The Kaamos Road follows French cyclist and filmmaker Joffrey Maluski on a winter journey along the Arctic Circle. On his 1,500km, 25-day expedition through Lapland, he carries everything he needs on his bicycle, barely seeing the sun.

The journey begins not on a bike but on a series of nine trains, which takes Maluski from the south of France to Bodo, Norway. There, he assembles his bike, on which he will carry his fuel, gear, and tent.

While he waits for the ferry to the Lofoten islands, he explains the plan. Starting from this archipelago, he'll cycle across Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The "kaamos" of The Kaamos Road is the Finnish word for the polar night. His entire journey takes place during a time when the sun barely breaches the horizon.

Through the frozen dark

He does enjoy a few hours of muted light every day, but the rest of the time, Maluski bikes through the dark. After six days of riding through lashing rain and icy wind, he reaches the Swedish border.

With every kilometer, he reminds us, he pushes deeper into the Arctic. Sunlight becomes even rarer, even as the camera lingers on the rosy, perpetually dawning skies. The scenery comes with fairly brutal conditions for a bike ride. After one 110km day, where temperatures never rose above -16˚C, Maluski shows us the icicles hanging from his face.

His journey quickly settles into a daily routine. At eight, he gets up, eats, and waits for the dawn. Around 10 am, he starts biking. He captures as much film and photographs as he can before it sets again at 1:30 pm. He keeps biking in the darkness, covering between 60 and 100 kilometers. His toes, he reports, are painfully cold, all day, every day.

The temperatures only drop as he nears the final stretch, crossing back into Norway. When he shows us his morning routine, he admits how hard it is to will himself out of his sleeping bag into the -23˚C morning and onto his waiting bike.

After the 25th consecutive morning of such hardship, Maluski arrives in Vardo, Norway.

A documentary short set in Daphne, Alabama, Jubilee describes a rare natural event that only occurs on Alabama's Mobile Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico. We're introduced to some of the people who live along the bay. For them, a Jubilee is part of their vanishing culture.

Watching for the Jubilee

In the bay, a complex combination of weather and tides can cause the water's oxygen levels to drop suddenly. When this happens, sea life congregates on shore and in the shallows. Shrimp, crab, eels, and flounders practically throw themselves on waiting nets and spears.

For many long-time residents, predicting, preparing, and watching for a Jubilee is an important part of their lives. We soon meet Miss Stephanie, a mentor to many of the younger residents who've discovered a love of Jubilee-watching.

When she was young, she says, the Jubilees were more frequent and more intense. We see faded photographs of dozens of flounders hung up, and of masses of crabs emerging from the water.

Mildred, her elderly mother, recalls how the entire community was mobilized at the call of "Jubilee." It was the neighborhood children who patrolled the beach most diligently, eagerly watching for signs.

Some of them still do. We meet Christopher, a young local, and some of his friends. Their summers are spent fishing, swimming, and rising before dawn to check the beach. This is when the Jubilee happens: in summer, just before dawn. But as Christopher explains, they're hard to predict. The wind, the tide, the temperature, the moon phase, and salinity all have to come together just right.

Beautiful unused piers

Miss Stephanie no longer gets up to check for Jubilees, now that Christopher has taken over. She still takes on the cooking when they bring in their hauls and keeps the door open, waiting for the kids to holler for her. (We even learn that in the old regional debate between Zatarain's and Old Bay for spicing seafood, she prefers Zatarain's.)

Christopher says she helped teach him to appreciate just spending time by the bay. A talented musician, he enjoys spending time at the beach, playing the accordion and violin. He doesn't understand, he tells us, why there are all these beautiful piers going unused. The camera runs along a line of large, pristine beachfront houses and their large, pristine piers, all vacant and lifeless.

"They don't really enjoy the bay," Christopher explains. They also build seawalls, which leads to the beaches eroding. "I don't know why."

Private beaches and rock walls prevent Christopher and his friends from walking long stretches of the beach to check for Jubilees. The people in those big homes look down, he says, on those who actually use the bay; it's low class to swim. He swims anyway.

Many of these same people, Christopher tells us, don't even believe the Jubilees are real, or at least that they still happen. We don't see one ourselves, only black-and-white pictures of massive hauls. But Christopher and his friends still get up in the middle of the night to check the beaches.

The High Life: The Final Season of Chamonix's Oldest Refuge catalogues the last days of a 119-year-old alpine hut. Called Charpoua, the refuge is the oldest and smallest in the Chamonix Valley, just north of Mont Blanc.

Sitting above 3,000m of elevation, the hut's keeper, Sarah Cartier, has spent the last eight summers living there in isolation. We join her and her two young children as they care for Charpoua, which was set to be demolished and rebuilt after that season.

Life at Charpoua

With the season set to open in a few days, the documentary meets Cartier and her children as they arrive at the hut and receive a load of supplies via helicopter. Cartier bustles about the hut, cleaning, unpacking, and airing out, while talking to the camera.

She discusses the work ("housekeeping at 10,000 feet,") and her decision to bring her two children, including one seven-month-old. But, like her decision to serve only organic and vegetarian food, Cartier stands by her own way of doing things.

The hut is a shelter for passing climbers, but most of the time it's just the three of them. She describes a sense of freedom in being alone on the mountain, in the tiny refuge. Her life in the hut, "a cocoon," from the outside world, is minimalist.

The end of an era?

Noe, Cartier's husband, visits several times a month, as do friends. When they do, she gets the chance to ditch the kids for a short climbing break. Like her, these climbers are drawn by the relative isolation of Charpoua. This relic from an older era of alpinism is situated in one of the more difficult-to-access and less-traveled areas around Mont Blanc.

On August 29, the season ends. Cartier and her family are joined by dozens of Charpoua well-wishers from the community. Cartier admits that, unlike previous years, this time she doesn't want to head down. "We're so happy living here," she explains.

The so-called "longest ridgeline" in Europe runs along the spine of the Mont Blanc massif. This short documentary follows Erik Heldmann as he and climbing partner David Deichmann attempt the ambitious route, called the Peuterey Integral.

Summitting Aiguille Noire de Peuterey from the south ridge, the route proceeds down the north face to a traverse of the Breches des Dames Anglais. From there, it flows along the Peuterey Ridge, up and over Aiguille Blanche, and ends at the summit of Mont Blanc.

After outlining the route that he and his climbing partner, David Deichmann, will take, we briefly descend into daily life. Heldmann is a professional route setter, working at a climbing gym in Darmstadt, Germany. In the gym, we see the deep professional satisfaction that Heldmann takes in his work. But it's important, he tells us, for him to change his mindset when he moves from the "very safe sport" of gym climbing to outdoor climbing.

As Heldmann and Deichman start their approach, the weather finally clears after days of storms. It takes eight hours to reach the Eccles Bivouac, a tiny shelter at over 3,800m in elevation.

On the Peuterey Integral

The next morning at 4:30 am, the pair takes their first steps along the Peuterey Integral. On the first day, Heldmann reaches the top of 4,460m Picco Luigi Amadeo and finishes a project that has taken him six years -- summiting all 4,000m peaks in the Alps, 82 in all.

From Picco Luigi Amadeo, the ridgeline and distant Mont Blanc are clearly visible; there is still a long way to go. Handheld and drone footage follow the pair as they make their way along the snaking ridgeline.

Finally, they celebrate success at the summit of Mont Blanc. As the two figures head home, text on the screen tells us that even after becoming one of the elite few to complete all the alpine 4,000'ers, Heldmann continues to work at his comparatively humble job at the climbing gym.

Released in 1988, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History is an offbeat documentary about Australia's invasive cane toad problem. Informative and thorough, it's edited like a horror movie in some places and a comedy in others. And in some ways, it's as much a people story as a toad story.

As text on screen informs us, the cane toad was introduced to Australia in the mid-1930s to control cane grubs, which were eating up the sugar crop. One hundred and two toads were snatched up from Hawaii and introduced to North Queensland.

It was a classic "little old lady who swallowed the fly" gambit. In introducing the toads to tackle the grub problem, they created a whole new problem. The documentary explains this issue via a surprisingly detailed breakdown of toad mating practices and techniques.

Fifty years after their introduction, the waters are thick with cane toads. Bill Freeland, a wildlife officer, pulls out writhing handfuls of slick black tadpoles. Hearty little beasts, they are quick to develop legs and can thrive in slow, fast, clear, or brackish water.

The second plague

The rapid colonization of the toads was not without consequences. Perhaps worst of all, they didn't even solve the original grub problem. The grubs and the toads were in the cane fields at different times, meaning they never intersected. The toads did, one farmer explains, kill a great deal of stray dogs. See, cane toads have a poisonous sack, which makes them a potentially deadly foodstuff.

In 1945, cane farmers brought new pesticides to bear against the grubs, resolving the initial problem. The toads continued to proliferate, covering most of Queensland and into New South Wales. And yet, by their ubiquity, they seem to have earned themselves widespread affection. One interviewee -- a self-serious intellectual trying to interpret the cultural moment -- calls it a "perverted reverence."

The documentary introduces us to charming old people who call the toads their "mates" and put out food for them. Later, we'll meet a young girl who keeps a very large cane toad as a pet, treating it like a doll. One man says he gives them cigarettes, which they apparently enjoy. There was even an attempt to erect a cane toad statue in Gordonvale.

Bufotoxin and bad habits

The cane toads aren't "mates" to anything that tries to eat them. As the stray dogs discovered, cane toads possess a powerful bufotoxin. When the glands in their backs are pressed, they expel this toxin, sometimes with impressive force and distance.

We are introduced to Dr. Michael Archer, a zoologist whose pet and study subject, a cat-like marsupial called a quoll, died after biting a cane toad. Archer, Captain Ahab-like, vows revenge against the cane toad. This led him to hit one with a pick, whereupon poison squirted right in his eye, temporarily blinding him.

The toads are also voracious and indiscriminate eaters. As Archer explains with obvious detestation in his voice, they've been found with small native marsupials in their stomachs. Larger native animals die from trying to eat the toads or being out-competed.

Another biologist, perhaps getting caught up in the moment and going a tad far, claims the cane toad invasion is just as dangerous as "the German army in World War II."

Several decades on, the cane toads have continued to spread. But the documentary isn't just a charming relic; its exploration of the complex relationship between human populations and invasive species remains relevant. It's also great if you want to see a human scientist imitate a toad's mating call with frightening accuracy.

Only weeks after the titular expedition returned, ITN broadcast Death on Annapurna: Chris Bonington's Lethal Himalayan Expedition. Using footage from the expedition, it chronicled the British Annapurna South Face expedition of 1970.

Led by Chris Bonington, the expedition successfully summited Annapurna's South Face for the first time. But on the descent, their luck turned.

Snow bad this year

The documentary begins with the porters, however. The expedition employed 320 local porters, who each made £3 total for their work. Days into their heavily laden march, Chris Bonington is introduced. He's received bad news. The snow was quite bad this year and lays thick and low over the mountain. This means a much lower base camp and a harder push ferrying their goods back and forth.

At 3,600m, the porters can finally abandon their loads. As accompanying presenter John Edwards notes, the South Face isn't clearly visible from the camp. The camp's distance from the face causes continuing supply line issues. Then a sudden blizzard forces the porters to abandon a load of supplies, which are promptly raided by local ravens.

"Big mountains are unpredictable," Edwards notes simply. At any moment, the weather, the altitude, and the ice can end the expedition. Under Bonington, the expeditionaries slowly work their way up the face, getting ropes in place and negotiating a mountainside that's never been climbed before.

To the summit

The team steals upward, throwing themselves against an intimidating icefall, which is increasingly unstable as melting ice and snow cause avalanches and falling seracs. The monsoon season, which will end all climbing, swiftly approaches.

It takes 21 days to climb the ice ridge. Now, with three weeks remaining, they face the rock band. Frustrated with the slow progress, Bonington tries to keep climbers on the mountain. But rest is impossible above 6,000m.

As Bonington explains, the work is unlike the "traditional Himalayan plod," with exhausting, very steep climbing and soft snow which must be shoveled through. The sheer face means Sherpas do not accompany them above 6,400m; in that era, few Sherpas had technical climbing skills. Forced to do their own carrying, the climbers are increasingly exhausted and sick. Bonington himself, pleurisy-stricken, has to fall back to Base Camp.

Short of time and fearing changeable weather, Bonington decides to continue the push. Don Whillans and Dougal Haston, especially, are game for the challenge. It is these two who ultimately reach the summit, as those waiting below cheer for them over the radio. They were actually only supposed to set up Camp 7, but as they explain over the radio, "It was easier to go for the summit than it was to pitch the tent."

A tragic descent

With that sudden and almost anticlimactic victory, it's time to descend. They've summited just in time, as the weather begins to turn while they celebrate. Then, another sudden shift.

Most of the men and supplies were already at Base Camp when Ian Clough, a climbing instructor and friend of Bonington, was bringing down a last load of equipment. Only three hours from Base Camp, Clough lost his life in the icefall to a falling serac.

Due to the logistical difficulties of retrieving his body, Clough is buried at Base Camp. We see the expedition gathered around his grave, as Bonington says a few words. Perhaps, Edwards reflects, this grave halfway up a frozen mountain is "the most suitable burial place for a mountaineer."

Rather than leave us with this quiet combination of grief and triumph, the documentary ends on a strange coda: Edwards interviewing Don Whillans about his alleged Yeti sighting. As Edwards repeats throughout the documentary, you never can tell in the Himalaya.

Kayak the Mangoky follows two men from source to sea along Madagascar's longest river. Friends Oscar Scafidi and Ben Ziehm Stephen set out in the spring of 2022 with a collapsible kayak to complete the first recorded source-to-sea expedition of the Mangoky River.

The film begins with their training in Tunisia, where they lived at the time. Rather than practicing with their kayak, they focused on hiking, running, and backpacking. As Oscar's voiceover foreshadows, this turned out to be a good idea.

Finally, it's time to start the expedition. They fly into Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and load up their gear. Things go wrong before they even begin the trek to the source of the Mangoky, when the 4x4 breaks down in the middle of the night. Flat tires and more complications follow. It's vehicle number four, a massive truck, which finally brings them close to their destination. The next morning dawns, the official day one of kayaking the Mangoky.

Carrying their gear (kayak included) on their backs, Oscar and Ben begin hiking along a path that fades in and out. But finding the exact source turns out to be trickier than anticipated. Dense foliage prevents satellite navigation, and the locals give conflicting directions and are generally unenthused by the prospect of guiding them.

Finally, they manage to stumble on a muddy little stream, the source of the Mangoky. Now, the expedition can officially start.

Source to sea

The next day, they trek back to the village where the river is enough like an actual river to support a kayak and assemble their vessel for the first time. For several days, the pair make a good pace, but outside the city of Fianaransota, they have to pack the kayak back up.

From here to Ikalamavony, it's nothing but punishing portaging for 135km. The scenery is beautiful, but the unwieldy, heavy packs and rumors of dangerous local rattle rustlers weigh down every step. Friendly passersby tempt Oscar and Ben with offers of rides, but they push through.

The pair is rewarded with more portaging. In Ikalamavony, they learn that crocodiles and rapids make the next section impassible. Instead, they'll have to trek an untested path through the mountains. Along with four guides, they set out west. But on the second day, they reach the fun-to-try-to-pronounce Mananantanana, a tributary of the Mangoky, running swift and clear.

There ends up being a lot of portaging anyway, as they dodge rapids that locals upriver had assured them did not exist. Got 'em with the old "navigable river" trick. In between portaging and kayaking, they manage to get completely lost.

The four guides eventually arrive to rescue them, and between the six men and helpful, curious locals everywhere they stop, they manage to get Oscar, Ben, and the kayak into the Mangoky proper. From there, it's smooth going, other than the non-functional camp stove, broken steering mechanism, and constant threat of crocodiles.

Even these can't prevent Oscar, Ben, and a whole cadre of guides from slipping into the Mozambique channel, completing the journey from the source of the Mangoky to the sea.

Arctic Alchemy, a short film from directors Colin Arisman and Zeppelin Zeerip, follows adventurer and climate scientist Roman Dial on an expedition into the Arctic.

Dial, now in his 60s, has been going into the Alaskan wilderness since he was a teenager. He has decades of experience climbing, mountain biking, packrafting, and hiking. In interview and voiceover, Dial explains how a love for the outdoors became a need to chase more grueling and dangerous challenges.

After a brush with death on an Alaskan peak, however, Dial changed. He realized, he explains, that he wanted to grow old and raise a family. He settled down with his wife Peggy, and when they had a son, named Cody, Dial went back to school. Dial got his PhD and became a science professor.

It is his research that brings him into the mountains now. We're following him on a rafting trip into the Brooks Range, where he and his team are sampling the pH levels of streams. The Arctic rivers, which should be pristine, are rusting from metal contaminants. By sampling them right at their source and following the water down, Dial and his team hope to shed light on this strange and worrying phenomenon.

Paddling a poisoned river

Most field science in Alaska, Dial's colleague and friend Brad Meiklejohn explains, is done by helicopter. The work is so remote, the land is so vast and sparsely populated -- but helicopters are expensive. By using his adventuring skills, Dial can get good results on a slim budget.

The scientific results are good, but the news isn't. As they delve deeper into the water's headlands, they find bilious, yellow water that leaves dark red stains on the rocks.

As anthropogenic climate change warms the Arctic, permafrost melts, exposing rock that hasn't touched water in millennia. When it does come into contact with water, the resulting chemical reaction produces acid and releases metals previously contained in the rock. Then the rivers bring the acid and metal downstream into the water table.

There are Alaskan native communities downstream whose survival relies on these waterways. The damage is not slow and long-term. The Brooks Range is changing quickly, and the effects are already being felt. For himself and Dial, Meiklejohn says, there is a real grief that comes with this.

Moving through wild country

As the expedition moves forward, Dial reflects on his experience with fatherhood. He raised Cody to love nature, taking him hiking, rafting, and camping from a young age.

In July of 2014, Cody was in Costa Rica, traveling on his own during some time off from school. He emailed his father that he was entering the park -- and then no one heard anything else. Roman Dial rushed to Costa Rica to search for himself, despite authorities telling him to stay out.

The search lasted for weeks, then months, and ultimately extended over a year. It was only two years after he'd entered the jungle that Cody's remains were found and retrieved. For his father, the grief was intense. Through fostering and encouraging his son's love of nature, Roman wondered, had he inadvertently contributed to his death?

