Reel Rock 8 Kicks Off Tonight

Tonight the 8th edition of the Reel Rock Film
Tour kicks off with the usual world premier in Boulder,
CO¹.
 For once I will have the pleasure of being there which is of
great benefit to me, and, if everything goes well, will hopefully
be of benefit to you as well.  After the success of our initial experiment, Louder
Than 11 and I figured we’d take it up a notch and do another live
interview show, this time focused on the Reel Rock Tour. Tonight we
are scheduled to be joined by filmmakers Pete Mortimer and Josh
Lowell followed by the stars of Reel Rock 8, Yuji Hirayama, Daniel
Woods and Hazel Findlay.  The show will be from 5-6 PM
MDT and you can catch it live over on the Youtube.
 Your participation is key, so be sure to submit
any questions you might have for any of the aforementioned
people either in the comments of this post or
over on the Youtube page².  Then be sure to tune in and enjoy the
show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7EuZbcL0ZQ This year’s Reel
Rock Tour is a collection of three short films and one extended teaser for an
upcoming film.  I had the opportunity to screen the
films already, and while this year’s show is the first in the past
several years that doesn’t involve names like Sharma, Caldwell or
 Honnold, there are still some stories to be told here. The
opening pieces on Yuji Hirayama and Daniel Woods in Japan and
Borneo as well as the piece on Hazel Findlay climbing in the UK and
Morocco are good introductions to a mass audience of charismatic
climbers like Hirayama³
and Findlay who both make it seem like hanging out and climbing
with them is quite a lot of fun.  The Stonemasters piece is
more an extended trailer for a forthcoming film
called Valley Uprising, so if 1970’s
Yosemite is your thing then you’ll be pretty psyched about this
part. And then there is the piece on Ueli Steck’s already well
chronicled ordeal on Mt. Everest this past spring.  While
there has been a lot written about what happened, the first hand
accounts and first hand video in this piece really tell a powerful
and in some ways disturbing story.  It’s still impossible to
tell exactly what happened, but the story told in this piece tries
to tell both sides as best it can, and it gives one a lot of food
for thought regarding the circus that has befallen the world’s
tallest mountain. Here are the snippets describing each movie from
the Reel Rock website:

The Sensei

Forty-three-year-old Yuji Hirayama is one of the
great legends of modern climbing. Near retirement, he plans one big
swan-song mission to complete a project, one of his hardest ever,
at the spectacular summit of Mount Kinabalu, on the island of
Borneo. But first he must find the right partner. Enter Daniel
Woods, the young American boulderer who is one of the strongest
humans in the climbing world, but lacks mountain experience.
Daniel-San travels to Japan to prove himself worthy of Hirayama’s
mentorship, and the unlikely duo team up for the expedition of a
lifetime.

Spice Girl

The UK climbing scene is known for its strict
traditional ethic, yielding dangerous routes and a competitive
machismo among the driven young climbers risking it all to prove
their boldness. It’s the last place you’d expect to find a nice
little blond girl putting all the lads to shame, but Hazel Findlay
is doing just that. The first woman to climb the British grade of
E9 (super hard, super sketchy), Hazel is a connoisseur of loose
rock, dodgy gear, and big runouts. Having mastered the scrappy
seacliffs at home she teams up with Emily Harrington to tackle the
massive, untamed bigwalls of Taghia Gorge,
Morocco.

The Stonemasters

Sender Films is currently working on a feature
documentary about the counterculture climbing scene in Yosemite
over the last 50 years.  Provisionally titled “Valley
Uprising,” the film brings all the legends to life: from Royal
Robbins’ epic battle with Warren Harding to the fabled drug plane
crash of 1977 and the escalating tensions between climbers and
national park rangers. This year’s REEL ROCK Film Tour will include
a teaser clip from the film that focuses on the sex-drugs-n-rock
era of Jim Bridwell and the Stonemasters.

High Tension:  Ueli Steck And The Clash On
Everest

Mount Everest made headlines
around the world this year when it was reported that Ueli Steck and
Simone Moro, one of the strongest duos in alpinism, were attacked
by a crowd of angry sherpas at Camp 2 while attempting a cutting
edge new route on the highest — and most crowded — mountain in the
world. Fearing for their lives, the climbers fled the
mountain, and the incident sparked a flurry of gasps and angry
recrimination: sherpas, western climbers, guiding companies, even
the legendary mountain itself were pounded with criticism from all
sides. Amidst the bizarre event, REEL ROCK was embedded with the
climbing team and given an exclusive look at what happened that
day, and why.