features at each stage, and the acclimatisation system to be able to summit. Now that there are so many climbers on the mountain these days, that must be a nightmare. In 1999 they were quoting $65k for a summit! There's some good shots of the upper ridge below the summit near the Hilary Step that are quite unnerving. And then the Sherpas have to lug GPS gear and set it up on the summit. After that, they rescued a climber who fell off a cornice that simply sheared off the ridge without warning. And then at the end you find out why Sting introduced the doco. A plug for his album of the time.  On the DVD there is a nice chain of little vignettes of the early part of the expedition. Instead of freighting in all their food, they buy it at the local market and give gifts to the lamas in return for blessings for two months. You get some insight into the enormous contribution of the Nepalese altogether, not just the Sherpas. Each segment on the way up the mountain is about 8 mins long and worth watching, there's a lot here that I've not seen covered in any detail, a lot of the nuts and bolts of the expedition system of almost 20 years ago, which has probably changed now.
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Feb 20, 2017 09:53
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:Maybe my memory is off, but it seems like that expedition was like the opposite of every other, "Looking for something lost a long time ago," documentaries. They always find the thing they are looking for at the last moment, but with that trip, my memory is like, "Ok, let's get started -- hey look, there's a body." And it was Mallory's. Yeah, they did a lot of acclimatisation before they got started and it was literally the first day of searching and Ankers caught sight of something. I did some wiki digging and they've tried a few times since to find Irvine, and got sidetracked with bad weather and rescue operations. gohuskies posted:IIRC they also wanted to test if Mallory could actually have climbed the Second Step, so during the climb they unbolted the ladder from the mountain and had Conrad Anker climb it free to get his take on how hard it actually was and whether Mallory would have had a chance. Yeah it's interesting that at the time (1999) he found Mallory, Ankers was convinced he couldn't have summitted (is that a word?) but by the time he tried to do it himself with similar equipment and free-climbed the Second Step he was equally convinced that if Mallory was fast as he usually was, he could have done it. I think Irvine will be found when the glacier's good and ready, or perhaps he's already gone past decades ago.
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Feb 20, 2017 23:27
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Curses, beaten to it. He didn't even get further than that.
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Mar 6, 2017 09:49
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He seems way more convinced in the doco that Mallory could have free-climbed the Step after doing it himself. Therefore if he did, he could have summitted. I haven't read the book, perhaps it uses more cautious language.
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Mar 16, 2017 05:19
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Sherpa (2015) Overall rating: This movie is really about respect, the lack of it. Bonus: Renan Ozturk (from Meru) was one of the directors of the movie, he talks about it in a DVD extra. Yes, after Meru. When 16 Sherpas died in the Khumbu Icefall, it was in the middle of shooting a movie about the Sherpas, and all hell broke loose. If you can get the DVD it's worth it for the extras, otherwise the film itself is a much needed perspective on the Sherpa side of the Everest story. I won't spoil it further, but if anything shines a light on this most bizarre of industries, this is the film to watch.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:07
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Surviving Everest (2003) Rating:  Yet another Nat Geo Everest documentary, possibly the most manufactured. The sons of Hilary and Tenzing climb Everest with the help of our old mate Pete Athans, for whom the expedition is a swansong. It's not just the names, they've already climbed Everest, and in two groups will try the South East Route and the Western Route, so the crazy starts there. Tenzing's son will only climb to Base Camp having promised to never climb it again after his one summit. Peter Hilary has even less reason to return: his mother and sister died in a plane crash in the 70's when the Hilarys planned to live in the area and improve life for the Sherpas. I've got to give Nat Geo credit: I've seen 3 docos by them on Everest and they never shirk their debt to the Sherpas and the dangers and sheer hard gruntwork they face. I can't understand how clients don't watch these and figure this out, given the events of the previous movie Sherpa I described. Cue shots of 5yo Sherpa kids picking their noses and not talking. Classy poo poo. We also get your classic noob client who thinks she can just buy her way up the mountain. Thankfully she's going up the standard South Col Route. The Western Route is daunting, 40 attempts, 6 summits, 23 deaths. Peter Hilary tried it, and lost two companions. There's a lot of irony in this documentary given its release date. They speak in hushed tones of the terrible season of 1972 when 6 Sherpas died in an avalanche. The Sherpas speak of the wedge of climbing income and deaths. There's also discussion of the ugly underside of the succesful 1953 summit. In 1952, Tensing Norgay attempted the summit with the Swiss expedition and failed only 800m away. The British not only benefited from the Swiss expedition's equipment and experience, they made a direct