And yet, Dial still finds comfort and escape in nature. He's transformed his loss, Meiklejohn believes, into his work preserving "their favorite place."

As for the Brooks Range, Roman Dial's work has advanced scientific understanding of how climate change is affecting it. His protegés, like Russel Wong, who was also on the expedition, will continue his research and advocacy against threats like the proposed Ambler Industrial Road.

BY WILL BRENDZA

When Nikolai Schirmer learned that his reclusive friend was attempting a massively ambitious ski tour through the Norwegian mountains, he decided to make a movie about it. After all, even for an extremely capable ski mountaineer like Rye Vegard, linking 27 peaks over 124 miles with over 82,000 vertical feet of elevation gain would be a challenge.

The endeavor was the culmination of years of planning and training. Vegard has been living like a monk of the mountains, skiing, climbing, single-mindedly striving, and dreaming of this unprecedented goal.

When he finally pulled the trigger and set out on his skis, Schirmer was there to record his friend’s adventure. The resulting feature film is nothing short of captivating.

This documentary is not just a thrilling ski movie; it’s The Story Schirmer has been looking for since he started making ski movies. Pop some popcorn, dim the lights, and set aside some time to really enjoy this one. It’s absolutely worth the watch.

This story first appeared on GearJunkie.

Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching follows two brothers on a year-long quest to see as many bird species as they possibly can. Owen Reiser and his older brother Quentin, however, are the exact sort of people you do not expect to birdwatch at all, let alone competitively. Quentin got the birdwatching bug first, and his younger brother copied him, which is classic younger sibling behavior.

They decided to plunge headfirst into the world of extreme birdwatching by going for a so-called "Big Year." This is the challenge to identify as many birds as possible within a 365-day period. The range is limited to the contiguous, or lower 48, U.S. states. Furthermore, the bird must be alive, wild, and unrestrained.

At the time they set out, the record to beat was 751 birds.

The average extreme birder

The brothers are definite underdogs in the race. As Owen lays out in voiceover, the average Big Year competitor has been birdwatching for 24 years and can identify over a thousand birds by sight. The brothers, meanwhile, are armed with only very limited bird knowledge and a 2010 Kia Sedona with which to roam the country on a directionless avian quest.

There's also eBird, of course, the citizen science app, to help them. During the day, the brothers take endless photographs of any bird they think might be new. Then at night they pore over the images, using online and printed guides to identify the species before recording it on eBird. The pair starts off from Tucson, Arizona, which is, by wild coincidence, my hometown.

There's a brief period when the app and a related app called Merlin, which identifies birdsong, are down. Forced to do things the old-fashioned way, the boys try dozens of decades-old "rare bird hotline" listings. The only one still active is run by an Amish community in Ohio.

As for van life, "it really sucks, actually," Quentin claims. They're taping up the van to keep out mosquitoes, incidentally eliminating all airflow. A surprising number of nights are spent in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. Showering is a rare luxury.

Bird controversy?

Amid the van life struggle and birding hunt, the pair investigates birding culture, interviewing both local and record-holding birders. They meet blackballed bird fakers, alligator attack survivors, extremely Christian birdwatching prodigies, and all manner of rabid avian enthusiasts. Along the way, at least one of them becomes a rabid avian enthusiast himself.

But as the year runs on and they pass 300, 400, 500 birds, the lifestyle begins to wear on them both. Quentin admits that while he's come to earnestly love birdwatching, which is "fun as fuck," the competitive aspect reduces his enjoyment.

Birding, their most positive interviewees say, should inspire an appreciation for the natural world and a desire to save it. Instead, competitive birders release mountains of emissions flying across the country to add something to their list.

"How many times does this happen every day?" Quentin asks mournfully, as they gaze at the remains of a killdeer nest destroyed by heartlessly applied lawn mowing.

"This is right up there with 9/11," Owen agrees.

By the end of the year, cumulative exhaustion and ethical quandaries have left them feeling cold regarding chasing rare birds. Instead, they decided to focus on actually watching the birds instead of ticking them off a list. They go see flamingos in Florida.

In the end, the brothers finish in 23rd place with 579 birds. They award themselves first place in the Kia Sedona-based Big Year category.

Waterwalker is a 1984 feature-length documentary from Canada's National Film Board. In this beloved classic, filmmaker and naturalist Bill Mason paddles through Ontario's wilderness, reflecting on art, nature, and the exploration of the natural world.

On the screen, we see Mason's art, film, and painting as he begins to discuss his ongoing attempts to share his experiences with nature. Originally a commercial artist, nature exerted an inescapable pull on him. He spent months at a time in the wilderness, taking commercial work to support his next trip. Then he turned to film as a way to transmit the beauty he saw.

"The problem with film," Mason reflects, as he adds the final refinements to a landscape painting, "you show it the way it is, everybody goes off to sleep."

Once, Mason remembers, he showed his footage to producers. They immediately began trying to add drama -- plane crashes, broken legs, wolf attacks -- to Mason's disgust. The producer's ethos is fundamentally opposed to Mason's work, which, he says, has no villains.

"Just you and me," Mason promises, paddling Lake Superior and the waterways of Ontario.

Following the water

The canoe is a literal vehicle for Mason but also a vehicle to explore his thoughts on spirituality, the natural world, artistic inspiration, and the timeless appeal of water. Starting on Lake Superior, he begins making his way upriver, reaching toward an unknown headwaters.

While Mason broadly works his way north, the film does not follow a particularly linear narrative. Instead, it winds along, stopping to examine a striking image or explore a line of thought.

Amidst wildlife encounters, tipped canoes, and painting sessions, he continually returns to his canoe. It's a traditional wood-and-canvas affair. While he admits it isn't as practical to lug around as the modern alternatives, his aesthetic sensibility is compelled by its lines. In a similar vein, he dismisses modern tents as "doghouses," in favor of an old-fashioned open-front A-frame tent -- variously known as a Baker tent, Labrador tent, etc.

Environmentalism drives Mason's desire to show nature's beauty to an audience. Both his paintings and his filmmaking entreat the viewer to understand and care about the land. On his journey, he sees birch trees struggling and hears about acid rain.

"You see for yourself what we're doing to the land." Even a seemingly pristine waterfall, far from civilization, is bittersweet, because one day he knows ravaging progress will find it.

Bill Mason passed away in 1988, at only 59 years old. Over thirty years later, his work, especially his documentary films like Waterwalker, remain iconic staples of the genre. His message -- the need to learn how to love and live with the natural world -- has never been more relevant.

In the descriptively titled Mount Fairweather Traverse, Yakutat to Haines, Alaska, Luc Mehl, Danny Powers, and Graham Kraft take on a month of hiking, skiing, climbing, and rafting through the Alaskan wilderness. The adventure peaks at the summit of 4,663 Mount Fairweather on the Alaska-Canada border.

The group starts off from the airport of the sparsely populated town of Yakutat. The first leg of their trip is a 160-kilometer hike down the coast, joined by Kraft's girlfriend, Lindsay Johnson. Clear skies keep the week going smoothly, aside from unnerving run-ins with bears. Although brown bear attacks are rare, there are a few tense moments when the group has to wait for bears to clear out of the area.

At the end of the beach hike, Lindsay parts from the group while another friend, Marcus Waring, joins the party. He's brought along their ski equipment, and they strap in for the next leg. Toting their unwieldy packs through the backcountry, they make their way to the snow-covered slopes of Mount Fairweather.

Summiting Mount Fairweather

Dodging crevasses, they climb (and trudge) all the way up to the 4,670m summit. They joyously ski all the way back down, except for Powers. His equipment broke, so he had to trudge down.

Powers and Mehl aren't done. Their route continues after the base of Mount Fairweather to the settlement of Haines, Alaska. After more skiing and trudging, they break out their inflatable packrafts and take to the Tsirku River. Finally, the pair hit soundings in Haines, completing their traverse.

The briskly paced video is a tight five minutes, a highlight reel of the ambitious adventure. Mehl hosts a longer write-up, with details of the route, equipment reviews, and practical recommendations, on his personal website.

Blackfly is a classic animated short from Canada's celebrated National Film Board. Dizzying, frenetic animated scenes provide visual accompaniment to a song by Canadian folk musician Wade Hemsworth. Hemsworth wrote The Blackfly Song in 1949, about his experiences as a surveyor in Labrador, Northern Ontario, and Quebec. The song is now considered a classic of Canadian folk music.

A cartoon menace

As the song recounts, Hemsworth went up north to work on a crew surveying the Little Abitibi River for a future dam project. In this region, the black fly, really a whole crew of flies in the Simuliidae family, are an extreme nuisance for much of the season.

In the accompanying animation, expressive anthropomorphic black flies pursue Hemsworth and the crew with malicious intent, sighting them with binoculars and chasing the men underwater using miniature scuba gear. The animation has a charming sketchy style which leaps easily from one visual gag to the next.

I particularly liked the scene wherein a dinner party of man-sized black flies feasts on human bones. As they do, Hemsworth sings that he'll "die with the black fly a-picking my bones."

They really do sound like a nightmare. Hemsworth recounts, through cheerful verse, swarms of biting insects crawling through his beard and hair, getting into the food and drink, and following them wherever they went. It's a common theme for Canadian explorers and adventurers. As much as the cold makes the northern winters harsh, the insects make the summer misery.

Hemsworth's song was already a well-loved staple in 1991, when director Christopher Hinton animated it. The result buzzed and swatted its way into the hearts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, securing an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short. All in all, a delightful way to spend five minutes.

BY MARY ANDINO

Normally, boulderers climb a couple of meters off the ground, but Red Bull athlete Domen Skofic decided to take the sport sky high. On September 30, the climber completed a V11 boulder set on the external body of an airplane, as it flew above 2,500m.

Let that sink in: Not only was he inverted under the wings, but he was also on a boulder problem that was moving at 100kph, nearly 2.5km off the ground!

Equipped with only a parachute, Skofic successfully climbed the route in mid-flight and then safely skydived (via backflip) to the ground.

What went into the stunt

Every move and element of the stunt was carefully designed and rehearsed. Red Bull flew an L-13 Blanik plane, which it described in a press release as a “stable, slow-flying, aluminium-built glider, ideal for the route.”

Skofic’s father, an engineer, designed the holds, which had to withstand up to 1.2 tons of force.

Skofic is an accomplished Slovenian climber who was the Lead World Cup Champion in 2016. In preparation, he spent months practicing in wind tunnels.

Unlike normal climbing, he had to worry about a whole lot more than just gravity, enduring significant G-forces and heavy drag. Temperatures were as low as -10°C, which quickly made his fingers go numb.

“Unlike traditional routes, each move had to be timed at ‘neutral moments’ between gravity and aerodynamic pull, requiring millimeter-precise coordination with the pilot,” the press release stated.

Pilot Ewald Roithner explained, “Domen knew exactly how I would fly, and I knew his moves just as precisely. In the air, communication was minimal, but trust was absolute.”

How the stunt went

When the plane hit around 2,500m over Austria, Skofic exited the cockpit and began climbing the figure-eight route that traversed around the wings of the plane. After roughly a minute of climbing, Skofic backflipped off the plane and parachuted down.

“It was an incredible feeling — much harder than the preparation on the ground. I started to doubt whether I could do it, but the route was just challenging enough. Something like this has certainly never been done before,” Skofic said.

“Climbing always gave me the urge to jump. Combining climbing with skydiving in this project was a dream come true.”

The climb is the first of its kind, but it’s part of Red Bull’s ongoing tradition of pushing the bounds of sport and human ability. “The Plane Climb merges climbing and aviation into one unprecedented challenge," the brand said.

This story first appeared in GearJunkie.

In The Traverse, alpinists Matteo Della Bordella and Leo Gheza attempt to complete Patagonia's iconic Fitz Roy Traverse. It'll mean over 4,000 vertical meters of climbing, at the mercy of Patagonia's famously changeable weather.

The film launches right into it with little preamble. The weather was good, so they took their chance. Immediately, they realize that they may have been overly sanguine regarding the weather. Strong winds whip their ropes, sending them dancing near-horizontally above the chasm beneath. The two-man team presses on, ticking off the first peak, Aguja Guillaumet, in only a few hours.

Making their way down from the second peak, Aguja Mermoz, Della Bordella and Gheza find a flattish patch of rock to set up for the night.

At the mercy of the winds

Day two dawns with perfect, clear weather. But the climbing is intense, and soon it becomes unfeasible to simul climb. The wind continues to pick up, slowing their pace and making them fight for every meter gained.

Three hundred meters from the summit, Matteo decides it isn't safe to continue. With the wind blowing and water running, the chance of an accident is too high. The pair pop up a tent on the summit of Goretta.

Day three begins, seemingly, in conditions designed to reward their prudence. The rock is dry, and the wind has died down. The pair is only one sheer 300m wall of rock away from the summit.

"Now, this is climbing," Matteo remarks in Italian. Indeed, they're making good progress under a bright sun. Before noon, they're on the summit of Fitz Roy. Della Bordella has summited Fitz Roy three times already. There are still two more peaks to go, however, before they've bagged the traverse.

At the peak, they hear on the radio that the weather is about to turn dramatically. There is no way they can continue.

"In the mountains, it's like this," Matteo says with a rueful laugh. He doesn't regret the decision at all, he says. The pair will return one day to complete it.

Conventional images of the Earth and the moon place them close together, the moon hovering, seemingly, right over our planet's shoulder. Of course, this isn't accurate; we know just from looking at the moon in the sky that it isn't nearly so large or close. But every image of the Earth and moon, and of the solar system in general, is out of proportion.

To Scale's short film The Solar System opens by laying this out and asking the viewer if they've noticed it.

Wylie Overstreet, the man on camera, has noticed. Taking it a step further, he concludes that "the only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one."

Building the solar system to scale

The project takes Wily to Nevada's Black Rock Desert with his friend and cameraman, Alex. They start setting up, laying vast circles over seven miles of desert. It takes that much space to make a scale model using a marble-sized Earth. By chasing lights around the orbits at night and filming from an overlooking mountaintop, they hope to give an accurate idea of the scales involved, from above.

To check proportions, Alex stands with the camera at mini-Earth's orbit while Wiley raises the meter-and-a-half-wide sun. Then, they wait for the (actual, full-scale) sun to rise. Its size exactly matches the model, standing from the perspective of "Earth." Their math was right.

It makes for a fascinating visual display. But the point of the project wasn't just a matter of proportion. Wiley reminds us that only a few dozen people have gotten to see the entirety of Earth from space. Onscreen, old footage plays of a few of them, describing how it felt to see the Earth so small and distant. They use different words but all describe the same sight: the Earth, "all you've ever known," as small as, well, a marble.

By depicting the solar system to scale, Wiley's goal was "to try and capture [that] we are on a marble, floating in the middle of nothing. When you...come face to face with that, it's staggering."

BY WILL BRENDZA

Once upon a time, there was a monk who lived in a cave in the Japanese Alps. He climbed peaks, establishing hiking routes, and made many of the region’s first ascents. Banryu Shonin is the Father of Japanese alpinism. He died in 1840, leaving a legacy that largely defined the nation’s relationship with its mountains. In 2025, four athletes followed in his footsteps — at a full sprint.

In the Footsteps of Banryu follows athletes Jake Baggaley, Aoi Chan, Yusuke Tannaka, and Sam Hill as they attempt to fast pack a route known as the Kamikochi, Yarigatake, and Hotaka Circuit. This path, following knife-edge ridges and climbing jagged peaks, was once walked by Banryu himself. This project has been Baggaley’s dream for years, and when he finally pulled it together, he brought a film crew.

Baggaley, Chan, Tannaka, and Hill’s route is considered one of the hardest hikes in all of Japan. And these athletes aren’t just hiking or even speed walking. They’re charging the trail at a full-on sprint. In the Footsteps of Banryu is a beautiful short film that leaves you wishing for more.

This story first appeared on GearJunkie.

This week's documentary chronicles the maritime adventure of two Irishmen, who spent two months kayaking the 1,500km circumference of Ireland. The pair are Jon Hynes, who had dreamed of the trip for two decades, and his paddling partner Sean Cahill.

Experienced paddlers

Jon shares the history of his life and his friendship with Sean as old footage plays. Growing up in County Limerick, Jon began kayaking on the Shannon and nearby Lough Gur. Traveling to Nepal and Africa's Zambezi River, he soon graduated to sea kayaking and more extreme rivers.

He met Sean in the French Alps in 2000, where Jon was a river guide. They immediately became fast friends. Over a decade later, Sean proposed that they kayak around Ireland. An experienced kayaker himself, Sean turned from whitewater to sea kayaking to better suit his aging body's limitations.

After two years of planning, they finally managed to fit everything into the boats, and in early summer, they set off.

Out from Old Head

The pair set out from a headland called Old Head, near Kinsale in County Cork. They paddled into the wind and the tide for hours; an inauspicious start. In fact, according to Jon, the first week was the hardest. The incessant fog pushed them to use all their navigational skills as they rounded the bottom of Ireland.

After the first ten days, Jon's hands were horribly blistered, forcing him to cut the wedding ring from his swollen hands. By then, they'd reached County Clare's famous Cliffs of Moher. But bad weather continued to plague them, which is actually Ireland's national slogan. The pair waited in a tent for the skies to clear as they prepared to round the top of Northern Ireland.

Their wait was eventually rewarded. Cheers erupted as they rounded Fair Head, at the top of the island, under bright sunshine. As with every stop along the way, strangers waved from the cliffs and beaches as they passed.

Three days from home

But once they were on the East Coast heading south, strong winds made for tricky crossings. Right after they passed Dublin, entering County Wicklow, a gale forced them back onto land.

While filming the conditions, a gust of wind blew Jon off a fencepost, hurting his leg. In an informal confessional from a doctor's office in Wicklow, Jon admitted that he hoped their luck would turn. He convinced Sean that he was not too injured to keep going, not when they were almost home, but the pain was bad, and so were the conditions.

Back in the kayak, they finally turned west. But they had to push through strong winds as they limped back to Old Head. They passed through a symbolically appropriate sea cave and emerged into the light of their final day, touching beach on Old Head at last.

"Wonderful privilege, lads," Sean says at their welcome home dinner, "to get to paddle around your own country."

In Zermatt to Verbier, the cross-country ski team follows the route of Switzerland's famous 1942 "Patrouille des Glaciers" race. Sam Anthamatten, Elisabeth Gerritzen, Yann Rausis, and Anna Smoothy race 57km through the Swiss Alps from Zermatt to Arolla to Verbier.

