Hey friends,
I've recently been falling down a rabbit hole of documentaries on extreme outdoor pursuits, in particular but not exclusively extreme mountain climbing. I've found these films scratch an interesting assortment of intellectual itches for me. For example:
1) Why do people do this?
2) Who are these people? Psychologically, what explains a person's pursuit of activities that could literally kill them?
3) How do people do this? Like literally and concretely, how? What kinds of gear, experience, planning, and skill are needed for this to be possible?
As a very-much-outsider to these extreme sports, I have developed my own tentative answers to these questions.
Question 1: Intellectually, I can at least somewhat understand the desire to climb a big mountain or paddle down a giant river. I understand that adrenaline rushes are fun, that knowing that you conquered something big and intimidating can grant you a deeply satisfying sense of efficacy, and that competing against yourself can be a huge driving force for people. I understand, theoretically, being curious about exactly how far a person can push their physical abilities, although on a basic animal level, I don't need that level of intense discomfort--to the point of possible self-destruction--in my life. I understand the wish to strenuously pursue one's own growth and to know that you can master successively tougher challenges. I don't understand how people don't get extremely bored focusing on one activity all the time.
Which leads me to assume, in a tentative answer to Question 2: the people who pursue these kinds of athletic goals are obsessive, possibly to the point of absurdity. Maybe they're incredibly competitive? Given the extreme lack of fear and pursuit of ever more intense sensation seeking these athletes display, I honestly, and without meaning to sound overly pathologizing, wonder if there isn't some form of mild characterological pathology at play. It's hard to imagine, given the all-consuming and often solitary nature of these sports, not to mention the risk these people regularly put themselves in, that these athletes are terribly interpersonally successful. They seem lonely, but perhaps only in a literal sense of often being alone, and perhaps not in an emotional sense of feeling alone. The more appropriate term might therefore be that these athletes are incredibly introverted, with some additional personality features to explain their deep absorption and ruthless pursuit of their passions.
All this to say: It's fascinating to imagine what it's like to be a person who might have a very different approach to their lives than my own, and I wonder if we would be friends if given the opportunity. Probably not? Not due to any antipathy, but simply because there wouldn't be much to relate to each other about.
Question 3: With regard to the "how", as a thorough nonparticipant in these pursuits, I didn't have much of an idea. Watching movies that focus on a variety of approaches to these sports has helped me form some vague answers to that third question, both through watching athletes in action, as well as through interviews with other expert technicians and historians who describe the various subtypes of these sports and their histories. I've learned, for example, that there are factions within the mountain climbing community with divisions based on the material you climb (stone vs ice (??!)), the type of gear you use (e.g., oxygen vs no oxygen, but even more perplexingly and stressfully ropes vs no ropes (???!!!)), whether you climb with a team or solo, and whether you carefully study and plan your route ahead of time or only determine your approach once the mountain is in sight. Climbers precariously suspend tents to sleep and shelter in mid-climb and don spiked climbing boots and wield diabolical-looking ice axes to cling to the sheer faces of ice and stone. They also, in some cases, pack way too damn little food for the highly unpredictable environments they hurl themselves into and apparently they never bring lip balm.
As I have a bit obsessively been chasing the answers to these questions by devouring documentary films, I've now arrived at the point at which I can put together a little medley of reviews of these movies, some of which have confirmed my suspicions and some of which have favorably challenged them. Without further ado, here they are!
"14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible" (2021)
Thanks to a Netflix suggestion, this was my entry point into the extreme sports rabbit hole. This film documents Nepali climber Nims Purja's campaign to summit all 14 of the world's 8,000+ feet peaks within 7 months--a bid to utterly demolish the previous world record for this feat. This was an absolutely engrossing and fascinating film that included some special facets that set it apart from the other films I've recently watched.
Purja's ambitious goal is actively informed by his sense of patriotic pride at being from Nepal. He views his venture as an attempt to claim rightful glory for the long line of Nepali climbers that have conquered mountains like Everest, but who have rarely gained a shred of the prestige and fame that has been bestowed upon the white climbers they escorted to the top of the world. With the exception of Purja and his team of other Nepali climbers as well as Jimmy Chin, the Chinese American climber and documentarian responsible for 2018's "Free Solo" (with his co-director and wife Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi) and who is interviewed for "14 Peaks", these sports are vastly over-populated by white men, which raises serious concerns given that many of the geographic targets for these sports are in holy or revered spaces in non-majority-white nations. Purja therefore is a model of a hopefully diversifying sport that might be more accessible to all people in the future.
Running very counter to my theory about climbers' relatedness, Purja speaks to the importance of having strong relationships with his teammates and the responsibility he feels as their leader to maintain morale and not put people in completely needless jeopardy. He readily includes others in his party's celebrations and bolsters people's confidence and sense of adventure. He puts his ethos into astonishingly courageous action after his first completed summit, when he and his team immediately return to the mountain to save a climber in distress--and this is not the last time he puts himself in danger to save a stranger in the film! His courage, community-building, and sense of responsibility to his fellow human beings is truly amazing to watch.
