Luck has undoubtedly been on my side the last week while completing perhaps 4 first ascents and the second ascent of Alex Lowe’s Mean Streak. This last week will go down as one of the best weeks of climbing in my life. With so many great photos and stories, I will break the week up with a blog post for each trip. Over the next week, posts will begin to roll into the blog and I hope everyone enjoys them almost as much as I enjoyed each climb.
Waiting for the sun..
As many of you know, “The Pursuit” film will be coming out very soon. I will have dates and more info to come on that. Over the past few days, I learned that filming a movie is nothing like watching the events unfold on the screen. Lots of preparation, timing and sitting around for hours to capture 2o minutes of action is common. Even so, only 30 seconds of that 20 minutes will probably be used in the film because, let’s face it, watching ice climbing is not all that exciting.
The new line can be seen in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately, most of the other ice melted away days later.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a line forming that I had never seen before up on Carter Mountain. The line was to the left of what’s called The Wig. Recently, as I hiked out from an afternoon on Curtains getting footage for the new film, I noticed that the new line was still there and was illuminated by an amazing alpine glow at sunset. We decided to head up to it the next day, hoping to capture the amazing light and score a potential new climb.
Aaron Mulkey on Curtains
We arrived at the base of the climb after crossing some sketchy avalanche-loaded slopes. Around 2pm, after crossing yet another loaded slope, Chris Alstrin and Joel Anderson had the gear rigged above the climb. Everyone was set and in place to shoot. It was just a matter of sitting around in the freezing wind and cold, waiting for the climb to come into the sun. I think the crew (Tanner Calender, Joel Anderson, Shawn Gregory, Chris Alstrin and Nelson Aries) were beginning to doubt that I ever actually saw the sun hit the climb.
We knew the sun set at 5:50. It was 5:00 and the sun was nowhere near the route. At about 5:15, thinking we’d been hosed, I decided I’d better at least get the climb done before it got dark. About 20 minutes into it, the route absolutely lit up. Climbing in that type of light was amazing (the spindrift face shots were just the icing on the cake). I topped out on the climb and literally had about 2 minutes of light left. Sometimes, the waiting around pays off big.
The alpine glow starts to illuminate the new route as Aaron Mulkey climbs.
We called the route Get Lucky for obvious reasons!