The Patrouille started with a Swiss military training exercise in 1942. A dozen men in groups of three competed, and the fastest finished in 12 hours. An interview with Colonel Daniel Jolliet of the Swiss military, commander of this Glacier Patrol, takes us through the history of the event while archival footage plays. 

In 1943, for instance, the starting point was moved because Zermatt was under quarantine, as it was again (due to COVID) when Zermatt to Verbier was filmed. Only seven years after the first one, tragedy struck: Eight men fell into a crevasse during the race, and none survived. The military decided to end the event.

The Patrouille in 2020

Local alpinists still remembered the event fondly, and in 1984, it was reinstated, this time open to public participation. After a few more years, they even allowed women. But during the height of the COVID pandemic, the event was called off. That's when the protagonists of today's film decided to do it anyway, on their own.

While competitors traditionally try to complete the course in as little time as possible (it being a race and all), their own private Patrol was more about the journey. Traditionally, the Patrol does not include feats like skiing the ridge line of Mont Blanc. The group stopped to ski promising lines they spotted from the trail, and piled into remote cabins at night.

The slopes are practically deserted, and even these professional skiers and Swiss residents admit that they're seeing sides of the mountains they'd never seen before. Following the route takes them far beyond the ski resorts and the most popular, easily accessible lines. Along the way, they complete the highest traverse in the Alps and tackle a challenging descent down the Dent d'Hérens.

"It made me think...I should get out of resorts way more and go explore the mountains," says Anna.

The short film ends with their arrival in Verbier, having successfully avoided the crevasses en route.

In The Most Dangerous Kayak Expedition on Earth, a pair of adventurers set out to explore the underside of Greenlandic icebergs. While scientists are still working on a unit with which to objectively measure danger in kayak expeditions, I'm sure they'd agree that this one is up there. Besides, after battling the icy Arctic waters for 1,000 kilometers in a kayak, paddlers Vincent and Alban have surely earned some hyperbole.

As the film opens, Vincent introduces himself and his companion, Alban, an expert in ice diving. Their quest is to explore the hidden world beneath icebergs, under the freezing waters of the Arctic. Their plan is to paddle, by kayak, between Ittoqqortoormiit and Tasiilaq, on the almost uninhabited east coast of Greenland.

A race against time

It's a race against time. If they can't reach Tasiilaq by the end of October, they'll be caught in the ice and the unending polar night. The days are an exhausting push, with Alban sometimes having to don his diving suit and tow their kayaks through chunks of ice. By the end of the day, Vincent feels like they've only narrowly avoided hypothermia.

Beneath the ocean's surface, as Vincent says, it's another world. Tiny pteropods bounce through the crystal clear water. Ice has been carved into fantastical shapes.

Between dives, the pair struggles for every kilometer. Winter is coming on fast. When the entrance to a fiord they're sheltered in freezes over, they have to haul their gear and kayaks over a pass while a storm blows in.

While they're sheltering, they celebrate Alban's 35th birthday in their tent with canned and bottled luxuries. There's even a singular balloon. The storm confines them for days until the weather clears. It's bitterly cold, but open channels remain.

Under a glowing aurora, Alban makes one final dive, this time at night. The illumination of his lights attracts a Lion's Mane jellyfish, a species best known as the murderer in a Sherlock Holmes story. In the black, frozen water, Alban finds microscopic squid, Arctic cod, and then, most thrillingly, a Greenland shark.

They're almost to Tasiiliq, but the last few days are a hard test. Often, the ice is too thick to kayak through and too thin to walk over. Constant snow buries their tent and whips at their faces as they paddle. But for the last few kilometers, the weather clears, and they savor the end of a 51-day, 1,000km Arctic kayak expedition.

The dialogue and narration, originally in French, have been dubbed into English. While it's a bit distracting at first, I do respect how the voice actors gave it their all and seemed to be having fun with it.

In Kai Jones' Falling Into Place, a teenage skiing phenom fights to survive and recover after a devastating cliff fall.

"I didn't think anything could stop me," Jones admits, over drone footage of his own daring skiing. But that was before.

Skiing from a very young age, Jones grew up watching his father's films, compilations of the most impressive skiing of the year. Jones was starring in the films by the time he was 11. His skills and young age, combined with professional-quality video, made his videos go big on social media.

Rather than being intimidated by the attention, Jones was motivated to go further, train harder, and take on riskier lines. A Red Bull sponsorship, award nominations, and massive viewcounts followed.

The accident

Before every session, Cruze explains, they would physically draw the intended line on a photo, scouting out the location. On the fateful day, however, Kai deviated from the line. It was late, with limited daylight left, he explains, and he wasn't thinking about the plan.

We see, recorded in high definition, as Jones begins down the line, jumps, and lands hard, crumpling and rolling down the cliff with snow piling after and on top of him.

"I was like...this isn't real," Jones recalls. Lying on the slope, he felt for his legs and found the protruding bones of a compound fracture.

Cruze rushed up the slope on a snowmobile, arriving to see Kai, screaming, with both legs mangled. It was nearly freezing, and they were 11km into the backcountry, halfway up a steep slope. They immediately called for a helicopter evacuation.

The search-and-rescue chopper arrived quickly, but to be lifted up, they had to straighten Kai's legs. He describes the sickening feeling of having his shattered bones forced into place, as onscreen we see that the cameras, still recording, captured him thrashing and screaming.

He was rushed into surgery at the hospital, where they discovered his legs were more "destroyed" than simply broken. Days later, Kai almost died again when he became critically anemic, missing almost half of his blood.

When he went to check out, they discovered the meniscus, cartilage which acts as a shock absorber for the knee, had become pinched in the fracture site. In both legs. A potentially career-ending complication, for which he'd need another surgery.

A long recovery

The surgery went well. Kai seemed to have found a way to keep going, with what he calls a "mental adjustment." He launched into PT and set a goal of walking by his birthday.

On his birthday, two weeks before doctors estimated he could start walking again, he took a few cautious but strong steps. So he set a new goal: to get back to skiing after eight months. Packing his bags, he moved to LA for the summer to work full time with professional physical trainers.

After nine months, he was skiing down the slope again.

But it was exhausting. And it was painful. It would take incredible amounts of time and work to get back to the level he'd been at, if it was even possible. He was afraid that during that time, the sport, the attention, and the sponsorships might move on. There's something fairly horrifying about a teenager recovering from near-fatal injuries having to think about things like that.

Kai took a few months to slow down, ski casually with friends, get his driver's license, and finish school. But only a year after the accident, he was flown to ski in Alaska, where he put his new legs through the ultimate stress test. They held.

The film ends with Kai back on Grand Teton, skiing a particularly challenging line. As he jumps and glides down the slope, interview footage plays. Kai says the accident and almost losing it all have given him "a new start."

We can't embed this film, but you can watch it here on the Red Bull website.

Ian, an Australian short film, introduces viewers to the eponymous Ian Elliot, a 72-year-old rock climber.

"Age isn't really a barrier to climbing," Ian claims simply.

Born on the then-rural Sunshine Coast in 1952, Ian didn't start climbing seriously until his mid-50s. He was always adventurous, from a youth riding motorcycles along the coast to bush walking and canyoneering. From there, he found rock climbing.

But it was only after his partner, Jeannette, developed knee problems that he became serious about climbing. No longer able to walk with her, he turned to climbing instead.

It has become a central focus of his life -- when he wakes up, he admits, he finds himself thinking through challenging sections, longing to get out there. At home, he trains with determination.

Now that we've met Ian, the film takes us with him to Mount Coolum, in Queensland. A volcanic intrusion less than a kilometer from the beach, Mt Coolum is a uniquely challenging climbing destination. A large overhang with unusual, horn-like rock formations makes it a destination for serious climbers.

"I don't really have anything to prove," Ian says, as we see him jump and pull his way up the jagged underside of Mt Coolum. "I just like to be out on the rock, climbing."

He doesn't claim to be immune to age. The stiffness and soreness, he admits, have worsened over the years. "But once I'm on the rock, you don't think about aches and pains."

Ian is practically climbing horizontally now, as the rock face bends dizzyingly up and over.

As captions on screen explain, Ian "astounded the climbing community" when he successfully completed his first 5.12d at the age of 69. He surprised himself, he confides, when he was able to keep going for so long, at such a high level.

Even he doesn't know how much longer he'll be able to do it. But he plans to find out -- keep training, and keep climbing.

A Baffin Vacation opens with a satirically vintage style narration advertising Baffin Island, a sparsely populated landmass in the Canadian Arctic, as a romantic travel destination. There is a fair amount of sarcasm in the narration, but it really is the site of a couple's shared adventure, as veterans Erik Boomer and Sarah McNair-Landry undertake a 45-day expedition.

The first days, Sarah admits, are the worst. They spend five days skiing in, hauling their kayaking and climbing gear while their bodies adjust to the cold and the toil. In a few weeks, the ice will break up and they will be, essentially, trapped until August.

But at the end of the skiing stage, when they round a final bend and see the mountains, Sarah reports only excitement. They follow a hunting path that the Clyde River Inuit people have traversed for thousands of years, and it takes them to the climbs they've set their eyes on.

Ascending and descending

Perhaps it is the starkness of the icy expanses and naked rocky promontories, but Baffin seems to be formed on a particularly vast scale. It takes hours of hiking and skiing just to reach the base of their climbs.

There is one pinnacle, in particular, that they have their eyes on. As they begin to climb, it starts to rain, and they start to shiver. They keep going, climbing through the night and into the next day. Eventually, they reach a point one pitch from the summit. After so long and pushing so far past their limits, the pair decides to head down. There's still a whole other leg to their adventure.

In their kayaks, they're in their element. With 21 days of food, they leave base camp looking for whitewater. Erik has been kayaking his whole life and coaches the less-experienced Sarah through Class 4 rapids that challenge her skills.

"There's always a chance that something goes wrong," Sarah says simply, as Erik prepares to take on a challenging drop. He admits that he worries about leaving Sarah in a difficult position if something goes wrong.

After taking the plunge, he emerges somewhat bloody but largely unharmed.

After 45 days alone, kayaking, climbing, skiing, and surviving in the Arctic, they are tired and bedraggled but in good spirits.

"Yeah, it's good. I dunno," Erik says when asked how the experience was. The cheery vintage music kicks back in as what can only be described as a blooper reel plays onscreen.

This short YouTube documentary chronicles the career of Dr. Fiann Smithwick, a paleontologist whose career was sparked by a chance childhood encounter. Now, he walks Britain’s Jurassic Coast with his dog, searching for fossils.

The film opens with a brief introduction to Fiann and a much longer introduction to Tia, a mixed-breed rescue. Beginning life abandoned on the side of the road in Romania, Tia is now Fiann's companion to his fossil hunting.

Lyme Regis, Fiann's home, is, as he describes, "the Mecca of fossil hunting in the UK." Down on the beach, the waves batter the cliffs and pull away layers of rock, revealing a wealth of fossils.

Picking his way through the surf, Fiann turns to the camera, explaining his methods. Taking a fist-sized rock, he demonstrated how its shape and the sound it makes when tapped can suggest hidden fossils. He breaks the stone open, revealing tiny ammonites.

A healthy obsession

As a child, Fiann was fascinated by the fossils he found lying on the beach or buried in his garden. But he had stopped fossil hunting by the time he was a teen, when he was diagnosed with post-viral chronic fatigue.

For several months, he was housebound. To build his endurance back up, he began going on small, slow walks, incrementally increasing the distance. Eventually, he was able to pick his way along the beach. When he found a fossil, he says, "It sort of re-sparked something, reengaged something in my mind."

His growing passion kept him active and engaged, and he believes it helped him recover from the ailment. He decided to turn it into a career, becoming a paleontologist.

Tour of a fossil hunting town

Small ammonites and fossilized wood are common finds, but the really exciting finds are the ichthyosaurs. At the local natural history museum, the Charmouth Heritage Coast Center, Fiann shows us an Ichthyosaur he found in 2013. When he saw the rows of teeth peeking out of the rock, he felt the "adrenaline and elation" of an exceptional find.

After leaving the museum, Fiann shows us a statue of Mary Anning, one of the first fossil hunters in the area. Anning was a pioneering paleontologist from the early 1800s who found many of the first complete plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs at Lyme Regis.

The story ends with Fiann, accompanied as always by Tia, becoming engaged to his partner, Flora, an ultramarathon runner.

The brief film leaves the viewer considering how its different, connected threads complement each other: the abandoned mutt turned fossil hunting companion, the sick teenager recovering through a rediscovered passion for paleontology, the small town of fossil hunters, and the beauty of the natural world preserved in stone.

"The North Shore invented mountain biking," claims Todd "Digger" Fiander, a trail builder and videographer. If the sport was indeed born in British Columbia’s North Shore Mountains, Betty Birrell was there from the start.

North Shore Betty, a short film from Patagonia, introduces us to the eponymous Betty. Now entering her seventies, Betty reflects on what is means to be an older woman in the rough world of mountain biking.

One big playground

She didn't start in mountain biking. Betty first made a splash (pun intended) pioneering women's wave sailing in the early 1980s. By her mid-forties, she was a single mother and full-time flight attendant, but she also started mountain biking. She started riding Fiander's "roller coasters for bicycles" after getting her first mountain bike in 1993.

Rather than competing, Betty found that mountain biking and being a single mother worked together. It became an activity she could do with her son, and they still bike together now that he's an adult.

Betty also isn't afraid to get injured. She's broken an arm, a wrist, a hand, and "lots" of ribs, dislocated shoulders, and torn her rotator cuff, but it didn't, and still doesn't, bother her.

According to Betty, when her ex told her she treated life like it was "one big fucking playground," she took it as a compliment.

The short film interviews Lea Holt, a nurse with a family who worried, as she approached fifty, that she would have to give up mountain biking. But Betty's career changed her mind. "I have twenty more years..." Holt explained, "to get better."

"Betty is a legend on the North Shore," says fellow British Columbia mountain biker Amanda Moffat. When they ride together, she says, people will call out to Betty as they pass, like she was a celebrity.

Now 73, Betty plans to keep riding into her nineties. "Older people...need to know that you can keep going," she says. On the screen, Betty's bike leaps over rocky trails and races around bends and through the forests.

A new film, Everest Revisited: 1924–2024, invites viewers to look beyond the headlines to consider what Everest has come to mean, both in the past and the present. The film, which was publicly released earlier this week, won the Jury Special Mention Award at the 2024 Kraków Mountain Festival and was runner-up for the Audience Choice Award at the 2024 London Mountain Film Festival.

The 41-minute documentary, produced in association with the Alpine Club and the Mount Everest Foundation, weaves together archival footage with analysis and reflection from some of the UK's leading Everest enthusiasts.

Narrated compellingly by mountaineer Matt Sharman and anchored by the personal connection of Sandy Irvine’s great-niece, Julie Summers, Everest Revisited is less a dramatic retelling of Everest history and more a reflective journey through the mountain’s cultural and spiritual legacy.

At the heart of the documentary are the expeditions of the 1920s, with particular focus on the ill-fated 1924 attempt by George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. With contributions from mountaineers and historians such as Rebecca Stephens, Leo Houlding, Stephen Venables, Chris Bonington, Krish Thapa, and Melanie Windridge, the film explores how these early attempts were shaped as much by imperial ambition and scientific curiosity as they were by the challenge of climbing itself.

A critical examination

Rather than idealise the past, the film examines it critically. It acknowledges the hierarchy embedded in British imperial attitudes, particularly toward the Sherpas and high-altitude porters who made these expeditions possible. The film highlights the essential, and often overlooked, contributions of figures like Karma Paul and Gyalzen Kazi, who bridged very different cultures. Porters like Paul and Kazi quite literally carried early Everest expeditions forward.

Everest Revisited also looks forward. Blending stories from climbers like former Gurkha Krish Thapa, who helped double-amputee Hari Budha Magar summit Everest in 2023, the film draws links between notions of historic heroism and modern questions of easy access and motivations. Despite the growing queues on Everest’s slopes and its increasingly commercial reputation, writer and climber Ed Douglas suggests that modern climbers may not be too dissimilar to those of the past.

"We tend to think that Everest is kind of somehow more complicated, more cynical, and less illustrious than it used to be. I think we need to look back at these expeditions with a more honest eye, because these are not simple, heroic people. These are people with the same motivations and the same, you know, concerns and the same complexities we have. They weren't always honourable. They weren't always perfect," Douglas reflected.

Emphasizing the unknown

Visually, the film integrates modern and archival footage of Himalayan landscapes with impactful interviews and primary artifacts, such as photos and equipment from early expeditions.

Rather than offering a final verdict on Mallory and Irvine’s fate, the film leaves room for mystery. It emphasizes the unknown. As climber Leo Houlding poignantly tells Irvine's great-niece Julie Summers, "I hope we never find your great uncle and I hope we don't find the camera. I hope that the mystery endures for another century."

Everest Revisited is a film about more than just mountaineering. It’s about memory and the shifting values we project onto the world's highest mountain. The documentary will intrigue climbers, historians, and anyone drawn in by the enduring allure of the world's highest mountain.

In Tornado Hunting: Chase it From the South, storm chasers Chris Chittick and Ricky Forbes document their lives in the notorious Tornado Alley of the central U.S.

Just south of Sioux Falls, North Dakota, Forbes, Chittick, and their crew are waiting and watching the skies for funnels of violent cloud.

"We are in the right spot!" they crow as a tornado warning comes in only a few kilometers away. The tornado siren echoes through an empty town as dark clouds roll overhead. The unfolding scene is apocalyptic. The air turns green, they lose signal -- but the tornado doesn't appear.

A professional storm chaser is like a sailor of old. The wind and weather are the ultimate deciders of success, no matter their skill or determination. Like the tars, they spend a lot of time away from their families.

After the disappointing storm, in a rain-soaked parking lot, Chris calls home and tells his children that he misses them. Then it's back on the road.

Home is Saskatchewan, Canada. Chris pushes one of his three young children on the swing, one eye on the darkening sky.

"I feel like weather always wins," admits his wife, Chelsea.

Meanwhile, Rickey and his fiancée, Tirzah Cooper, are driving to her first cancer treatment. She wonders how soon she'll lose her hair.

From the south

A storm is forming around Canby, Minnesota, and the Tornado Hunters drive to meet it. But the road conditions and local terrain complicate their attempt. Hills and tall trees prevent their view and access to the storm. The only chance of getting close is to go right in front of the storm's path, a dangerous gamble. It's safer to approach tornadoes from the south, as the storms move in a northerly direction. Driving into them head-on can, and has, been deadly.

