Shot on location throughout Alberta, Canada, this promotional video shows off beautiful Alberta. Didn’t know much about Alberta before watching this video, but now thinking it’s worth a trip. Apparently this is one of many promotional commercials. Time to wade through the rest.
Category: Climb
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First Ascent – Extreme Freeclimbing Movie Trailer
Featured in the 2006 Reel Rock Film Tour, First Ascent is a film about those places in the world that are too dangerous, too remote..or just too hard to climb. It’s about the glory of being first, of doing something nobody has ever done before. Another beautiful documentary from Sender Films.
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Bear Grylls Climbs Iconic 350-ft Tombstone Rock
This video is less about real climbing — have you seen Alex Honnold? — than it is luscious cinematography, but alas, certainly Nerve Rush worthy. Tombstone Rock is in Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, where Bear Grylls first learned about climbing from his father. Watch him reconnect with his roots, courtesy of Degree’s Masters of Movement series.
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Dani Andrada Rock Climbing Training
Ever wonder what it takes to be a top-notch, world-renowned rock climber? Dani Andrada gives us a glimpse with his indoor training schedule, surely one of the more grueling rock climbing workouts one could do.
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GoPro HD Hero 2010 Compilation
In this video are some of GoPro’s best shots in 2010. Shot on a GoPro HD HERO, this footage features skiing, snowboarding, surfing, swimming, skateboarding, car racing, human flight — you name it.
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Swedish Andreas Fransson’s Ski Descent of Denali
In the summer of 2013, I plan to climb Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. And when I stand on the summit, I plan on representing Nerve Rush in the triumphant, glorious manner it deserves.
As it stands, this expedition is about 1.5 years away. In the meantime, as I pad my bank account for the necessary gear and logistics, I also begin to think about a training schedule that will optimize my chances at reaching the summit. Standing tall at 20,320 feet, Denali is no easy climb.
Currently in armchair-mountaineering mode, I occasionally find myself browsing the Internet for Denali-related resources. Training programs, trip reports, maps, you name it. Just recently, I stumbled upon something remarkable and definitely Nerve Rush worthy.
Andreas Fransson, Swedish Alpinist Extraordinaire
Andreas Fransson, a 28-year old Swedish alpinist and extreme skier, has the rare kind of prowess we at Nerve Rush HQ tend to swoon over. Not only is he capable of scaling mountains with world-renowned alpinist, but he’s one of the best extreme skiers in the world, buddying up with the likes of French snowboarder Xavier de Le Rue.
In 2010, Fransson shattered the upper half of his body in the French Alps when a wet-slab avalanche ripped him from his rappel. A year later, in May 2011, he broke new ground with a solo first descent of Denali’s south face, a route called the “baddest unskied line in North America.”
After a month of alpine-style climbing on the mountain, ascending and descending to acclimate and familiarize himself with the route, Fransson took 12.5 hours to descend the 8,000-foot south face of the mountain. Much of this trip was done at night..without a headlamp!
Riding with 177-centimeter Nordica Enforcers, Fransson descended on a precarious and seemingly never-ending surface that featured sections of 70-degree ice.
After returning safely to base camp, Fransson, in true extreme form, decided that the adventure wasn’t done. He took a rest day then climbed Denali’s Cassin Ridge, one of the most famous alpine climbs in the world, in a mere 33-hour round trip push. To lend some perspective, the Cassin Ridge has been climbed in under 36 hours fewer than 10 times. And, following this second successful venture, Fransson skied the Messner Couloir, a 5,000-foot, 45-degree descent. All told, he slept 3 hours in 3 days.
Fransson currently lives in Chamonix, France, a skier’s and alpinist’s mecca in the French Alps. He trains 10 hours a day.
From Fransson:
“Society has an absurd general belief that life is about hanging on as long as possible. So people [are] often hanging on for the sake of hanging on and not for really living … I can go on for days about this, but the important things in life are unsayable, so let’s just live it out and see what we find behind the curtains in front of the big game we are all playing.”
Here is a clip of Fransson skiing the Col de L´Aiguille Verte in Chamonix:
[vimeo id=”19292027″ width=”600″ height=”350″]
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Alex Honnold, the Quirky Rock Climbing Beast
There are rock climbers, and then there’s Alex Honnold.
There is no adrenaline rush. If I get a rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong. Because the whole thing should be pretty slow and controlled. I mean, it’s mellow.
Surviving on less than $1,000/month and living out of his white van, Honnold is a rock climbing prodigy. Armed with nothing more than rubber shoes and a bag of chalk, he tackles walls thousands of feet high. Without a rope. It’s called free solo climbing, and it’s one of those sports that, even here at the Nerve Rush headquarters, we cringe when thinking about it.
It’s not like Alex is unqualified to do what he does. He started climbing indoors at the age of 11 and was there 3 hours a day, 6 days a week honing the physical skills and mental fortitude required for such a demanding sport. At the age of 19, Honnold dropped out of his engineering courses at UC Berkeley to devote 100% of his time to rock climbing. By the time most of us heard about him, he had completed more than 1,000 free solo climbs.
