Get down and dirty in this outdoor adventure program.
The audience is encouraged to bring warm layers, blankets and stoke! It’s BYO chair, but keep in mind no tall chairs are allowed. If you can fit a soccer ball underneath it, it’s too tall. (Dogs, glass and shelled nuts are also not allowed.)
Five women. Four ropes. Two-hundred-and-twenty meters of webbing. Ninety kilograms of equipment. A one hour and thirty minute hike. Six hours of installation. Three hours of disassembly. All over three days. Finding inner calm and balance while highlining thousands of feet off the ground, these women demonstrate their fierce ability to control the mind and body, overcome fear and doubt, forge unbreakable bonds and laugh amidst it all.
A group of climbers of color make the 13-hour road trip from Brooklyn to return to the climbing playground of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The group is seeking redemption on tricky bouldering problems that have bested them in the past. We hear from three of the friends about their individual approaches to mentally preparing for a climb by channeling confidence, focus and trust.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that the sport, industry and obsession of mountain biking was at least partially invented by mountain town pioneers riding “klunker” bikes down mountain passes between Crested Butte and Aspen. The sports’ inventors had no clue — they were, one recalls, “just a bunch of outlaws with too much time on our hands and a couple million acres of wild country to explore.” Tinkering with klunkers led to bike innovations; impromptu partying turned into organized events; cow paths were linked together into single track networks. Filmmakers Mike Horn and Galin Foley intercut archival footage, interviews with Crested Butte old-timers and reenactments to tell the story of the Butte’s Grubstake Gang and the outdoor adventure sport they helped launch.
Jerome Mowat is a paramedic during a global pandemic and has not seen his family in over five months. In the gruesome mundanity of working in an emergency vehicle, Mowat finds solace in the fundamental and elemental characteristics of rock climbing. When his mind can become so occupied by something as irrelevant as a piece of rock, that is when he is able to completely remove himself, not only physically, but mentally, from the heartbreak of his work. In the juxtaposition of climbing and being a paramedic, we are able to catch a glimpse of coping at its finest.
Toni Arbones has always followed his passion — bolting climbing routes to the top of a remote and winding six-kilometer road in Siurana, Spain, where he built his paradise. The limestone cliffs of the world-renowned climbing area now boast 1,700 routes thanks to the relentless work of Arbones’ drill and glue gun. Arbones is a self-proclaimed bolting addict, who has raised the painstaking task to an art form.
American ultra runner Patrick Vaughan attempts the fastest known time for the rugged 470-kilometer (290-mile) Lebanon Mountain Trail. But Vaughan, like the country itself, is torn and scarred. The film toggles back and forth between his struggles with heat, exhaustion and route finding over more than six days on the steep and rocky terrain, and the raw, confessional-style telling of his addiction to painkillers and the downward spiral that followed. No longer numb to his pain, Vaughan uses it to forge a deeper connection to the country and push himself toward his goal.
Spellbound offers a poetic and haunting take on wingsuit BASE jumping — the antidote to the usual narrative of the thrill-seeking adrenaline rush. Waterfalls, granite spires and mountain lakes flash under wing as the bird people of New Zealand soar past, ethereally defying the laws of nature. This meditation on the concepts of light and dark is a breathtaking ode to flight.