"The more I've storm-chased, and the more that I've seen the destruction that tornadoes can do, the more terrified I become of them," admits Ricky.

They're watching construction crews haul away the wreckage of a ruined house, after the storm they failed to catch has passed.

Their caution brings them back to Saskatchewan, where Ricky and Tirzah go to another appointment. He shaves her head. Not long after, a nearby tornado watch offers what he thinks will be the best chance all year. She urges him to chase after it.

After a succession of near-misses, Ricky finally approaches a dramatic tornado. He stops the car and stands in the road, staring up at the twisting mass dominating the sky. In narration, he says that the feeling he had at that moment was the same feeling of awe he experienced the first time he saw a tornado.

Then, he goes home. " A few years ago," he says, "I never thought anything could be more important than storm chasing. I was wrong."

The film ends with him at home, as on-screen text tells us that both Ricky and Chris continue tornado hunting, and Tirzah is now cancer-free.

BY WILL BRENDZA

When normal singletrack trails and downhill mountain bike parks don’t do it for you anymore, where do you go to get your adrenaline fix?

If you ask GoPro athlete and enduro and freeride mountain bike rider Kilian Bron, he’d tell you to head east to the Himalaya. Bron recently went there in search of some of the steepest lines and most remote mountain bike rides in the world. And he found them.

In this clip from GoPro’s series Draw Your Lines, Bron climbs a 4,600m peak. He carries his bike all the way to the top, traversing a ridgeline as he approaches his descent location. Then, he drops into a chute, fires out onto an open slope covered in scree, and rips his way downhill, with the Annapurna massif in the background. It’s a legendary line — the kind that mountain bikers dream of.

This story first appeared on GearJunkie.

This week's documentary takes us to the frozen Arctic, where a modern expedition follows the route of early 20th-century explorer Hubert Wilkins. In 1931, Wilkins set out for the North Pole in a repurposed military submarine. The subtitle of Frozen North -- "The Disastrous Attempt To Reach The North Pole In A WW1 Submarine" -- hints at how well they fared.

A promising adventurer

Wilkins was raised in Australia. The son of a sheep farmer, he was a self-taught pilot, photographer, and explorer with an abiding interest in the weather. Wilkins first made a name for himself when he flew from Alaska to Spitsbergen, completing the first trans-Arctic airplane flight. He immediately launched himself into the next adventure: reaching the North Pole by submarine.

He chose an old WW1 submarine, which he rented from the U.S. Navy for $1 a year. Interested in his plans, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst promised Wilkins $250,000 -- worth over $5 million today -- if he could actually reach the North Pole.

Feted in Brooklyn and well-wished by the wealthiest men of the age, the newly christened Nautilus headed North. Wilkins' goals were scientific. He believed, correctly, that polar conditions impacted weather worldwide.

In addition to his meteorological instruments, the ship was fitted with an ice-borer which didn't work, a hydraulic flap to keep it below the ice, and an airlock from the converted torpedo bay. It had no heating or insulation.

The disastrous attempt

Her sea trials went badly, but the season was getting late. It was forge ahead or wait another year, and no polar explorer has ever chosen option two. They left New York with only two months of summer left, with 10,000km to go.

Almost immediately, a storm nearly wrecked them, and the Nautilus sent out an SOS signal. They were rescued and towed the rest of the way to England. Once there, they lost a month to repairs, only halfway to the North Pole. They kept going anyway, making it to Bergen, Norway. Norwegian experts doubted they would survive, and Randolph Hearst sent Wilkins a telegram telling him to call it off. Wilkins ignored this.

It was freezing in the hold, where Wilkins and the researchers conducted observations. They actually did important research, including showing that the Earth is flattened at the poles, instead of a perfect circle. Hopefully, this achievement consoled them through the miserably cold, wet, and cramped conditions.

After doing some science and freezing in the Arctic Ocean, the crew was ready to go home. But that wouldn't satisfy the press, so Wilkins ordered a dive. They were going under the ice.

Under the ice and missing the Pole

Upon inspection, however, Wilkins found the steering mechanism damaged. Historians in cutaway interviews suggest that this was deliberate sabotage by an engineer anxious to go home. Wilkins was unmoved and ordered a dive on the next calm day.

They made it under the ice, becoming the first people to do so. But the radio was damaged, leaving them unable to call for help. At home, newspapers reported them dead.

When they re-emerged, they jury-rigged a radio announcing they were alive. Hearst signaled back that he was glad they were alive and was also cutting off funding. Devastated, Wilkins stayed in the ice for three weeks, taking groundbreaking scientific measurements. It was clear they were not going to reach the Pole.

The Nautilus left the frozen north and limped back to Norway. By the time it arrived, another engine failure had left it unusable. On order of the U.S. Navy, it was scuttled off the coast of Norway.

Diving to the Nautilus

Nearly a century after his failure to reach the Pole, Wilkins' attempt is appreciated as an exploratory and scientific success. But the mystery of the broken steering mechanism lingers.

In a modern two-man submersible, researchers descend to the sunken Nautilus. The modern craft contrasts sharply with the dangerous, dirty, and miserable conditions of the older one, showing how far (with some exceptions) the technology has come.

They found the Nautilus, well preserved in the cold water, but now home to a diverse array of marine life. Researchers focused on the steering gear, looking for signs of deliberate damage. But it's buried in the sediment, preventing them from inspecting it.

Sabotage or not, it was suicidal to dive without those diving rudders, explains oceanographer Raphael Plante. Coming back alive at all was a remarkable achievement.

But Wilkins always dreamed of returning, and proving that submarines were a viable way to explore the North Pole. In March of 1958, a year after Wilkins' death, U.S. Navy submarine USS Skate reached the North Pole. They scattered Wilkins' ashes there.

Later that year, his vessel's namesake, the USS Nautilus, became the first submarine to transit under the North Pole.

Jake Davis is a professional wildlife filmmaker who has recently begun posting what he captures to YouTube. The title of his latest is descriptive: I Left $100K in Cameras on a Wolf Kill. Here's What They Captured. It's a deceptively simple premise. The footage Davis captures is the story of an entire ecosystem and a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of wolves.

One day, Davis tells us in the introduction to the footage, he spotted a wounded bull elk. Davis realized he had stumbled into the immediate aftermath of a wolf hunt, and was now face to face with the victim. Knowing this presented a rare opportunity, Davis waited and watched. The next day, carrion birds flying overhead led him to the body of the elk.

Setting up the cameras, we get a behind-the-scenes look into the process of professional wildlife filmmaking. Davis explains his setup, placing cameras at different distances and angles to get different shots. To make sure they're on when there's activity, he sets them to be activated when a nearby device registers heat signatures-- living creatures. Then he leaves.

The afterlife of a bull elk

The birds are the first to arrive at the wolf kill. Various corvids hop about the corpse, and even a large golden eagle alights. Foxes join the gathering periodically. But after five days, the carcass is still largely intact -- and no wolves have visited. But they have been spotted close by.

Davis faced a dilemma. The cameras needed to be serviced to ensure none of them had a dead battery or were buried in snow. But if Davis went out to refit them, he would scare away the wolves. Or he could trust luck, hope the batteries held out, and wait. Fate decided for him, closing the road with storms and accidents.

When he finally makes it out, the cameras are covered in snow. And wolves had visited.

Visit of the wolves

Two young black wolves had arrived to feed, then left again. Quickly, Davis replaced the batteries and memory cards on his cameras and replaced them. Two weeks later, he returned again, to a strange scene.

The elk was nearly eaten up and had also been dragged several yards. And one of the cameras was missing. Footage showed the black pair had returned, as had an older grey wolf, and finally an entire pack. They fed on the elk all night, though one of them took a break -- to steal a camera and carry it off.

The wolves carried it away down the hill, biting at the case and the handle. When Davis is able to find it again, however, the memory card is intact, and we get a glimpse of the thief.

The next day at sunset, the wolves return for the final time. As we watch them gnaw at the bones, it is, as Davis says, "a window into a world that's never seen."

In 1954, the Academy gave the award for Documentary Short Subject to the first film in Walt Disney's People & Places series. Titled The Alaskan Eskimo, the film stitched together events in the daily lives of indigenous Alaskan people.

While the language and viewpoints expressed are outdated, the footage represents a remarkable historical document of daily life in an Alaskan community over 70 years ago.

Summer business

The film crew visited in the warmest months and documented the preparations for the coming hunts and colder seasons. We see men building houses, and women stitching watertight coverings for new kayaks.

When the whalers return, the entire community comes together to haul in and flense the carcass of a beluga whale. We see children enjoying muktuk, slices of the skin and blubber of the whale. It's a very traditional food for groups all across the Arctic Circle, and an excellent source of vitamin C. "It has a taste like beech nuts, er, they say," our mid-Atlantic 1950s narrator adds with typical dryness.

Winter underground

The film crew stays on as the winter chill comes in, and the camera moves inside. The home we saw being built in summer, half buried in the earth, is now finished and in use. The people of the village are not idle in the long, cold hours, but busy themselves preparing useful items.

Men carve knives and harpoons, while women sew waterproof raincoats out of dried whale intestines and strands of grass. The people of the village also prepare seal skins for mukluk shoes. The children snatch the cut-off scraps to chew on, grinning widely at the camera.

A break in the weather occasions an outburst of activity. Dog teams set out to replenish stores and gather wood before the full fury of winter returns. We watch as the men harness dogs, load driftwood onto sleds, and conduct a reindeer hunt.

Hunters and fishermen, the narrator reminds us, are in constant danger. If a blizzard sets in while they are so far away from home, they are likely to die. The weather does turn, but the hunter we are following manages to make it back to the village just in time.

Spring is sprung

As winter draws to a close, the villagers prepare for the celebration of spring. Dressed in their best clothes, they come together in the meeting house. There, the filmmakers record a festival celebrating the end of winter. Men dance in masks representing the gods of the sky, the sea, and the land, in order to honor and thank them, accompanied by drumming and singing.

The ceremonial transitions into the farcical as the dancers switch their masks for caricature masks, intended to represent fellow villagers. The audience laughs, rocking to the quick tempo of the drums, as another winter ends.

In Five Caves, Five Days, Australian climber Ben Cossey sets off on what he alliteratively dubs "The great Australian coastal cave climbing crawl from Campbelltown to Coolum."

Cossey's been climbing in Australia for more than two decades, but he admits that he hasn't explored much. He has his few favorite areas, and until a friend suggested it, hadn't thought much of climbing north of Sydney. But after looking at a map and finding five promising crags in a line along the coast, he set out to expand his horizons.

Junkyard cave

The first stop is at Junkyard Cave, outside of Campbelltown. Cossey meets up with local climbers who introduce him to a warmup line named Fifty Shades of Mt Druitt.

One of these locals, also named Ben, shows Cossey the main event. It's a line that he and his peers have been working on for a long time, but has attracted little attention from the broader Australian climbing community. Ben hopes they can get more people to try it and appreciate the "little paradise" around Junkyard Cave.

Cossey is game. He manages to send the line, quite literally kicking and screaming, emerging victorious atop a rather cinematic jut of cliff.

"A clean, beautiful rock," he admits, surprised. "Reminiscent of some of the best stuff I've climbed in Australia."

Lobster Cave

Tom is the friendly local assigned to Lobster Cave. In addition to showing Cossey the lines, including one Roast Lobster, they spend some time exploring the area. Close to the coast, the area around Lobster Cave has been inhabited for a very long time. Australian Aboriginal people have carved rock art nearby.

When it's time to start climbing, Cossey first goes for the Red Headed Dragon.

"Not a bad spot," Cossey says with satisfaction. "That's an ideal top out... another coastal cave-crawl classic."

Hoppy's Cave

Another day, another cave. This one is known for being rather sharp. Cossey isn't dissuaded, but he does stop and pick up some analgesic cream in anticipation. His guide today is Jason, who sets Cossey onto Blackleg Miner. The route is long and steep, running all the way from the back of the cave.

"It's pretty radical. It's really radical," Cossey says, impressed. The rock sticks out from the surrounding valley, the only feature like it in sight. It is also, as promised, sharp.

"Man, that is an undertaking!" Crossey exclaims when, hanging upside down bat-like from the ceiling, he reaches the end of the line.

Flinder's Cave

"It's about 400 degrees in the shade," Cossey says, as day four finds him at Flinder's Cave. That's 752 degrees Fahrenheit. Lucy is his guide today, who starts him on Wet Jigsaw Puzzle as a warmup.

Cossey compares her introduction to the cave to being shown around someone's home.

"I didn't know what to expect, but it's better than what I expected," Cossey says.

After "Wet Jigsaw Puzzle" and one other, Lucy sets him onto the grand finale: A Space Odyssey. It's a hard climb, with smoother rock than the other Flinder's lines. Cossey is screaming and panting in the final stretch.

"There's unfinished business there," Cossey reflects. "A lot of routes there to go back to."

Mt. Coolum

Cossey's final day finds him sore and swollen-fingered but undaunted. Krystle meets him at Mt. Coolum, a cave with unique horn-like rock formations.

The strange new style of rock throws Cossey for a loop, to his surprise. The locals, used to the strange surfaces, scurry up the rock where Cossey was struggling, but he keeps at it.

His goal is to finish a route at every crag, and for the first time, there's doubt if he can. As the hours go by, Cossey is running out of time.

Torn to shreds by five days of climbing, his fingers force an end to the fight. This time, Mt. Coolum defeats him. The locals, smiling, are sure he'll be back.

He technically failed the challenge, but resolved his original question: Is there enough good climbing along this coastal route north of Sydney to consider it a climbing destination?

"The answer is, absolutely."

The Mirage follows Timothy Olson as he fights to claim the Pacific Crest Trail speed record. To do so, he has to run 4,270km in less than 52 days, 8 hours, and 25 minutes. This means about 14 marathons a week and about 17 Mt. Everests' worth of elevation gain.

He'll also be accompanied by his pregnant wife, Krista, their two young sons, and Krista's parents, Debbie and Bob Loomis. Trailing Tim in an RV, their family must take care of Tim as well as themselves, always racing against the clock.

Things get off to a rocky start. By day two, husband and wife both recall hitting a wall.

"It's going to bring out the worst of me," Tim admits.

His family provides logistical support, mapping and scouting the trail ahead. Olson is entirely reliant on them to feed and supply him with water. But stretches of the trail he has to backpack alone -- not one of his strengths. But that's sort of the point.

Heat, cold, bears, and snakes

You want ideal conditions, Olson explains, when you're attempting a record. Olson did not have ideal conditions. He hadn't planned for his wife to be heavily pregnant, and he certainly hadn't planned for a record-breaking heat wave.

In addition to the heat, Olson's path is strewn with venomous serpents that rattle and hiss, sometimes from the underbrush and sometimes from the path itself.

Abruptly, the battle with the desert ends, as he crosses the Mojave and enters the Sierra Nevada. Now, Olson faces a different battle. Snowy, rocky slopes cut down on his time.

As the attempt goes on, fate seems to be conspiring against them in a dozen petty ways, all caught on camera. The RV is stuck in a ditch and needs towing, Olson gets injured and lost, and equipment breaks. Because of the then-recent COVID pandemic, trail maintenance is more neglected than usual, leaving downed trees all over the trail.

Climate change affects the run in more ways than the heat. Wildfires rage around the trail, closing aid stations and filling the air with smoke.

Around the halfway mark, a shin injury begins to worsen, slowing his time and causing "excruciating pain" with every step.

"I miss the whole reason I'm out here...to heal," Tim admits. But he keeps pushing, and his team "throw the kitchen sink" at his injury, trying everything they can think of (other than rest) to keep his leg working. Slowly but surely, the pain starts lessening. His speed picks back up. It still hurts, though.

A family affair

His wife's father explains that running the PCT would, technically speaking, be far easier on Olson without having his family along. "But that wasn't the project."

Bringing his family along wasn't about logistical help. Knowing his wife and kids were waiting in the RV at the end of the day pulled him forward, "like a magnet," during his time on the trail.

Despite everything, Olson triumphs in the end. After 51 days, 16 hours, and 55 minutes, he reaches Canada and the end of the trail. The film ends with a selection of baby photos, and a phone recording Olson made during the run, addressed to his then-unborn daughter.

"Dad is out running...having a hard moment, but it's really beautiful to think of you."

Salimor Khola is a remote valley in Api Himal, nestled between a steep gorge and several unclimbed 6,000m peaks. The ridges and valleys of far western Nepal are far less popular for tourists and mountaineers, a tantalizing lacuna for the latter-day explorer.

This recent documentary, Salimor Khola: A Climbing Expedition to an Unexplored Valley in the Himalaya, follows a team of four as they attempt to explore the valley and summit some of its unclimbed peaks.

It takes over a week of travel -- first flying, then driving, finally trekking-- to reach the area. On the way, we meet the team-- Matt Glenn, Hamish Frost, Paul Ramsden, and Tim Miller -- all experienced mountaineers from the United Kingdom. The area is rural and remote; the people they do meet are surprised to encounter a Western climbing expedition.

The expedition is the brainchild of five-time Piolet d'Or winner Paul Ramsden, a sturdy Yorkshire man in his mid-50s. Ramsden had warned the younger alpinists that there might not be any climbing at all on their climbing expedition. They were going in to explore, not even knowing if they could reach accessible routes. But there was only one way to find out.

They manage to find a route into Salimor Khola, so with a week of food, the expedition splits into two teams: Paul and Tim, and Matt and Hamish. Taking the time to explore also allows them to acclimatize.

The summit that wasn't

After the reconnoitering and acclimatizing, Matt and Hamish set their sights on an unclimbed 6,000'er. After a hard day and 800 vertical meters gained, they bivouac on a ledge cut from snow.

They wake up to snow pressing on all sides, crushing and burying them. The footage goes black, but we hear them swear and pant as they struggle to free themselves and the tent. Eventually, with a half-broken tent and an exhausting night, they try to push on.

But they meet with impassable rock faces and are forced to turn back to base camp. After a day of rest, they head for a second peak -- but exhaustion and heavy snow follow them. The next day, they meet a false summit and a series of avalanche near-misses. But they push on.

Only a few hundred meters from the summit, they stop. The rest of the way is heavily corniced, and another avalanche has just missed them. It's time to turn around.

"There's just something really beautiful about doing this...and then not being able to do the thing that you wanted to do and just having to do it for the sake of it," Glenn observes.

