House of Cards (Work in Progress)

In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk attempted a long-sought-after summit: a highly technical and challenging granite buttress called the Shark’s Fin on the northeast side of the 6,310-meter peak Meru Central in India. They — like many other alpinists before them — did not make it to the top, although the resulting documentary, Samsara, redefined climbing films, winning the Charlie Fowler Award at Mountainfilm in 2009. In that film, Chin clearly states that he is never coming back to Meru, yet in the fall of 2011, the three men return to India to take another shot at what has become a 20-year obsession for Anker. Each man has many reasons not to return to a place the Hindus consider to be the center of the universe, including family responsibilities for Anker and Chin and a traumatic head injury suffered by Ozturk during a ski accident. Yet the summit still beckons the three men.