Finally, the footage from each of the 14 expeditions is arrestingly beautiful. The extensive hard work, training, planning, and discomfort required to see those views first hand notwithstanding, seeing them second-hand helped me further understand why a person would want to climb an otherwise hostile and impervious mountain. This film is an absolutely exhilarating journey.
I gave "14 Peaks" a 5.
If you're interested, you can follow Nirmal ("Nims") Purja on Instagram here.
"Meru" (2015)
Unlike his later film, "Free Solo", Jimmy Chin is both the co-director (with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi) and the subject of "Meru", which depicts the saga of two attempts to summit the titular mountain in the Indian Himalayas with two other climbers, Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk. This film much more holistically inventories the immense personal cost of the sport of climbing than "14 Peaks", which both enhances the drama of this particular film and dramatically decreases my patience with the sport and the people who participate in it.
To illustrate my point, the film includes the following either retrospective or contemporaneous events (spoilers ahoy, so scroll ahead to the next movie if you prefer to save the following exasperating revelations for your own viewing of this movie):
--The climbers' first attempt up Meru, only to get stuck in their dangling flimsy-ass tent (aka portaledge) for days because of a horrendous snow storm, during which they resort to roasting cheese rinds because they didn't pack enough food and then when the weather clears they KEEP CLIMBING.
--Anker's loss of his best friend and fellow famous climber, Alex Lowe, in an avalanche at the foot of Mount Shishapangma in Tibet that Anker improbably survived.
--Anker's marriage to Lowe's widow and resultant step-parentage to Lowe's children, who he acknowledges he would be failing if he died on the mountain in either of the expeditions in this film. (He either said "failing" or "letting down" and I'm like bro is that really the term that applies to your violent and preventable death??)
--Anker's loss of his mentor, Mugs Stump, who inspired Anker's relentless fixation on summiting Meru and who died from a fall while descending Denali in Alaska.
--Chin's seemingly impossible survival of an avalanche while filming extreme skiing footage in the Tetons in Wyoming.
--Worst of all, while working on the same ski shoot with Chin, Ozturk suffers a catastrophic skiing accident that breaks multiple bones in his skull, neck, and back, resulting in serious risk of stroke if he is at too-high altitude. But guess what? Next up:
--All three climbers decide go ahead with their plans to re-attempt a summit of Meru 5 MONTHS after Ozturk's accident.
--On the second attempt, Ozturk, you guessed it, starts experiencing stroke-like symptoms after they are well up the mountain. AND THEY KEEP CLIMBING.
I feel my blood pressure going up again simply recounting the events of this movie. The fact that the three men successfully reach the summit of Meru at the conclusion of the film is lifted up as a testament to their teamwork, mutual trust, and perseverance. I'm glad for them that they were successful and extremely relieved that they survived their exploit, but it just seems unforgivably irresponsible that they went through with it. It seems more a product of excrutiatingly unlikely luck than anything actually within their control that none of them died on their trek. Especially after Anker and several of the climbing experts interviewed for "Meru" wax poetic about the importance of having a strong team and not taking unnecessary risks in their pursuit of a high-mortality-rate sport, I just have a hard time being excited about the outcome of this film.
All this is a shame, because I really like Jimmy Chin. After seeing him in "Free Solo" and interviews in "14 Peaks", I've come to find his combination of gravitas, climbing knowledge, and emotional vulnerability really appealing. "Meru" unfortunately made me second-guess his and his fellow climber's judgment. I remain surprised at all of them for their foolhardiness in pursuing this summit.
All that said, this is a totally riveting and well-made film. It includes gorgeous footage and interesting backstory and history explaining the climbing approaches used and the lineage of climbers that led to the accomplishment depicted in "Meru". Despite their arguably ridiculous choices, Chin, Anker, and Ozturk are likeable people who seem perhaps a bit tragically cursed by their obsession with climbing. Even though I wish they'd just played it safe and gone home, there's a part of me that still felt happy for them as they relished their summit of Meru.
As a stylistic sidenote, it's also interesting seeing the vestiges of what I believe are Chin's sports highlights reel-making directorial history in the opening passages of "Meru", which if I'm remembering correctly were thankfully gone from "Free Solo". His directorial style seems to have fully transitioned into a more thoughtful, measured, and less Mountain Dew-y edginess aesthetic that I really appreciate.
I gave "Meru" a 4.
You can follow Jimmy Chin on Instagram here.