Back at base camp, the pair reunites with Ramsden and Miller. They've made the first ascent 6,605m Surma-Sarovar, although Ramsden's finger is frostbitten.

The film stays with Glenn and Frost at the end of their expedition. They didn't get a summit, but they did do what Glenn calls a "proper expedition" -- an adventure.

"I would love to do more of that," Glenn says. "But maybe just not yet."

Crossing Dreams, subtitled "Solo bivouac paragliding adventure in Himalaya," documents the recent exploits of professional paragliding coach Francois Ragolski. His attempt to follow a long route through and over the Himalaya covered 60 days, four countries, 2,580km and 113 hours of paragliding.

Ragolski has been paragliding for 18 years and planning this expedition for six months. Like him, the movie is anxious to finally start, so it wastes no time launching into the first day of the journey.

It's a solo trip, but he avoids self-isolation, stopping to speak and share meals with the people he passes.

"I thought everybody here would speak Russian," Ragolski says ruefully, when his attempts to find a common language with two hunters in Tajikistan fail. "I was wrong, nobody here speaks Russian." But even with the language barrier, his friendly enthusiasm carries him through.

"Everyone was so welcoming...they load you with so much good food," Ragolski says. Every few days, he meets locals, usually shepherds, who share their food and shelter with him. Left to his own devices, he mostly eats packaged noodles and dried fruit, so a hot meal and friendly faces are a welcome change.

Re-routing

Ragolski spent months plotting his course on Google Maps using satellite images. But when he arrived in Dushanbe, Tajikistan to begin his route, officials stopped him. Government officials, military officers, and tour agency representatives told him the airspace he planned to fly through was simply too dangerous.

They gave him a new route. It was less likely to get him shot down, but it was also longer and more difficult from a technical perspective. The route change lands him in an area heavily populated by wolves and bears, where officials warned him not to stay the night. But the wind and weather conditions ground him, and he passes a stressful night hearing the sounds of animals outside of his tent.

At your own speed

Tired and hoping to avoid confrontations with the local wildlife, Ragolski hitches a ride into Pakistan. Some exceptions for bear and militarized airspace-related dangers aside, he aims to fly as much as possible. Doing that means landing -- and sleeping -- in places he can take off from again in the morning. This makes for some uncomfortable digs, but it's better than walking. "I am lazy," Ragolski jokes. 

After the stark beauty of the mountains, the intermissions in crowded urban areas are another kind of striking. Later, a two-week-long spot of rain grounds him in India. He avoids despair through ping pong and a bit of light tourism.

"But as soon as I flew again, I was just so happy," Ragolski says when he finally gets back in the air on day 41. This is a frequent exclamation; his sheer joy at being aloft and moving forward is palpable.

The point of going solo is that he can go at his own pace, taking his time to explore, to meet people, to avoid unnecessary dangers and complications. It's not a race or an exercise in self punishment -- it's an adventure.

In the final days of his journey, Ragolski glides past famous peaks like Annapurna and Everest, marveling aloud. "Wow! What an adventure...I'm so so happy I came."

Gaucho chronicles the days of elderly Patagonian gaucho Heraldo Rial. Gauchos are skilled horsemen and cattle ranchers who have lived independently in the Patagonian region for centuries. Known for their bravery and skill, the gaucho is a sort of folk hero in Argentina. But as modernity encroaches, that ancient way of life is under threat. Rial is one of the last true gauchos.

Now 80 years old, Rial can't do everything he used to. In the summer, three men make their way to the one thousand hectares of wilderness that he ranches. Papo, his nephew Diego, and his son Franco come to help Rial with his tasks. They're the only people who make the days-long journey through the mountains to see Rial.

He spends the winters alone in his little house, bringing his herd down from the mountain pastures to wait out the wind, rain, and snow. Papo compares him to a hibernating bear, tranquil and quiet. But he works every day, tending to his animals and maintaining the house and fences.

"I'm going to die here, at some point," Rial states calmly, as the camera lingers over his home. He seems to be at peace with the idea.

A dying breed

Most of the gauchos that Rial knew are gone now. Increased urbanization, as Papo explains, led gauchos to sell their lands and move to the cities, abandoning the mountain paths and old places.

Cattle ranching is an important part of the economy in Argentina. However, most of that money is made by a long series of middlemen. The men like Rial who work every day to raise the animals earn just enough to get by. In return, they face danger, isolation, and grueling work.

The film shows some of Rial and his helpers' daily tasks, which include finding and chasing down an escaped herd, branding and gelding young steers, and butchering animals.

Papo guides his son Franco, who is learning these skills for the first time. Rial might have passed these skills onto his own son, a friend of Papo, but he died five years ago. "But that's life," Rial says. "And his came to an end. He had to leave."

Rial's way of life is more than specific skills and herding practices.

"One should live without thinking," Rial explains. The way of country people, as he describes it, is one of acceptance. Of death, inevitability, circumstance. It's a way of thinking and living that is alien to modern, urban existence.

"He's the only gaucho left in Patagonia," Papo reflects. "There are no more."

Years ago, Nick Kleer, together with his now-wife, then-girlfriend Kristina Perlerius-Kleer, visited the Tiger Canyon nature reserve in South Africa. They never left. Wild Connection documents their cheetah conservation efforts, as Kleer and Perlerius connect with the famously fast cats living in the reserve.

Cheetahs are critically endangered. In the last century, their population has gone from 100,000 to less than 8,000. Their once-extensive habitat has shrunk due to increased urbanization and farming, leaving them with insufficient hunting ranges.

Anyone familiar with thoroughbred horses or purebred racing greyhounds will know that beautiful, fast animals are often also nervous, fragile, and inbred. The cheetah is no exception. The cheetah population is unusually inbred due to a population bottleneck that occurred around 12,000 years ago. While the paleolithic cheetahs managed to come back from the edge of extinction, it left them with very low genetic diversity.

Hands-on help required

As a result, cheetah breeding programs require very careful management. To save them, it isn't enough to just fence off a piece of land and put a bunch of cheetahs in it, Kleer explains. It requires hands-on intervention by people who can closely monitor their physical and, yes, emotional well-being.

While some conservation efforts emphasize a separation from nature for its own protection, Kleer thinks differently. With industrialization, he says, we have "disregarded...the natural world, to the point that people have forgotten that we are connected."

His cheetah conservation means fostering a close, personal connection with the animals. His particular love for the species began when he first visited Tiger Canyon and met a pair of cheetah brothers. He'd only hoped to get a good view of them, but the pair approached him, purring, and invited him to pet them with friendly headbutts.

Since then, Kleer has spent much of his time in the bush with cheetahs, forming close friendships with several of them.

Tiger Canyon's cheetah reserve covers 970 hectares of bushland. Its inhabitants are Mara, her four cubs, her sister, and an adult male cheetah. Kleer recounts Mara's story, explaining how her anxious, shy personality transformed after she had her first cub.

"She's a very gentle soul...she truly enjoys our company," Perlerius says.

Mara will even bring out her cubs to spend time with the human visitors. The cubs' father is Mashai, who was raised in captivity and had to be taught how to hunt. Now, however, he is successfully living on his own in Tiger Canyon.

Saving the cheetah will help restore the entire ecosystem, Kleer explains, from the antelope on down to the plants. In the same way, the cheetah is connected to the ecosystem, people are connected to cheetahs.

Since the Tiger Canyon cheetah conservation program has started, they've released ten individuals into the wild, several of which have gone on to have cubs.

Kitturiaq chronicles a 620km canoe expedition across the Labrador plateau down the George River in Canada's northern Quebec. Professional adventurer Frank Wolf undertook the journey with partner Todd McGowan.

Wolf is bold in adventure planning and is perfectly willing to be bold in filmmaking, too. The film's narration is delivered by a fictional mosquito who chooses to tag along as an unofficial third party member. In fact, the Inuktitut word for mosquito gives the project its title.

Meanwhile, the Kitturiaq, named Malina, shares the story of explorer Hesketh Hesketh Prichard. (Evidently, his parents felt that one "Hesketh" wasn't enough.) Through Malina's narration, the story of the Briton's failed 1910 attempt to complete the route unfolds simultaneously to the main action.

The journey begins in Nain, now the northernmost town on the Labrador coast and the administrative capital of the Inuit region of Nunatsiavut. There, Wolf interviews local community leaders about the land his upcoming journey will take him through.

A 600m climb, with canoe

The first stage takes them a little north to the giant Fraser Canyon, which they must scramble up to the Labrador plateau. Malina's blackfly relatives are thick in the air, just as locals warned they would be.

But it's the portage they have to make that is the real killer. With no waterway to follow, they have to unload their gear, then drag it and the canoe 600m up a crack in the cliffs called Poungassé to the top of the plateau. Sweat and blood cover them both by the time they reach camp, and McGowan suffers sunstroke. The long subarctic summer day can be blisteringly hot.

They're still doing better than Prichard, who took a steeper route and ended up abandoning one of his canoes. Atop the plateau, Prichard saw no waterways -- the plateau is mostly swamps and shallow ponds in this area -- and abandoned his last canoe, continuing on foot. Wolf and McGowan elect to drag theirs. After a brief descent into fly-induced madness, they're back on the water.

"People have been here, a long, long time before us," Wolf reflects, examining a piece of wood. No trees grow on the tundra, so an Inuit hunter must have brought the discarded log on his sled, or komatik, years before. This small moment is a quiet reflection on a core theme of the film.

The paddling and portaging continue. "They're beginning to act a little strange," Malina notes. A headnet makes a reappearance.

When they make it to Nunavik, they go fishing, while Nain politician Johannes Lampe reflects through a previous interview about how prohibitively expensive food is this far North. Caribou is much more cost-effective than groceries, and fishing is cheaper than buying fish. The land takes care of you, Lampe explains, when you take care of it.

The George River

When Prichard and his team reached the George River, they hoped to meet the local Innu people. But these elusive people had already passed on to different hunting grounds. Without any canoes to handle the George River, Prichard had to turn back.

But Wolf and McGowan's portage drudgery paid off, and they still have theirs. Once they reach the George River on day 17, the kilometers begin to fly by. Speaking of flies, they remain innumerable. Soon, the canoeists reach the end of the river at Ungava Bay.

Llanberis in Northwest Wales is dense with routes that give the region arguably the best climbing in Britain. But ascending the lines of the green and grey Cymru hills is more than just technical. Adra, a new documentary, delves into the long history of Welsh climbing and its importance to local identity.

Friends Lewis Perrin-Williams and Zoe Wood grew up on the cliffs of Llanberis. Together, they take the viewer along on various iconic local climbs, like the Left Wall of Dinas Cromlech. When it was first ascended in 1956, climbers wore heavy boots and used railroad ties for protection. A fall meant a serious injury at best.

Lewis's father, mountaineer and author Jim Perrin, recounts the neglected history of native Welsh climbers. Recorded first ascents during earlier eras went to famous English climbers like Noel Odell, who used the hills of Wales as a proving ground before moving onto the Alps and Himalaya. But local Welsh copper miners were the true pioneers of many routes.

Devil-may-care attitudes

Older climbers like Jim Perrin draw a connection between the daring, "devil-may-care" attitudes of climbers in the 1980s and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher's tenure is remembered with intense hatred in Wales. Her economic policies left millions unemployed, and the violent police response to the 1984-5 miners' strike shocked the nation.

Adra explores how climbing was counter-cultural in 1980s Wales.

"My climbing came from not being subject to social conditioning," explains John Redhead. Many of the young people in the area were out of work. They started climbing as a way to escape their daily anxieties.

Lewis explains that climbing isn't just a sport but a way of celebrating and communing with his homeland. Adra means "home" in Welsh, a language that was illegal to speak in court until 1942. Celebrating the Welsh language, heritage, and, yes, climbing history is an act of resistance to centuries of British rule.

Climbing, Adra explains, is ancient and indigenous in Wales. But it also nourishes an immediate, living community.

This short film examines what it means to be a snowboarder who isn't social media famous. Now I know what you may be thinking: Why even watch a film if the subject is cloutless? Well, he does fight fires, if that sweetens the deal for you. Snowboarder Joe Lax is not a household name and doesn't want to be. Dark Horse explores exactly what that looks like.

Documentary photographer Brad Slack discusses his subject's elusive, quiet nature. The film opens in Slack's studio, and we first see Lax through his lens. Then, we hear from fellow snowboarder Joel Loverin, who stumbled upon Lax's enigmatic Instagram account.

Whiskey Tahoe

Under the name Whiskey Tahoe, the account posted clip after clip snowboarding steep lines, all without any locations or personal information. Social media comments fill the screen with requests to know more -- where is he, who is he?

He's Joseph Donald Lax. Born to a Saskatchewan farming family, he left home as a teen. He went to Whistler, British Columbia, then a hub for snowboarding culture. There, film companies lurked, creating compilation tapes of the most impressive athletic feats. This is the culture Lax came up in.

But he wasn't interested in going with the crowd. Lax gets up early, what he calls "psycho early," to ensure he is the only one on the mountain. Often, he finds and rides new lines in places no one else dares to try.

Part-timer

Being an underground legend is technically only a hobby, though. By day, he's a firefighter.

"I never saw snowboarding as a career pursuit," Lax explains. He started firefighting as a means to support his time in the mountains. Work hard in the summer, and take the winter off to snowboard. Over the years, though, he's worked his way up to an operations chief. He has seen fire season grow fiercer and fiercer, threatening the mountains at the center of his life.

Something else came along, too, to threaten the primacy of snowboarding -- a wife, Ulla Clark, and two daughters. Instead of choosing between family and the mountains, he brought his family to the mountains. The four of them live in a cabin, and he taught his daughters to snowboard and go on backwoods adventures.

Lax snowboards purely for the love of it and has built his life around it.

"it's 'till the wheels fall off," he promises. His friend Joel thinks they'll be riding the slopes together as old men.

North to Nowhere is the funniest film about North Pole expeditions that you'll ever see. Polar explorers have always taken themselves very seriously, but luckily Montreal filmmaker Josh Freed took a bemused perspective on the crazy cast of characters vying to reach the top of the world one spring back in the late 1980s.

At that time, modern North Pole expeditions were in their heyday. In 1986, American Will Steger and his party made the first unsupported dogsled trip to the Pole. That same year, Jean-Louis Etienne of France skied the 760km alone. (Earlier, in 1978, the great Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura had reached it alone using dogs.)

These were serious adventurers, but every year, several less prepared travelers also showed up in Resolute Bay, Canada, touting their great plans to reach the North Pole in various creative ways. Resolute's beloved outfitter, Bezal Jesudason -- featured in the film -- provided logistics and tried to advise them as best he could. Jesudason, who improbably came to the High Arctic from India, used to joke that he himself was planning an expedition to the North Pole by elephant.

Do you need oxygen?

In this pre-internet era, information about the North Pole was not as easy to come by as it is today. Some would-be polar explorers would phone to ask if they needed to bring oxygen "that high up." One British man imagined that he could walk about 80km a day over the broken surface of the Arctic Ocean and was going to show up with just 10 days' food to reach the North Pole. "He was even so generous as to bring two days' extra for bad weather," Jesudason later told me. Luckily, the outfitter managed to dissuade the man from coming.

Scandinavians were usually competent, but one spring, two older Swedes showed up in Resolute with no idea how to use a camp stove. Unable to melt water during two brief shakedown trips near Resolute, the experience so humbled them that they went home without even beginning their expedition. Others spent thousands of dollars to charter an aircraft to the north end of Ellesmere Island to begin but quickly realized they were in over their heads. Typically, they called for a pickup a few days later, citing back injuries as a convenient excuse for quitting.

An influencer ahead of his time

The expeditions profiled in North to Nowhere belong to this zanier crowd. Two French pilots/gourmet chefs set out to fly their canary-colored ultralight plane to the North Pole. There was Shinji Kazama, a Japanese Yamaha salesman who -- heavily supported by Inuit with dogsleds -- took his motorcycle to the Pole. Then there was Dick Smith, the founder of Australian Geographic magazine, who sought to go there in his helicopter. The extroverted Smith was a visionary who anticipated the selfie/Instagram generation and walked around holding a lightweight movie camera pointed at himself and breathlessly narrating the adventure that was about to unfold.

With admirable restraint, North to Nowhere documents the goings-on during this brief Golden Age of what people in Resolute used to call the Silly Season.

Climate change, politics, and difficulties chartering aircraft have ended the hijinx for the time being. The last full-length North Pole expedition was in 2014.

This spring, Tyler Andrews hopes to summit Everest in 16 hours from Base Camp without supplementary oxygen or Sherpa support. The 34-year-old American is no newbie to Himalayan records. He is one of a growing number of climber-athletes who are bringing their mountain running skills to the Himalayan peaks, aiming for FKTs (Fastest Known Times).

Manaslu before Everest

It likely wasn't a coincidence that when Andrews announced his Everest FKT project earlier this week, his sponsor La Sportiva released 9 Hours on Manaslu, the film about his FKT on Manaslu last year. Andrews ran from Base Camp to the top of the eighth-highest mountain on Earth in 9 hours and 52 minutes, beating Pemba Gelje Sherpa's previous record. Andrews was also racing up the peak in 2023 when Pemba Gelje summited. But that year, Andrews didn't feel well on the upper sections and turned around without summiting.

Back home, Andrews had to deal with a badly damaged Achilles tendon, which required surgery. It took a lot of rehab and training before he finally returned to Nepal and broke the Manaslu speed record 12 months later.

For that reason, Andrews sees his Manaslu climb as "a story about failure and redemption," he told ExplorersWeb.

Fall and rise

The film also shows Andrews' personal transformation from a kid interested in math and music to an elite long-distance runner. He dealt with depression but bounced back when he discovered the wild world of mountains and open spaces on Ojos del Salado in Chile in 2020. He began to travel the world in search of thin air, high summit views, and fast times.

Andrews' regular climbing and running partner, Chris Fisher, did most of the Nepal footage on this film. Yet the most intense sequences are those from Andrews' headcam during the ascent: his feet on the frozen ground, his gloved hands on the fixed ropes, and his shadow reflected on the ice seracs. When the runner lifts his eyes, we also see views of Manaslu, a strikingly beautiful peak.

The film will provide a great background for those interested in following Andrews' upcoming Everest expedition and want to understand what's behind the feat and the character.

To learn more about the film, you can listen to this episode of Andrews' podcast, Talking with My Dad. In it, he discusses the challenge behind the scenes and shares details about his physical and mental training with his real-life dad, Tim Andrews.

