54 Candles
Expedition
By Allen Sherpa
Ten men – most from the White Mountains of Arizona
– will launch an assault on the summit of Mount Hood, Oregon’s highest
mountain, in the early morning hours of Friday the 13th of April,
2001. Allen Sherpa was invited to
participate, but declined. With this
letter, he’s staying in close contact with the climbing party.
Holy Avalanche,
Captain Climb! I saw the mountain
climbing movie Vertical Relief the other night. If the real thing is even slightly similar
to the movie, you guys have truly lost all contact with sanity.
As far as the movie
itself was concerned, let me summarize it for you. The only real relief was when it ended. I’m not normally a real big movie buff, but this film seemed to
be a complete waste of perfectly good cellulose. The acting was poor, but at least the writing was abysmally
bad. I’ve seen thicker plots in Dr.
Seuss books. The only people I’d
recommend this movie to are the terminally ill. If they sat through the whole thing, it would make their lives
seem like an eternity.
Nonetheless, I want
you to see this movie. Critical acclaim
aside, the movie did show a number of mountain climbing scenes and (if you can
believe anything at all from the movie) did present some insights into the
world of climbing tall, icy, cold, windy, miserably high mountains. That’s right, Pebble Picker, doing the same
thing you loon-birds are going to be doing on Mount Hood.
I don’t want to
spoil the plot (as if there was one) for anyone that hasn’t seen this
masterpiece, but the movie is centered on these Donny and Marie clones. Marie falls in a giant crevasse high on K-2,
the world’s second highest mountain. An
avalanche buries Marie and the evil villain in an ice cave. Donny, along with
some recycled action hero, spends the rest of the movie trying to rescue Marie
as she wastes away in the rarified mountain environment.
In the process of
reaching the rescue scene, they undergo all of the joys that you jokers are
going to experience on Mount Hood.
Avalanches, crumbling snow-bridges, winds that would freeze a
blow-torch. There are falls, jumps,
flying leaps and everyone is suffering terribly (especially the audience). But, as heros must, the Donny look-alike
finally gets to the rescue scene.
As the lives of the
victims teeter on the brink, the rescuers realize they have a serious
problem. Marie and friend are buried in
an ice cave. How are they going to find
them? I’m not going to ruin that disgusting
part of the movie for you. The writers
and directors did that themselves. But,
I will tell you that the hero had the wisdom and foresight to haul a
substantial amount of – what else? – nitroglycerin up the mountain.
So here they are,
supposedly not far from the summit of the world’s second highest mountain, a
mountain that is renown for its massive avalanches. In the real world, this mountain is actually the place of final
repose of many great mountain climbers who have been buried in avalanches and
this yak brings nitroglycerin up there.
They actually blow half the face of the mountain away and leave only the
now perfectly formed, snowless entry to the ice cave in which Marie anxiously
awaits rescue. The massive explosion
vaporizes half the mountain and doesn’t mess up the heroine’s makeup. Wow!
That is high drama.
So if the movie
lacked in some areas, why do I want you to see it? What lessons are there to be gleaned from this masterpiece? The first is that the effects of prolonged
exposure to high altitude can be devastating.
This was proved by the fact that the writers and directors apparently
spent some time at elevation filming and researching the movie. Obviously, something had a severe impact on
their ability to perform. The only explanation
I can come up with is “oxygen deprivation”.
Another lesson is
that you and your fellow slope dopes are probably over-training. The Donny clone nearly made the summit of
K-2 without previous experience at elevation and with no advance preparation
for the climb whatsoever.
Finally, watching
this movie should serve as a great training exercise. Sitting through two hours of this cartoon has to go a long way
toward preparing you for a couple of days of extreme suffering on the face of Oregon’s
highest mountain. I’m not sure I
wouldn’t bring the video and watch it in the lodge the night before you
leave. You’ll look forward to getting
out into the snow and shivering for a while.
Just clean up and look good.
Donny showed us that’s all that’s important.
Who knows? Perhaps they’ll make a movie about your climb of Mount Hood. It’s got to be better than this one. Well, I guess that’s another story.