play to secure Norgay for the following season. When you hear about the post-summit politics, keep in this in mind: they would not have succeeded without him but made every attempt to dismiss his contribution once he did. This doco has the most bad weather Everest photography I've ever seen, usually it's only mentioned to raise the drama. It also demonstrates what a traffic jam on the south summit looks like, which is a hideous thing to see when you're coming back down. And speaking of that, this doco ends on the summit, which I just hate, it's only half the story! The biggest problem with it is that, outside of the story of the sons and the 1953 expedition, there's very little point to this doco, it's redundant about many things if you've seen others from the 2000's. That's about it, though, I've pretty much ransacked my DVD provider for mountaineering docos unless new stuff comes in like the tale of this season  postscript: one of the better moments is Pete Athans talking down a Sherpa who's having a bit of a crisis higher on the mountain. I won't spoil it but the Sherpa is really mad at God. ewe2 fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 21:28
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I think its assumed the Chinese removed the bodies because they were gone at the beginning of the next season.
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Apr 1, 2017 10:15
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They're mad. They'll get blown off the mountain, that's how people die on that route.
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Apr 11, 2017 01:28
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The tragic thing about Steck is that this often happens to the best. It's not the insanely difficult climbs that kill them, its the unforeseen avalanches, the thawing seracs, the slippery rocks that they weren't expecting that do. Or the weather. Or just climbing down. It's awful he went that way, I was hoping he'd do the West Ridge.
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May 1, 2017 17:09
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Mountain looks exciting, September release can't come soon enough.
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Jun 8, 2017 09:32
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Keep tabs on this site http://www.himalayandatabase.com/ later this month, we'll be able to do our own stats.
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Nov 20, 2017 07:18
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Why K2 in winter? 
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Jan 27, 2018 03:54
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weg posted:I'm not sure how bad Kathmandu is to land at, but in terms of land or die from a mountain face you're thinking of Lukla: That were luxury! We used to have to land on a dirt strip, no control tower, no apron, no baggage staff and someone might turn up to get us to the airport if we were lucky! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQB1578Vesg edit: from the looks of this, the control tower was the last thing to be built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Grx5ZiT8qk ewe2 fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 09:08
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VoodooXT posted:Oh man, Daniele Nardi died with him. The mountains have their revenge. That is a hell of a talk, in some ways a worse story than the The Summit because lessons should have been learnt. That's also the first time someone clearly said that there wasn't enough rope, it may have been said in the doco but I don't recall it.
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Mar 11, 2019 18:27
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It's a pretty selfish undertaking really, in some ways I'm not surprised how scumbaggy people get to the top of mountaineering. But for most of them it seems to be an increasing obsession if you're good enough to go through the various levels of mountaineering skill. By the end of that you probably have a healthy ego if it wasn't already.
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Mar 12, 2019 10:46
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Make K2 permits cheap.
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May 24, 2019 22:33
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Got around to watching Everest 2015, it looks pretty but it can't decide whether it's a doco or a movie. It doesn't do a great job on the characters, and doesn't explain what was so controversial about the real events at the time. Current seasons make this drama look piffling, and the mistakes are still the same. You're better off watching a doco like The Dark Side of Everest.
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Jun 5, 2019 20:37
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They found those missing climbers from a while back:quote:Eight climbers — four from Britain, two from the United States, and one each from Australia and India — went missing on May 31 after they failed to return to their base camp near the 7,816 metre mountain, Nanda Devi. 
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Jul 3, 2019 20:48
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High Lord Elbow posted:For future reference, you start a post like that by saying “they found the bodies of those missing climbers...” They're people, not objects.
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Jul 6, 2019 08:30
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 18:52 |
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This is a pretty elaborate suicide pact.
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Jan 17, 2020 06:59
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