Painting the Mountains documents the work of Matthew Tufts, a photographer and journalist, as he attempts to capture the mountaineering exploits of his companions.

In Patagonia, climbing is well-established. But the stark granite faces hold little snow, and skiing is more rare. The lines are dangerous -- and spectacular.

Matthew's goal was to follow high-level French skiers Aurel Lardy, Vivian Bruchez, and Jules Socie as they made new descents in the legendary Patagonian Andes.

Painters and Conquistadors

Matthew explains that Renaissance painters could spend six months just mixing the colors they used for a painting and another six months preparing the canvas. His photographic work in Argentine Patagonia was similar.

He first visited the town of El Chaltén years earlier, staying for three months to write an article. He self-funded the trip, determined to establish a connection with the place and the local people. Matthew was wary of coming in like a "modern-day conquistador," exploiting the land for his own gain.

Throughout the expedition, Matthew considers how he might give back to the community and the people who live at the foot of the famous mountains.

A new way to look at it

The skiers bring their own artistic vision to the slopes. The descents they attempt are extreme, dangerous. They see a path where others see only a cliff. Matthew describes one such line as "a thin ribbon painted across a wall of granite."

Through Matthew's camera, the skiers boldly carve their way through the mountains, across never-before-attempted slopes. Local legend Max Odell, who has been skiing El Chaltén for many years, says that the new perspective of the Frenchmen gives him his own new perspective. They see lines where he hadn't dared to imagine skiing, and it inspires him to get back out there.

Max Odell is known as the Godfather of Skiing in El Chaltén. Matthew is proud that they are inspiring him to return to his passion.

The second descent

The climax of their expedition is making the second-ever descent of the Whillans-Cochrane Ramp on Aguja Poincenot. The late extreme skier Andreas Fransson made the first descent in 2012. Descending the steep, exposed line is both dangerous and difficult.

After a hard climb, however, they turn and ski down the ramp, emerging unharmed at the bottom. Matthew, looking on, sees them as artists. They are, he says, "painting the mountain."

The camera pans up a minimalist landscape of snow and stone. Jagged spires stab into the air, their dramatic profiles accentuated by the sharp drone of a male voice singing wordlessly. It might be the beginning of Meru -- until the throat singing cuts out, and the narrator says, "My bad, little something in my throat."

The Crystal Towers: a Yukon Climbing Story is one of three projects funded by the Yukon government for its 125th anniversary. This elegant short documentary is part climbing film, part lighthearted travelogue, and part advertisement for the sparse beauty of Yukon.

Radelet Peak

One hundred and twenty kilometers south of Whitehorse, Radelet Peak lurks above a small lake, still mostly frozen in July when the documentary was filmed. Only one of the team, self-professed flamingo fan Zach Clanton, had made the trip before. Clanton conceived of a new route up the knife-edge arete on the mountain's east side.

But bolting a new route would take hardware, and getting hardware to Radelet Peak would take a helicopter. Where might a "quintessential climbing dirtbag," in the words of his climbing partner Rob Cohen, acquire many thousands of dollars for such a flight?

The government, as it turned out. With support from the Yukon125 fund, four climbers set out with a drone, a carton of Metamucil, and (almost) enough gear to bolt a new route.

The route

The Crystal Towers starts gently as its protagonists tackle the ridge à cheval. The slope isn't steep, but we are frequently informed that it's wickedly sharp, and they would rather it weren't so sharp, thank you very much.

Then the first headwall flaunts up above them, and the documentary comes into its own. Climber and filming lead John Serjeantson effectively uses his drone for striking panoramas. One features Dave Benton nestled in a massive maw of rock just under the subsidiary peak.

Most of the route is crack climbing. Both finger cracks and hand cracks snake up seemingly impassible granite walls. Unfortunately, most of this climbing didn't make it to camera.

It's in close quarters that The Crystal Towers struggles: only a few short sections of GoPro footage supplement the wide shots, and the team largely did not record leads from below.

The lack of footage confuses the narrative. One climber taps out of summit day, referencing difficulties on the route never shown onscreen or explained to the audience.

But while it's clear that these are more climbers than documentarians, that doesn't stop them from creating a lovely film. The shots are clean, showcasing the splendor of the landscape, and the narration brings the audience along on the most exciting pitches. It's always a good sign when a video leaves you wanting more instead of less.

The film meets its goals

As for whether the team sends the route, you'll have to watch and see. But the bolting they carried out will allow a new generation of climbers to explore this region. Said Zach Clanton, "Our goal was to create somewhere that people can walk in with just a rack and a rope and have a super good time, and explore a part of the Yukon they never knew existed."

And as a promo for the beauty of Yukon, well, halfway through, I was already googling plane tickets.

Thirty-two-year-old professional cyclist Lachlan Morton holds the record for the fastest lap of the Australian mainland by bike. The previous record holder rode the entire 14,210km coastal route in 37 days. Last year, Morton completed the same circuit in only 30 days, riding an average of 450km each day for a month.

The Great Southern Country is a film about the process -- and struggle -- of setting that record.

While the biking effort was Morton's alone, a small group of family and friends drove a little blue RV alongside him to provide support.

His wife, Rachel Peck, embraced her husband's newest and most ambitious adventure with cautious enthusiasm. Tom Hopper served as Morton's dedicated bike mechanic, and Athalee Brown as Morton's masseuse.

Morton's elder brother Angus, with videographer Scott Donald Mitchell, filmed it all. Angus had cycled professionally himself, but in the past decade, he has turned to the camera. Finally, Graham Seers, Morton's coach since childhood, rounded out the team.

Ice baths

The timeline was incredibly ambitious, even if nothing went wrong. So, of course, things went wrong. Only days into the journey, Morton became ill with food poisoning. Undeterred, he continued cycling that day without eating, determined to maintain his daily goals.

The team gently attempted to convince him to slow down, but Morton kept to the schedule.

Luckily, Morton bounced back quickly. But as the days went by, even the best-conditioned body and the most determined mind began to falter. His legs became red and swollen, and increasingly, he spent his time off the bike in ice baths. When heat and strong headwinds made conditions untenable, the team struggled to convince Morton to stop.

"You always want to push... to see what you're capable of," says Morton. "That's the whole point of doing it."

More immediate dangers also arose. The most notable was from traffic. In one harrowing moment, a truck drove Morton off the road. After several close calls, they altered the route to avoid major highways.

While he sometimes didn't stop even to eat, Morton did once pause to help an injured bird off the road.

Understanding the land

The journey wasn't just a test of endurance. For Morton, born and raised in Australia, it was as much about the land he would be covering as it was the distance. The ride is about "understanding where I'm from."

This meant engaging with the indigenous people. The film includes several sections of narration in Indigenous Australian languages and highlights the people and cultures of each region.

A New Way Up shows two mountaineers combining climbing and paragliding in a novel way on a previously unsummited Karakoram peak.

Fabi Buhl is a German climber, Will Sim is a British alpinist, and Jake Holland, a pilot and filmmaker, is the narrator. The itinerary integrates all their skill sets.

Buhl and Sim are shown going over equipment, comparing different clips, carefully weighing gear, and debating every detail. Their expertise and careful planning are on display.

Gulmit Tower rises 5,801m to form a rectangular jut of granite, powdered with snow. Previous attempts to reach the summit have been unsuccessful. Those earlier attempts all approached from the opposite side, from Gulmit village. As Holland lays out, their expedition will attempt it from the south side by paragliding onto the tower and then climbing the final stretch.

A comfortable base

The expedition based itself in the green and comfortable town of Karimabad rather than a freezing tent camp. If the paragliding is successful, it will turn a strenuous hike of many days into an hour-long flight. But once in the air, they are at the mercy of the weather.

The flight is tense, as winds change in a moment and separate the three paragliders.  This time, though, they were lucky and managed to reunite on the mountainside despite the fluctuating thermal. And just like that, they’ve skipped not only the drudge hike but the first two-thirds of the mountain. They make camp while dramatic drone footage emphasizes the remote location they’ve reached after only an hour of travel.

This is still a climbing expedition, and they’re up before dawn, ready to make their way to the summit. Voiceover is minimal as Will and Fabi, appearing as tiny dots on a sheer face, inch up the tower as Holland tracks their progress.

Around noon, they reach the summit. Fabi and Will seem struck by the surreality of their approach. “Twenty-four hours to climb basically a 6,000m mountain…starting at 2,500m in a hotel, without a helicopter,” Will says.

“It’s pretty crazy,” laughs Fabi.

A new era?

From the summit, they return down to the tent, don their wings, and prepare to take off. The danger, however, is being unable to get off the mountain. While Jake and Will make it to the hotel, the wind changes and leaves Fabi stuck in the Gulmit basin and alone on the glacier.

After hours and many attempts to take off, Fabi manages to get airborne and successfully lands, but his perilous situation reminds us that their novel technique has its downside.

The film ends on a triumphant note, as the trio enjoy the amenities of their hotel only hours after being the first to summit Gulmit Tower. Whether their “new way up” has the potential to change exploratory high-altitude alpinism is up to the viewer.

In a small wooden cabin on Mt. Washington, one caretaker resides alone. This short film introduces us to Jack Kingsley, a young man who cheerfully signed up to live on an isolated, frozen mountainside in New Hampshire.

Everything you need, nothing you don’t

Kingsley savors the independence and self-reliance of the caretaker’s life. The camera follows him through his day, gathering snow to melt into water, cleaning and repairing the cabin, and cooking for himself. The life offers, he explains, “everything you need, nothing you don’t.”

This simple life, he says, allows him to appreciate the little things. The peace, as well as the power, of nature.

Kingsley spends much of his time in nature. He’s a passionate ice climber, hiker, and backcountry skier. Few other occupations would give him this much time or opportunity to indulge in his passions. But at the end of the day, his life revolves around the old cabin.

An old dirtbag of a cabin

“If the cabin was a person, it would be a dirtbag,” Kingsley says. “An old dirtbag.”

The old dirtbag was built in 1963 by Harvard undergraduate students. They were members of a mountaineering club without any background in construction, but park rangers agreed to let them build a cabin. Things were different in the 1960s.

For decades, the cabin and a lone caretaker have acted as a waystation for hikers and climbers on the mountain. It is the nexus of the mountaineering community on Mt. Washington. This means that cold, lost, and hungry strangers might at any moment break the isolation in which Kingsley lives.

“Anyone can walk through that door, and that’s part of the beauty of it,” Kingsley says happily. Rather than isolating, the cabin seems to present an opportunity to connect. With the strangers who pass through, with the history of Mt. Washington mountaineering, and with his own father.

Aged photographs are projected over Kingsley’s voice, showing his father taking a younger Kingsley onto the mountain, where they regularly visited the cabin. His father was a mountaineer and traveler, and the cabin was a special place for him to share with his son. Now, Kingsley explains proudly, he can share the cabin with his father, when he comes to visit.

The job

While he believes that passersby have a right to take risks on the mountain, Kingsley sees his job as making sure they are informed of that risk. And the risk is substantial, he explains. Mt. Washington is only 1,917m but sees hurricane-force winds every three days, with windchill regularly reaching -34˚C. Mountaineers use it to train for attempts on places like Everest and Denali.

It’s essential that weather conditions on the mountain are measured and broadcast. Kingsley helps with that, too. Part of his caretaker duties involves measuring temperature and snowfall for the Parks Service.

It certainly is not a life most would choose. But this casual, intimate portrait of a caretaker challenges the assumptions one might have about people who choose to live in perceived deprivation. Kingsley is not your typical mountain hermit.

The Big Wait begins with an unending field of blue sky, then tilts down to show the dry, scrubby Australian landscape. As the shot lingers, a train, so far over the horizon that it's barely visible, slowly creeps into the frame. It's a perfect beginning to the short documentary, given its subject — two people and a dog, managing a tiny emergency runway and six cottages that almost nobody ever visits.

"Forrest is a township with one street, one intersection, and six cottages. And they're only here because we have an airport. And we have people to look after it. That's the managers, currently Greg and Kate," Greg and Kate Barrington say jointly in an interview.

In the snippet, they refer to themselves in the third person and finish each other's sentences — precisely as you'd expect people in their situation to do.

Population: two

"And Holly," they say, referring to their dog. "Population of Forrest is...two."

As Greg explains it, the cottages he and his wife caretake are hardly ever occupied because the "airport" he previously referred to is actually an emergency landing strip.

"Most of the time, it feels like an abandoned movie set because there aren't people," he says.

Nevertheless, Greg and Kate keep the cottages in pristine condition. They water and mow the lawns, wipe dust off the shelves, change the linens, place freshly rolled towels on the beds, and generally keep things ready for visitors. They even put fresh flowers in each of the rooms on a regular basis.

"You lose total track of time," Kate says over footage of the pair riding their bikes for exercise on the empty emergency runway. "I don't know what day of the week it is today. Or the date. It just...vanishes in a flash. The day is gone in a flash. Sunset, and next day, and you just keep rolling. And every day is different, that's the best part. So you rarely get bored," she continues.

That might seem hard to believe. But that's what makes The Big Wait such a fascinating piece of filmmaking. The viewer can't believe that Greg and Kate aren't bored, and yet they clearly aren't. They smile, they laugh, they fill their off hours with tennis games and haircuts. They drive their car at top speed down the runway, they ride their bikes, they have bonfires. They watch the sunrise and sunset.

So much space

"There's so much space, I find it gives me a chance to think more clearly," Greg says. "because the troubles really go away. There's nothing out there pressing in on you, and it's really what comes from inside. I suppose you throw away all the non-essentials. There's electricity, there's water. If the train comes through, there's food. With any luck a beer at the end of the day. And you don't have to worry about 'Am I going to get promoted,' because there are only the two of us out here to start with."

The filmmakers capture the experience with sensitivity. There's no question that Greg and Kate are a bit odd, and slightly awkward. But The Big Wait's tone is gentle, not mocking. And the film's cinematographer excels at juxtaposing the weirdness of that row of cottages with the beauty of the Australian landscape, particularly at dawn and dusk.

The Big Wait is the best kind of short documentary. It's sweet, inquisitive, and is over before it wears out its welcome. At only 14 minutes, you can fit it in on your lunch break while you consider your own promotion (or lack thereof). And you just might find yourself wondering if Greg and Kate are on to something.

Hugh Wilson has spent the last 30 years regenerating native forest on New Zealand's Banks Peninsula. The story of how he did it is the subject of a lovely little 30-minute documentary called Fools and Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest. It's the perfect watch for anyone who needs their faith in humanity (and humanity's ability to fix its mistakes) restored.

With his unfailingly cheerful nature, white beard, bald head, glasses, and propensity for mixing long-sleeved flannel shirts with shorts, Wilson looks like a well-loved grandfather. But he's so much more than that.

Interested in plants from an early age, Wilson channeled his dual love of art and science into a thriving life as a botanist. He spent the first half of his career conducting detailed studies of the plant life on the Banks Peninsula — a region that used to be heavily forested but, by the late 1990s, was mostly farmland colonized by invasive plant life.

Starting from nothing

"Both Mauri and European settlements had a huge impact on the forest, so by 1900, less than one percent of the old-growth forest [on the Banks Peninsula] was left," he notes.

Then, an acquaintance asked if he'd be interested in running a private nature preserve. The goal? Bring tapped-out pasture back to the way it looked 800 years ago. And do it fast, because New Zealand had already permanently lost some of its native species of plants and animals.

"Some people say, well, why are you restoring the forest? It's kind of like asking why you should love your mother," Wilson says in the film. "We're totally, totally dependent on the vegetation and wildlife that supports our own lives."

So he hopped at the chance to manage the Hinewai Nature Reserve, a piece of land that would eventually cover 1,500 hectares. But there was some pushback.

Naive greenies?

"I am all for saving patches of bush, but the thought of starting from scratch on land that is clear enough to be used productively frankly appalls me. As for shutting up a whole valley, heaven help us from fools and dreamers!" one newspaper letter, written by a local farmer at the time, said.

"I think they basically thought we were naive greenies from the city. I'm sure they thought we'd come here with all these ideas, and within a year or two, we'd find out it was all just too hard, and it wasn't happening, and we'd [leave] again. Now here we are 31 years later. I looked at it as a great compliment because we need a few more fools and dreamers in the world," he notes.

The solution? Gorse, of course

The key to Wilson's plan was counterintuitive. The landscape he wanted to turn back into native forest had been used as pasture for generations and was also infested by gorse, an invasive flowering plant that grows quickly and renders pastures unusable. Many people thought he was nuts for not beginning his reforesting by trying to get rid of the gorse.

"Gorse is a terrible weed for pastoral farming. And no one, let alone me, would deny that. But nothing is black and white, is it? If you've got it, and it's kind of infested the landscape, then it's worth looking at its good points and saying, 'Well, maybe we don't have to fight it,'" he remembers. "We don't want pasture, we want the native forest to regenerate, and gorse is a wonderful nurse canopy for native forest regeneration."

This is why botanists are handy to have around. Wilson knew that gorse is a nitrogen fixer, meaning it fertilizes the soil it inhabits. It grows quickly and creates sheltered spots for shade-tolerant hardwood saplings to grow. But it has to have full sunlight to stay alive. So once native trees in the preserve sprout up beyond the gorse canopy, the invasive weed dies. It's a brilliant, elegant solution, and Wilson's spent the last three decades making it happen.

Wilson's routine

There are no motorized vehicles in the nature reserve, so Wilson begins each day with a walk to his current work site — a journey that sometimes takes him as much as two hours. He works all day and then treks back home. After dinner and a pipe, he turns to his management tasks, handling piles of the Hinewai Nature Reserve's paperwork late into the evening. Then he goes to bed, gets up, and does it all over again.

The result is spectacular. The once dry, grassy land in the reserve has largely returned to the lush forest it once was. Streams flow, even in the dry season, and there are 47 waterfalls on the property (that Wilson has found so far). And from the very beginning, the reserve has been open to the public.

"I think the community is now by and large in support of Hinewai," a local farmer says toward the end of the film. "We realized that the way farming was done over the years had to be changed. And I think what [Wilson] has done is helped people realize that it can be done. In a good way."

Mila Del La Rue comes by her free-riding chops honestly. Described as a skiing prodigy, the 18-year-old's father (Xavier) and uncle (Victor) are also big names in the free-ride snowboarding world.

Of a Lifetime is a 45-minute North Face film that chronicles the three as they venture to Antarctica in the company of a boat crew and mountain guide. The mission? Free-ride that continent's steep shorelines.