"The River Runner" (2021)
After watching a couple of climbing movies, I was interested to check out a film about a somewhat similar sport: river kayaking. "The River Runner" profiles Scott Lindgren while also chronicling his pursuit of his goal to kayak the four rivers that flow from a sacred mountain in Tibet, Mount Kailash.
Of all of these films, this left the most unsavory taste in my mouth. Lindgren comes across as the worst embodiment of my theoretical psychological profile for athletes involved in extreme sports: pugnacious, self-involved, and self-destructive, he seems like someone who would be very difficult to form close relationships with and who instead, as he admits, would be happy to tell people to fuck off if they didn't seem to pass his version of muster.
Consistent with his brash white dudebro-y persona, Lindgren talks about his goal to kayak the four aforementioned rivers, only ever so briefly noting that the mountain they flow from is sacred, with the air of an invading colonizer rather than with any degree of humility or curiosity about whether it's acceptable for him to maraud into terrain that others have significant reverence for. Not that this is mentioned in the movie, but the most cursory of googlings reveals that Mount Kailash is considered sacred by FOUR faith traditions. But Lindgren never overtly pauses to consider whether he's using another culture's cathedral as his personal bouldering gym. To the contrary, as footage of Lindgren bickering with his gigantic team of local porters over their payment suggests and as a massive counterpoint to the ethos modeled by Nims Purja, Lindgren simply does not play well with others and takes particularly unkindly to the locals of the countries he's invading having opinions of their own. It's all pretty gross.
Of admittedly lesser importance is the fact that this film also isn't particularly well suited to satisfy an outsider's curiosity about the sport of kayaking. The footage of actual kayaking is generally limited to short shots of the gnarliest moves, bro!, but not the longer and more studied shots often included in the climbing movies that give the viewer more of a sense of the entire experience. Despite following Lindgren to multiple continents, you're left with a frustratingly unclear sense of the totality and surrounding environments of each of his trips. Unlike in "14 Peaks" or "Meru", you don't see much establishing footage or hear a thorough explanation of the path Lindgren will take or the overall terrain he'll traverse. This yadda yadda yadda-ing over these details only further reinforces his potentially harmful narrow-mindedness: to him, the context--who or what surrounds the rivers he's traveling down or what the significance of those waterways is--doesn't seem to matter. All that matters is that he gets to "high five down the river" with his fellow paddlers.
In fairness, "The River Runner" does attempt to create a redemptive arc for Lindgren. He contends with his history of destructive behaviors and attitudes (although never with the pretty blunt manifestations of his problematic whiteness in the non-majority-white nations he travels). After experiencing a major health issue, goes on to practice a bunch of appropriated healing traditions like yoga and meditation and then proselytizes about the healing properties of outdoorsiness, but the film never totally convinces that this isn't just the next evolution of a perpetually self-absorbed man who still just wants to do whatever he wants to do.
I gave "The River Runner" a 2.
"The Alpinist" (2020)
The final entry in this medley follows Marc-André Leclerc, the titular alpinist. This profile is a study in contrasts: On the one hand, Leclerc is an impossibly goofy, sweet, affable young Canadian guy with an impossibly sweet relationship with his sweet, good-natured, easygoing yet similarly committed to the outdoors girlfriend Brette Harrington. Leclerc and Harrington live in a tent in the woods and dedicate all of their resources to outdoor pursuits, where they seem blissfully happy and utterly lacking in ego. Leclerc seems like the kind of kid who should be playing hacky sack and getting high all day before rolling into his job at a pizza place.
On the other hand, Leclerc's harrowing climbing approach is to tackle major mountains alone, without planning his course in advance, and without the use of ropes. And he's amazing. There's one passage of Leclerc climbing that is unreal in its beauty and fluidity; he slides up the rock like a swimming snake cuts through water. Even as a viewer completely ignorant to the sport of climbing, it is clear that Leclerc is an incredible technician. On a later bid to summit Argentina's Torre Egger during winter--a previously unheard-of feat, the climb of a lifetime--Leclerc regularly swaps his spiked boots for climbing shoes and his ice axes for his bare hands, seamlessly utilizing the stunning repertoire of skills that makes this and other seemingly impossible summits possible. I learned so much about the techniques and skills required to competently climb just by watching the film's mesmerizing footage of Leclerc.
This film couldn't be a stronger counterpoint to my more pessimistic tentative profile of athletes in extreme sports and my underwhelming theories for why people pursue extreme sports: Leclerc lovingly and humbly talks about his love of adventure, conveys the tantalizing, engrossing present-moment focus and quieting of his mind he attains when in nature, and shares the breathless euphoria of his summits. He is all the more special for how concertedly he eschews public attention for his feats, much to the chagrin of the documentary film crew he regularly evades throughout the filming of "The Alpinist".
This will probably be the last of these kinds of movies I watch for a while. For lots of reasons, it's a tough act to follow.
I gave it a 5.
{Heart}