His toughest climb to date, featured in the film Alone on the Wall, was a free solo ascent of the northwest face of Half Dome, a 2,000 foot granite behemoth in Yosemite National Park.
[images via Wikipedia and National Geographic]
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Reporting Live: 2011 Reel Rock Film Tour
A few weeks ago, Nerve Rush HQ received an email:
I bought two tickets to the Reel Rock Film Tour…The six movies being shown look incredible.
I hopped on over to the website and found this trailer:
Boom goes the dynamite–I was in. Waiting in line, I realized I should have gotten there earlier. The theater was packed.
History of the Reel Rock Film Tour
The first Reel Rock film tour premiered in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado, featuring two new climbing movies. Founded by Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer, both who have been producing and directing adventure films for more than a decade, the Reel Rock film tour is organized annually and promotes films about rock and ice climbing, mountaineering, BASE jumping and other adventurous mountain sports. The tours often include gear raffles, athlete appearances and signings and fundraising for non-profit organizations. The tour is put on by Sender Films and Big Up Productions, who team up with North Face and Windstopper as primary sponsors.
Reel Rock Film Tour 2011
This year, the 6th annual film tour kicked off with two winners from a filmmaking competition. The judges picked one winner, and online votes (or “the people”) chose the other winner.
The judges choice, “Crash Pad Test Facility,” featured a comical sequence of tough situations, all of which were handled miraculously by the bouldering crash pad. The people’s choice, “The Climber Kid,” was a climbing parody of The Karate Kid.
There were six other films:
Ice Evolution
A beautiful film shot at British Columbia’s Helmcken Falls, maniac ice climber Will Gadd, a 30+ year veteran to the sport, shows us his dream climb–a heinously difficult but perfectly aesthetic overhanging climb behind a waterfall. Gadd and Tim Emmett dodge 30 foot icicly bombs and climb undoubtedly the hardest pure ice climb in the world. My favorite part of the film? When Gadd and Emmett used a metal detector to hunt down ice-covered bolts from the previous season. It was hilarious.Cold
“What the fuck am I doing here? We have to get down.” Over the past 26 years, 16 expeditions have tried and failed to climb Gasherbrum II, one of Pakistan’s highest peaks (over 8,000 meters), in the winter. In February 2011, Simone Moro, Denis Urubko, and Corey Richards became the first to achieve this goal, surviving -50 degree temperatures and a massive avalanche. In this first-person look at modern super-alpinism, Richards captured both the glory and pain of the trip.Project Dawn Wall
Tommy Caldwell, one of the world’s best rock climbers, has devoted the last decade of his life to opening free climbing routes on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Three seasons into his ultimate project–the seemingly impossible Dawn Wall–Tommy documents his first big ground-up push, showing us pitch after pitch of 5.14 first ascents. Eventually, an epic storm shuts the team down for the season, but boy did they come back with some nutty footage–imagine what it looks like to sleep on a completely vertical face. Ever heard of a portaledge?Origins: Obe & Ashima
One of the more inspiring adventure films I’ve seen, Obe & Ashima profiles nine-year old Ashima Shiraishi, a New York City bouldering prodigy under the tutelage of her passionate coach, Obe Carrion, a former professional. In part of the film, they head to Hueco Tanks, TX, seeking out the highest concentration of boulder problems in the U.S., where Ashima tears it apart. After climbing the notoriously difficult V12 Martini Right, Obe says to Ashima, “This is how psyched feels.”Race for the Nose
It’s the wildest competition known to man, the speed record on the Nose route of Yosemite’s El Capitan. For 50+ years, the world’s best climbers have been one-upping each other, racing up 3,000 feet of vertical granite rock in under 3 hours, risking life and limb to shave mere seconds from the climb. In this film, we follow Dean Potter and Sean Leary, who duke it out with other teams for rock climbing’s ultimate prize.Sketchy Andy / Slacklife
Andy Lewis is a nutty guy who, among other hobbies, enjoys BASE jumping, naked slacklining and aerial “trick-lining.” This film showcases someone who is pushing the limits–some might think too far–with some pretty gnarly feats. Below are some highlights, not from the film tour, of Andy’s best. -
The World’s 10 Most Dangerous (and Extreme) Sports
From TermLifeInsurance.org:
Defining the world’s most dangerous sports remains a tricky subject, mainly due to limited data and a reluctance among organizers and participants to publicize deaths in their sport.
If an activity involves being exposed to the elements of using special equipment on an inherently incontrollable and unpredictable environment, we’re classifying it as a dangerous sport.
Here are ten of the most dangerous:
I discovered this infographic when researching the world’s most dangerous and extreme sports. I’m not sure when it was put together, or how the numbers were culled, but regardless of the validity of the data, it’s an interesting list to think about.
A lot of thought put into this, but I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the list. White water rafting? BMX? What about mountaineering, or free-climbing? The latter is particularly daunting.
What do you think?
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Ueli Steck Speed Solos North Face of Grand Jorasses
The soundtrack title is “Human After All,” which is comical considering Ueli Steck is nowhere near human. We’ve showcased his speed solo ascent of the Eiger before, but this clip is equally as impressive. Watch Ueli Steck conquer the north face of the Grand Jorasses in Chamonix, France.