But first, they'll have to get there, a journey that requires five weeks on a small boat, with a notable journey through the Drake Passage. The famously treacherous stretch of water connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between the southern tip of Chile and the South Shetland Islands. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current blasts through the passage unchecked, and seas can top 12m. The resulting seasickness is not a great way to prepare for a ski excursion.

Mila spends most of the passage in a bunk, trying to hold down the last thing she drank, much to the amusement of her father. But in a theme that runs through the film, Mila is determined not to disappoint her accomplished family.

Bonding in Antarctica

"I'd like to go as far as them because I love skiing," she narrates.

For his part, Xavier sees the trip as a moment to grow closer to his family.

"Because of the age gap, Victor and I were always so far apart. Like living parallel lives. It's been forever since our last trip together, so now is the moment to finally reunite," he says.

In the first few days of the expedition, Xavier and Victor head off to tackle uber-steep lines with overhanging cornices while Mila gets the hang of ice axes and crampons under guide David's tutelage. But they don't call her a prodigy for nothing. Soon enough, Mila is ascending capably. But it's when she straps on skis and points herself downhill that the magic happens. She handles herself just like you'd expect — at first.

As the expedition continues, the lines get more intense for the Del La Rue family. Here Mila's youth comes into play again. Without the life experience of the older athletes, she freezes halfway down a steep run and breaks down into tears.

Blocked by fear

"I feel blocked by fear between crevasses, seracs, the rocks, and the ocean below. I keep imagining falling at any moment. I want to go back on the boat and feel secure. I doubt myself and my capabilities," she admits over tense action-cam footage of her shaky descent.

"I keep asking myself these questions," she continues. "Am I gonna feel this fear constantly? And I do have the [skill] level?"

For Xavier, the moment is a test of fatherhood. He's never seen his daughter freeze up like that. She's always been a fearless tagalong on his adventures.

"I wish I knew how to help her," he says as Mila grows increasingly short-tempered and withdrawn.

A little father-daughter heart-to-heart conducted Del La Rue style — which is to say at the top of a couloir after an exhausting ascent — does the trick. Xavier admonishes Mila for her fear-driven lack of communication, while Mila accuses her father of being too risky. Both agree to change their ways moving forward. The pair descend, whooping with joy.

Of a Lifetime is a classic ski film in many ways. Scenes of prep, scouting, and good times are punctuated by long, adrenaline-fueled skiing and riding sequences. The filmmaking team captures it all beautifully, making the best of the Antarctic backdrop and the Del La Rue family's easy charm.

A different family film

But at its heart, Of a Lifetime is a film about family, with all the connection, disagreement, and reconnection that concept contains.

"I've had plenty of time to think," Mila narrates in the film's closing moments. "And now I know what I really want. I want to learn to do things my own way. And I want to be strong. Because I didn't have this mindset before. So I want to say thank you, Dad. For bringing me on the trip of a lifetime. It sounds cliche, but I'll never forget it."

Justin Barbour's name might be familiar to regular ExplorersWeb readers. The school teacher-turned-content-creator and adventurer's 3,800km trek from Northern Quebec to the southern tip of Newfoundland made our list of top expeditions of 2024.

On that journey, Barbour used a mix of traditional and modern travel methods and gear, witnessing all four seasons along the way.

The subject of his recent film Maze of the North in Remote Newfoundland Wilderness is a dramatically shorter though no-less-intense expedition.

In the company of his dog Saku, Barbour embarked on a 230km journey along the length of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula. The peninsula is 17,483 square kilometers of mountains, fiords, lakes, marshes, and rivers, sparsely populated by just under 15,000 people.

Bushcraft and extra kilos

A fan of bushcraft and traditional survival techniques, Barbour purposefully brought meager rations for his expedition, intending to supplement his calories with fish and foraged plants. And in a classic move, he intentionally headed into the bush with a little extra weight on his body, expecting to lose about nine kilos along the way.

"The question will be whether we can find a way through or not," Barbour narrates early in the video. And it's a valid question. Not one community exists along his route — as he puts it, the peninsula is "one of the wildest places left on Earth." Stands of a common subarctic shrub that Newfoundlanders call tuckamore are so dense that it is impossible to get through them.

"I have a rough line drawn out," he says. "The rest I'll figure along the way. It's okay to go to sleep with a few question marks rolling around in the belly. That's what makes it an adventure."

As you'd expect with that kind of mindset, Barbour and his dog spend a lot of time route-finding across difficult terrain, sticking to moose and caribou trails whenever possible, and just punching through dense stands of short conifers when not. There's a lot of backtracking. Detours abound. Any high rocky ridge that allows for easy footing is a cause for celebration. It's all an inevitable part of this type of backcountry travel.

Squishy marshes

When the vegetation vanishes, squishy marshes appear, where Barbour and Saku "gotta work for every step." The pair ford rivers, haul themselves up and over mountains, and walk face-first into powerful winds. With terrain that nasty, it's no surprise they only average about nine kilometers a day.

But of course, speed isn't the goal here. It's total immersion, an idea Barbour reinforces with his reliance on fishing and foraging along the way. There's also plenty of scenery to admire.

"You just come across these fine little areas. Little tuck aways. Places you'd like to call home, put a cabin here, live for a bit. It's just that gorgeous," Barbour says.

By the time Barbour and Saku wrap up their journey with a final 30km along an overgrown logging road, they haven't seen another human being in 25 days.

"Just a wicked time," Barbour says of the trip as the video closes, before noting that even though he walked 230km, he only traveled 72 as the crow flies. "It just goes to show how tangly and jungle-like the terrain was," he continues. "Tough to figure out, but walking away, what great experiences. Absolutely amazing. You gotta love it."

As for his final weight loss?

Just 5.5kg. Barbour knows what he's doing out there.

Three-quarters of the way through her attempt on the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup (WURL), having just summited the final peak on the route, amateur athlete Mali Noyes leans over and vomits. The gusting wind blows her stomach acid nearly straight sideways.

Afterward, she feels better and continues jogging slowly downhill. The most difficult portion of the journey, a 45-degree gully choked with scree and talus, lies ahead.

It's all just another moment on the WURL, a deceptively difficult 58km ridge linkup route that circles Little Cottonwood Canyon just outside of Salt Lake City. The WURL fiendishly combines a middle-distance trail ultramarathon with a perpetual string of Class IV scrambles over 6,000m of elevation gain.

Not quite a trail run

The brainchild of Salt Lake City runner Jared Campbell, the route exists in a liminal space between climbing and trail running that challenges devotees of either discipline.

Campbell was hiking in Little Cottonwood one day in the early 2000s when the thought occurred to him that a linkup of the surrounding ridgelines could be possible. And so the WURL was born.

Rite of Passage is a film that follows Noyes as she attempts to complete the route. But the documentary also serves as an oral history of the route and includes a murderer's row of accomplished athletes (some quite famous) reflecting on the challenging run.

The WURL sometimes attracts people who aren't quite up to the challenge. Partly, that's because the route is so close to Salt Lake City — a hub of fit, enthusiastic outdoor athletes. And partly, it's because a 58km ultra with 6,000m of vert doesn't seem intimidating to athletes who can go out and run 160km.

"People look at the numbers, at the elevation gain, and maybe underestimate what's involved," Campbell says.

But Campbell, along with every other athlete interviewed in the film, urges caution. The exposure is constant, the stakes mortal. There's an ever-present danger of slipping off one of the route's countless knife-edge ridgelines, especially as the distance increases and fatigue sets in.

'It can be so intimidating'

But Noyes is a local trail runner with climbing chops, and she has what it takes. As the film progresses and she gets deeper and deeper into the run, she struggles, slips, and slides but never seems out of control. And like many ultra-distance efforts, the real battle is in the mind.

"Wherever you are [on the route], you can look at where you came from and where you have left to go, and it can be so intimidating," she notes at one point.

Rite of Passage is a short and punchy watch, clocking in at just under 20 minutes. Seeing the enthusiasm the runners have for the route, you might just be tempted to try it. But know thyself. The WURL isn't something to be tackled lightly.

However, if you have the skills and the fitness, it looks absolutely amazing.

"I've had a lot of people say, 'That was something I'll never forget; that was one of my best experiences in life.' " Campbell reflects. "Those [comments] mean a lot to me."

This weekend's film examines the sublime and simple beauty of Tibetan culture.

At 5,070m, Thoe Village is one of the highest permanent settlements in the world. The ethnic Tibetan population comprises 37 households and 150 people. Many of them make their living tending sheep.

Three seasons out of the year, the villagers herd their sheep back and forth across the windblown foothills. The drought-stricken mountainsides around Thoe provide sparse fodder for the animals. But in a land where no trees grow, and no crops sprout, it's the only way to make a living.

To manage their herds, shepherds like Dainzin use traditional Nepalese herding techniques — flinging stones from slings and whistling commands. At 54, Dainzin is the oldest shepherd in a village where the average life expectancy is 45.

Much of the first half of Icy Journey follows Dainzin over the course of several months. Viewers watch him part from his wife Sonam for weeks, living on nothing but steamed bread, sleeping at night in a stone hut, and walking among his sheep. For Danzig, this daily existence gives him satisfaction — he'd like to continue it for as long as his body holds out — but it is also a necessity, the only way to feed his family.

And then winter arrives.

With it, plunging temperatures and fierce winds that eradicate any chance of feeding the herd.

Blue Jewel

But in one way, Thoe Village is lucky — or blessed, if you take the villager's perspective. It's nestled on a large lake called Puma Yumco, or Blue Jewel. Five kilometers into the lake, a tiny island nestles. The villagers call it the Island of God, as a Buddhist monastery was once located there.

And thanks to an accident of geography and local weather, the sheltered little spot grows enough grass to feed the village's 2,000 head of sheep throughout the winter.

But how to get the sheep to the island? Dainzin and his fellow shepherds have to band together, combine their herds, and drive the sheep across slippery, wind-blown ice once the lake freezes over.

It's this yearly adventure that takes up Icy Journey's second half. Impatient viewers might be tempted to skip ahead to this section of the film, but that would be a loss. Because without the scene properly set — without a knowledge of what's at stake if the shepherds fail to accomplish this task — the gripping scenes that follow lose their impact.

A dangerous journey

The journey is fraught with danger. The shepherds scout the route ahead of time, looking for the thickest patches of ice. Sheep have fallen through it before, endangering the entire herd. But safety isn't guaranteed, even with preparation. Sheep skitter and slide on hooves not designed for traction on ice and threaten to scatter. To help, the shepherds scatter bag after bag of ash to provide a hoof-hold.

The wind blows incessantly. Sometimes, the animals just stop, unwilling to budge. It takes a lifetime's worth of knowledge and a lot of teamwork to get them moving again. When some animals inevitably get injured, the shepherds pick them up and carry them on their backs toward the safety and food of dry land.

Eventually, shepherds and sheep all make it across. For a little while, the men can rest in a job well done, and the sheep can munch to their bovine hearts' content. And then, next year, they'll do it all again.

An Icy Journey from Tibet's Sky Village is a measured window into the lives of people whose existence is very different from ours. For that reason alone, it's worth a contemplative look.

We aren't able to embed it, but you can watch it here.

Two years after Alex Honnold famously free-soloed El Cap, he sat down for the Nobel Prize's version of a Ted Talk with psychologist Armita Golkar. The conversation focused on fear — where it comes from, how to handle it, and when to ignore it. The resulting 30-minute video, posted in late 2019, is a window into the inner workings of a man who knows a little something about mastering his mind.

And it's a useful watch for any outdoor explorer.

Exposure leads to devaluing

At one point, as Honnold is talking, he becomes distracted by a photo being projected on the screen behind him. It's a shot from his El Cap free solo — the crux of the route. Honnold uses the photo to segue into a conversation about risk and uncertainty.

"Four meters of [that route] is incredibly hard and dangerous," Honnold says. "But it's a spectrum, and I think that in normal life, everything we do has a spectrum of risk like that as well. Every time you get in a car, there's danger involved. There's risk, there's uncertainty. Every time you step out your front door, there's uncertainty."

Golkar agrees with him, noting that his point touches on an important aspect of fear — how regular exposure to something can decrease its emotional impact.

"The fact that we make all these decisions on an everyday basis that are typically full of not just risk but uncertainty [is important]. Traffic, trusting other people, you don't have any control while sitting in a car what anyone else is going to do in that situation," she says.

"It would be a 100% deadly outcome if you fall," she notes, speaking to Honnold. "Traffic accidents could be potentially deadly. We are used to them because they are so frequent. So, we don't really pay attention to the risks and uncertainties in everyday life because they are so frequent...Which makes us kind of devalue the risks and uncertainty associated with traveling in a car."

Golkar goes on to extend the metaphor to the decision to have a child, which is also a very common choice full of long-term risks and uncertainties.

Preparation and experience

Honnold then points out that something like free soloing is an activity he's chosen, prepared for, and mitigated risk for as much as possible. His theory is that the most dangerous risks in life are the ones you take without fully thinking about.

"There's rational fear that makes sense because it's your body responding to danger, and then there's felt fear. The challenge in rock climbing is to be able to differentiate between the two and know which to heed and which to ignore," Honnold says.

Curiosity and uncertainty

The conversation springboards into a related topic: How experience can mitigate uncertainty and the specific difference between risk and uncertainty.  The distinction is that risk involves calculation, whereas uncertainty involves being trapped in a cycle of worrying about uncalculated factors. But uncertainty isn't all bad — Golknar associates it with curiosity. After all, we like not knowing what we're getting for Christmas (or at least most of us do).

According to Golknar, the human desire to mitigate fear is what led to us developing curiosity in the first place.

Honnold goes on to say that, in his opinion, the best way to deal with uncertainty — in this case, unexpected situations on the wall — is to build a broad base of experiences on which to fall back. Again, it comes back to preparation. Honnold is famous for it, especially in advance of his free solos.

We'll stop there because the conversation is best experienced as a video. But it's a worthwhile watch from start to finish — particularly if your hobbies involve dangerous situations.

Erik Boomer and Ben Stooksberry are two of the best expedition kayakers in the world. But even they may have met their match when they travel to Chihuahua, in northern Mexico. The plan? First descents on the rivers that rampage through the region's famously beautiful (and dangerous) canyons.

¡Ay Chihuahua! is the 17-minute film the pair created about the expedition. The story unwinds as a good old-fashioned travel tale. After laying out the broad strokes of the expedition, we meet members of the Group of Speleology and Exploration Cuauhtémoc, a collective of Mexican canyon explorers. They chuckle ruefully when the kayakers ask them if the rivers they've targeted are runnable.

Dangerous and hard

"I think it's dangerous and hard," Ricardo Rios, one of the group's members, says.

But before the duo can get on the water, they have to wait out agonizing days of nonstop rain, which swells their initial objective — Rio Candameña — well past runnable levels. You can see Boomer and Stooksberry's frustration as they huddle under eaves and watch the water pour. Doubt starts to creep in.

"We are teeter-tottering between total stoke to drop into these rivers, and then when the rivers flash flood, we're scared and kind of wondering what the hell we're doing here," Boomer says.

But these are seasoned expedition kayakers, and they know that waiting — and the hesitation that accompanies it — is part of the job.

"In my experience, any worthy or difficult or challenging objective is just this mind game," Stookesberry says.

The kayaking starts in earnest about six minutes into the film. The kayakers change tacks while they wait for the Candameña's waters to recede, deciding to tackle a first descent of the nearby Río Concheño.

Boxed-out canyons

Kayaking awesomeness ensues. The boys scout when they can, but it's a long trip, and they have another river on their mind. Time is of the essence.

"Gnarly, boxed out barranca canyons that were just enough to make everything scary," Boomer notes of the river. "So you think to yourself you're going to go here, and here, and then go left. And then when you get into the canyon..." he finishes before trailing off ominously.

After several exciting kayaking sequences that will appeal to experts and neophytes alike, Boomer and Stookesberry finish their run in the small town of Moris. There, they party with locals before traveling back to the Candameña, whose waters are now at perfect levels.

Well. Perfect for the Candameña. There's a reason nobody else has notched a first descent on it. The pair probably spend more time portaging than they do kayaking. But when they do get to drop into whitewater, it's all adrenaline. The drops are steep, and the moves are must-makes.

"It's a marathon of Class V, a marathon of portaging, a marathon of intensity. And there just isn't one moment that you can pick out, except maybe the moment when things go bad." Stooksberry says.

The moment he's referencing occurs when Boomer puts a sizable dent in the bow of his kayak, then pokes a hole through it while attempting to repair it over an open fire.

In the end, the pair achieve their first descent and are all the better for it. "We didn't get held hostage. The people didn't threaten us. Nobody almost died. We don't hate each other. Maybe it's kind of a boring story," Stookesberry says.

Reader, trust me on this. It's anything but.

It seems like most adventures these days have charity fundraising goals, obscure records to break, or fastest-known-times to set. Joffrey Maluski, a photographer and filmmaker based in France, rejected all those notions when he began planning his snowy, windy bike trip across Iceland.

"I'm not here to set speed or distance records. I've come to seek adventure, the unexpected. The discovery with its ups and downs," he voices in the film he made about his experience, Bikepacking Iceland: A Winter Journey Through the Heart of the Highlands. "Its moments of hardship, and its moments of intense happiness. So, I accept this pace imposed by the elements. And I keep moving forward until nightfall."

Maluski was referring to a punishing day of travel in which he pushed his bike through snowdrifts far more than he rode it, occasionally making only one kilometer an hour. But as the saying goes among bikepackers of a certain mindset, "If you're pushing your bike, you're in the right place."

Winter bikepacking: not for the faint of heart

The filmmaker got the first germ of his trip — which took him from Iceland's easternmost point to its westernmost point in 28 days — after a summer bike tour of Iceland with friends in 2021. He returned again in the winter of 2023 with no agenda other than a solid route and an idea of recording his experiences via photography and film.

The resulting film showcases grueling winter bikepacking. At first, Maluski is able to move quickly across windblown ice, towing a pulk behind him. But as he enters day five of his adventure, the terrain becomes mixed ice and snow. Soon enough, he's strapping his sled onto his bike and manhandling the whole rig through waist-high drifts.

"I pedal a few meters, I push, I get back on the bike, and repeat," he narrates.

At times, he changes modes of travel completely, loading up his fatbike onto the pulk and manhauling one step at a time. Through it all, he remains unfailingly cheerful and in awe of the scenery around him.

