mountaineering

i really want to see this

it's very good!

even if you don't care about or even hate rock climbing/mountaineering as a selfish dangerous pursuit

I'll try to see that. Honnold is pretty amazing.

definitely looking forward to this

i don't have an issue with rock climbing being selfish or dangerous, i just find the personalities of climbers to be annoyingly alpha

over the past 5 years or so i’ve discovered that mountain climbing docs are one of my favorite things. i love watching ppl do stuff i would never in my life even attempt.

i love imagining myself running them over with my car.

*shrugs*

:(

lol sorry, i have feelings about climbers as i'm living in one of their meccas right now and i guess this thread at this moment gets to receive them. i feel like i get what makes climbers tick and i just don't care about witnessing their increasing degrees of fearlessness; nonetheless, the spotlight is always turned on them and the same old story of physical triumph over nature.

Funny, nature never understands that it has been subdued or conquered. It just keeps on being nature in the same old way.

also it'll make your palms sweat
first theater I've seen with chalk marks all over the seat arms. Xp

Re what makes ppl tick - I get your point, and it relates to a phenomenon I call "venue toxicity". I get it when trapped in any super intensive sports environment esp. med/long course tri dorks hang gravity riders. but it can be non sporting, like jam bands. after like 8 consecutive hours I'm was way done. bluegrass? pretty instantaneous for me.

living in Moab tho? so many offsets.

not hang, "and"

map! i agree that climbers can be aggressively self-aggrandizing w/r/t their accomplishments ("accomplishments") and certainly with how they turn the camera on themselves (cf conquistadors of the useless)

also: climbing is so fucking fun i actually don't care

anyway if/when i get to moab i'll buy you a beer if you let me

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.