Iceland through an expert's eye

And what scenery it is. Even a mediocre photographer could make the winter Icelandic landscape seem vast and imposing, but Maluski has an eye. His lens expertly captures the beauty of the terrain. Through his perspective, the landscape is stark, yes. But also surprisingly vibrant. A careful blend of traditional videography, action-cam shots, and drone footage showcases the textures and nuanced shades of the winter scenery to good effect. Although generic, upbeat production music choices occasionally hinder the film, the cinematography saves the day.

As Bikepacking Iceland progresses, it falls into a rhythm — pedaling, pushing, fording shallow rivers, then camping or holing up in the huts that dot the landscape. Glimpses of these huts, which are often positioned near hot springs, give viewers a strong impetus to plan an Icelandic bikepacking trip of their own. However, one exceptionally windy night might give them second thoughts.

Wind and snow

"My tent swells, flaps, and distorts under the relentless pressure of the wind. I consider every possible scenario, but I keep calm. I focus on what I can control, leaving the rest aside," Maluski says with typical stoicism.

He waits out the storm for 24 hours, then, restless, decides to keep pushing forward.

As he travels westward, the biking gets easier, and Maluski makes better time. As he nears the end of his 1,000km journey, he reflects on the mixed feelings of elation and sadness that accompany every long human-powered adventure. But mostly, for him, it's elation.

"Everything is moving faster now, the landscapes are passing by. I'm crossing numerous mountain passes, it's climbing, it's descending, headwind, tailwind, it's sunny, it's snowing, it's warm, it's cold, the fiords are always a mental battle. I'm tired but happy. Happy to live this adventure, to discover remote and magnificent places, to feel free and alive," he says, to the accompaniment of typically stunning landscape videography.

Bikepacking Iceland: A Winter Journey Through the Heart of the Highlands is a cozy winter watch that runs just over 18 minutes.

Some mountains are aesthetically pleasing. Some mountains are fiendishly difficult to climb. Some mountains are both. Jirishanca, a 6,000m peak in the Peruvian Andes, falls into this third category. That's why climbers like Josh Wharton and Vince Anderson keep trying to climb it. And that's why, until the pair's latest attempt, no one had been to the top in 20 years.

"Steep and intimidating. It's the epitome of a climber's mountain," Wharton says in the opening minutes of Jirishanca, Patagonia's new film about the duo's 2023 alpine-style attack on the mountain.

In Wharton's words, Jirishanca is a "legendary" objective that wasn't summited until the late 1950s and not all that often since. In 2019, Wharton and Anderson themselves turned back four pitches from the top.

The total package

Jirishanca is the total package, featuring 5.13 face climbing, chossy mixed climbing, ice roofs, a big limestone wall, and, as Anderson puts it, "funky snow-wallowing toward the summit."

The Peruvian peak has been a long-time goal of Wharton's, in particular. It's a rare case of man matching mountain. In one of the film's interviews, climber Tommy Caldwell describes Wharton as "one of the best all-around climbers in the world."

Other climbers call Wharton "the best climber you've never heard of." He's a unique personality in the modern climbing world. Quiet, stoic, a Luddite with a flip phone, social-media averse, avoidant of media, and chronically allergic to what he calls the "hyperbole in climbing and climbing films and climbing media."

Perhaps in deference to Wharton, the filmmakers behind Jirishanca keep the tone reserved, choosing long, dramatic drone shots over quick cuts and dramatic edits. They never sensationalize. The reality of climbing Jirishanca is sensational enough. The mountain's soaring limestone walls, overhanging ice roofs, and crumbling faces provide all the drama. No cinematic tricks necessary.

Risks and rewards

Between the climbing scenes, the filmmakers take the time to delve into Wharton and Anderson's personal lives. Both are family men, both had their share of close calls in their early climbing days, and both have backed off a bit from the precipice of disaster. This shared caution, combined with well-honed skills, makes them ideal climbing partners. It shines through in all their scenes together.

Not that Wharton is risk-averse. He just has a more nuanced take on the subject since becoming a father.

"Risk is a valuable thing in life because it leads us to growing as a person, and having all sorts of adventures and cool and interesting experiences. So I wouldn't want my daughter to live in a bubble. I wouldn't want her to try and avoid risk in her life. And so it's not something I want to totally let go of either," he says.

To the top

The climbing segments unfold over three days. A huge limestone face provides the first challenge, followed by ice climbing and a hair-raising choss. Jirishanca has always been a tough climb, but it's gotten harder in the last 20 years as climate change melts off the snow and ice. Wharton has noticed a change just in the few years since he's been tackling the mountain. Now, on pitches that used to be cemented together with frozen water, cow-sized chunks of rock peel off and go tumbling into the valley below.

In one particularly memorable scene, the two climbers bivouac under an ice roof, witness a gorgeous sunrise refracted by the frozen water, then begin their morning by ice-axing out from under the overhang and working their way upward. The camera slowly pulls back and back and back, until you can see they are only a few dozen meters from the top.

In true stoic fashion, Wharton's reaction upon reaching the summit is a relatively subdued "woo-hoo."

Gorgeously shot and edited with restraint, Jirishanca delivers a great ride without succumbing to the hyperbole that Wharton finds so distasteful.

The cost of human life is a thread that runs throughout the entirety of the award-winning film 109° Below. Fresh from a Best Adventure win at the 2024 Banff Mountain Film Festival, the 14-minute documentary takes viewers back in time to 1982, when an elite group of rescue climbers struggled to save two young men who became lost on New Hampshire's Mount Washington.

Washington's claim to fame is "the worst weather in the world" — earned thanks to record wind speeds, icy temperatures, and violent winter storms. In fact, the film is called 109° Below because that's the temperature (in Fahrenheit) that the wind-chill factor reached while the crew was filming on Mount Washington.

A serious problem

"When the weather is bad, all you have to do is lose your mitten, and you've got a serious problem," Paul Cormier, a member of New Hampshire's Mountain Rescue Service, says in one of the film's interviews.

But in 1982, 17-year-old Hugh Herr and his partner Jeff Batzer did much more than lose their mittens. Although experienced for their age, the two young men made a fateful decision — to press toward Washington's summit in the face of an oncoming storm.

Reaching a ridgeline, the pair decided to walk three more minutes closer to their goal before descending. Those three minutes proved disastrous, as visibility dropped precipitously. Herr screamed at Batzer, "Let's get the hell out of here," and began their descent.

Frostbitten and hypothermic

By the time they realized they'd taken the wrong line down a steep slope, they had neither the energy nor the time to retrace their steps. They kept descending and were quickly lost. They continued bushwhacking until two or three in the morning, then finally halted, frostbitten and hypothermic.

Meanwhile, the climbers had been reported missing, and a 10-person crew of volunteer Mountain Rescue Service members set out to find them. And then tragedy struck. While conducting the search, two of the rescuers were caught in an avalanche. One survived, but Albert Dow broke his neck in the crush of snow and debris. It was a stunning blow to the close-knit rescue community, which still had a duty to the missing climbers.

"I hated the people we were searching for. But I realized I hated this young man because my friend was dead," Joe Letini, a member of that 1982 rescue team, says in the film. "But Hugh was 17. Sometimes, you just push that little too far. And you don't know what's too far. You're learning. Hopefully, you learn from it."

To learn from the experience, the two climbers had to survive it. And they almost didn't. As the fourth day of their ordeal dawned, they began to lose hope.

"Most people believed that we were dead...we gave up all attempts to survive," Herr says.

Accidental salvation

But in a moment of serendipity, a group of snowshoers found their tracks in the fresh snow and followed the trail to a cave where Herr and Batzer were fading fast.

Transported to a hospital, both of Herr's legs were amputated below the knee. Batzer's lower left leg, all the toes on his right foot, and the thumb and fingers on his right hand were amputated.

But the worst part for Herr? Learning the true human cost of his rescue.

"To me, that was the lowest point of my entire life. Hearing that a fellow climber had died while searching for Jeff and I," he says.

109° Below is fast-paced, dramatic, and well-shot. It uses expertly constructed reenactment footage, gorgeous landscape videography, and interviews in a combination familiar to fans of Touching the Void. But where the film truly shines is in its final moments, when it examines the aftermath of the rescue attempt and finds some redemption for its primary subject.

A hard lesson learned

"Albert Dow's death was very profound for me. It transitioned from shock into rage at myself for making bad decisions in the mountains and really putting others at risk. That rage drove me ironically to climbing again, with artificial limbs. I was going to use every cell in my body to do something positive with my life," Herr shares.

Herr didn't just climb with prosthetics; he designed them himself. He's now a professor at MIT and a world-recognized leader in the prosthetics field.

"If I pitied myself and didn't apply my mind and body to something good for society, I thought that would be an absolute disgrace to Albert's sacrifice," he concludes.

If you want to get to know a wild place — really know it — you have to travel it by foot. There's just something about moving slowly that allows the brain to absorb and process the subtleties of beautiful settings.

Unfortunately, the measured pace of long-distance backpacking trips doesn't often make for interesting feature-length films. I'm a long-distance backpacker and outdoor journalist, so trust me when I say that. I've seen a lot of them. Backpacking tales seem better suited to books, where authors can better break up straightforward point-A-to-point-B narratives with inner dialogue, humorous asides, and other nuances.

But Out There: The Great Divide Trail is a bit of an exception.

The 80-minute film was shot, directed, and edited by its two main characters: Ryan "Kodak" Brown and Ilsa "Cinnamon" Praet. It follows the two as they journey along Canada's Great Divide Trail (GDT), which stretches from Waterton Lakes National Park on the U.S.-Canadian border to Kakwa Provincial Park, some 1,130km north.

Familiar grooves

To some extent, Out There settles into the same familiar grooves of many long-distance backpacking movies. Kodak and Cinnamon gather their gear, travel to the trail's start, take the requisite photo, and start hiking. Along the way, they meet interesting people, power their way over passes, scrape the morning frost from their water bottles, and otherwise attend to life on a long-distance trail. Eventually, they reach the end and go home.

But where the film stands apart is in the wise decision to center the GDT itself. The pair have an eye for sweeping landscapes and the technical skill to showcase those landscapes to full effect. When paired with an unobtrusive acoustic soundtrack, the result is a film that makes the best use of the GDT's famously remote setting to quiet, meditative effect.

How it differs from other trails

It helps that the GDT is so beautiful. Dan Durston, a Canadian backpacker who runs a successful (and innovative) ultralight backpacking gear company, is interviewed throughout the film. He says it best:

"You can hike trails that are awesome. Pacific Crest Trail. Te Araroa. Those are fantastic trails. But what they don't have is this big, authentic, intact wilderness that we have here in the Canadian Rockies. We are going hundreds of kilometers without crossing a road. Fully intact ecosystems. And it gives the trail this sense of authenticity that you're actually hiking through something really special. The cliffs, the icefields, the spires. It's some of the most aesthetic mountains in the world."

Durston knows what he's talking about. He was the first person on record to yoyo the GDT, which is to say finish it in one direction, then immediately turn around start walking back the other way.

Kodak and Cinnamon are also experienced hikers. They met on a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, and "haven't really left each other's side since," Kodak says in the film's voiceover. But the GDT has challenges that test even the most capable backpacker. The trail's remote nature is certainly a factor. Wildlife is another.

Bears, wildfires, insects

"People have to consider that the Canadian Rockies has most of its megafauna still on the ground. In the wild. Including black bears and grizzly bears. There's everything from ticks in the early season to biting, flying insects. There are wildfires. There's also some risk with the traffic where the trail is forced to follow along highways from time to time."

It's also tough logistically. Unlike most of the long trails in the United States, there isn't one permit that will get you through all the protected areas that the GDT traverses. It necessitates careful planning and sticking to that plan.

Finally, there are sections of trail that aren't trail — high alpine areas that require route finding, scrambling, and navigating sketchy scree fields.

"Damn GDT. You don't need to go so hard right out of the gate," Cinnamon says during a steep climb early in the journey. Kodak later wryly refers to the GDT as "the Great Difficult Trail."

Just do it

But her partner also offers some words of comfort to viewers with itchy feet.

"So for those intrepid souls who want to hike the whole thing, I'd say start planning early, get as much information as you can, and don't get discouraged. You can do it. If you have the resolve, you can make it work," Kodak narrates over some characteristically beautiful cinematography.

The pair finishes their trek in a cozy cabin on the shores of a lake. It's a fitting end to a journey more spiritual than pulse-pounding.

"Saying goodbye is bittersweet. The further north we went, the more we fell in love with the natural beauty surrounding us," they write in the cabin's logbook.

The Banff Mountain Film Festival is the crème de la crème of outdoor and film showcases, and this year was no exception. This year's festival took place this past week, and the winners cover a range of topics from ski-racing Afghan youths to Mongolian conservation and everything in between. Let's look at a few of the winners. And while you're at it, check out the always spectacular trailer, just below.

Grand Prize and Audience Choice: Champions of the Golden Valley

This tale of passion and politics set in rural Afghanistan wowed judges and the Banff audience alike. It follows a group of young Afghan skiers in a friendly rivalry as they pit their skills against each other, sometimes using makeshift wooden ski equipment. Village girls even begin to take part in the burgeoning pastime.

But following the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, the Taliban returned to the region, forcing all involved to radically change their lives once again.

ExplorersWeb editor-in-chief Jerry Kobalenko said of Champions of the Golden Valley, "This labor of love was years in the making, and the unexpected return of the Taliban added a dark edge to what began as a feel-good story about the discovery of outdoor sports in Central Asia."

Best Adventure: 109 Below

The icy 109 Below chronicles a fateful rescue attempt on New Hampshire's ferocious Mount Washington — a mountain famously known to have "the worst weather in the world." The rescue in question takes place in 1983, but the events of 109 Below continue to resonate today.

"Directed with empathy and gravitas, the narrative spans decades of moral reconciliation in a mere 14 minutes while opening up a debate it can’t hope to resolve," jury member Brian Johnson noted.

Best Environment: The Giants

The Giants weaves two narratives as closely together as tree roots: the intertwined stories of politician and conservation activist Bob Brown and the giant trees he fights so hard to protect.

Using lush live-action cinematography paired with gorgeously rendered animation, the film examines the dueling powers at war for the soul of the Australian landscape: human passion for wild places and the human desire for resources.

Best Mountain Sports: Big Water Theory

If you haven't heard of Nouria Newman, French extreme kayaking phenom, you're in for a treat. Big Water Theory is as good a place as any to start learning about the skilled and ambitious Newman. The film follows her on a quest to make the first female descent of the Indus River's Rondu Gorge.

"Ultimately, this is a story of small humans bravely facing vast nature — tiny figurines in plastic kayaks amid the foaming, powerful waters of the Indus, seemingly on the brink of disaster yet miraculously making it down the rapids unscathed, jury member Masha Gordon shared. "Is it luck or skill? Mostly the former, with just a touch of the latter."

While you're waiting for Big Water Theory to hit streaming services, go check out some of Newman's other adventures.

Best Mountain Culture: Mongolia, Valley of the Bears

Jury member Brian Johnson described Mongolia, Valley of the Bears as a "movie of many genres. A cinematic spectacle that distills poetry from landscape. An eco-documentary too complex to be doctrinaire. A character drama with a trickster protagonist. A western about an enforcer who fights an outlaw band of poachers by recruiting warriors from their ranks."

At its heart, the film is about former hunter turned ranger Jal Tumursukh as conservation efforts and traditional cultural practices clash across the vast Mongolian landscape.

Other winners

Here are the remaining winners across the Banff Mountain Film Festival's other categories. According to the festival, all of the winning films will be available online in the U.S. and Canada from November 6-13.

Best Climbing: Adra

Best Snowsports: Wild Days

Best Feature: Ashima

Best Short Film: The Bird in my Backyard

Creative Excellence Award: The Smoke that Thunders

Special Jury Mention: The Last Observers, Sadpara

It's been almost 30 years since the 1996 storm on Mount Everest claimed the lives of eight people: guides Andrew Harris, Rob Hall, and Scott Fischer; clients Doug Hanson and Yasuko Namba; and Indo-Tibetian Border Police officials Subedar Tsewang Smanla, Lance Naik Dorje Morup, and Head Constable Tsewang Paljor.

Over the years, the survivors have penned conflicting accounts, documentarians have created films, and major Hollywood studios have even attempted dramatic retellings of the story.

So you may think you've learned all there is to learn about the disaster. But for a glimpse at the immediate physiological and physical impact the event had on some of the climbers stranded on the mountain during that fateful season, look no further than this 60 Minutes Australia special.

Recorded in 1996 in the abrupt aftermath of the disaster, it draws heavily on interviews from Adventure Consultants guide Michael Groom and clients John Taske and Beck Weathers.

A tangled timeline

You could spend days unraveling the timeline's tangled threads (and people have). But if you're just tuning in, the broad strokes go something like this: guides and clients from multiple outfitters became stranded at high camps while descending from summit attempts when a major, multiple-day storm blew in unannounced. Confusion, hardship, and death followed. In the aftermath, serious conversations ensued about ethical climbing and who, exactly, belongs in one of the world's most extreme environments.

The short is only 16 minutes long, so after outlining the scenario, it quickly homes in on the stories of Groom and Weathers.

At the time of the expedition, Groom had successfully summited more Himalayan peaks than any other Australian. And though he recounts the story as placidly as perhaps only an Ozzie can, you can see that the shock is still very much present within him.

In a confusing series of events, Groom was forced to abandon two of his clients, Weathers and Japanese climber Yasuko Namba, 500m above Camp 4, as he stumbled on for help. After reaching the camp, the exhausted and hypothermic Groom dispatched two other climbers to search for Weathers and Namba. The stricken climbers were found, but the fatigued rescuers judged them too close to death for a successful rescue and returned to Camp 4 alone.

Left for dead

Namba died there in the snow above Camp 4, but unbeknownst to anyone, Weathers later regained enough strength to claw his way to his feet. He was totally unaware there had been a rescue attempt and determined to press on.

"I thought to myself, I'm going to face into the wind, I'm going to walk forward, and I'm either going to walk off this mountain or walk into a tent, one of the two," Weathers says in his interview.

The Texan, snowblind and severely frostbitten, somehow made it to Camp 4 the next afternoon, where he shuffled into a tent and passed out with a sleeping bag over his face.

The following morning, Groom shepherded the rest of his clients further down the mountain, eventually reaching Camp 2 and medical assistance. But not before exhaustion and bad luck led him to make a controversial decision. Making his rounds at Camp 4 before departing, Groom happened upon the tent where Beck had blindly sought shelter.

"I looked into a tent that was open; I saw a body lying on the floor of the tent with a sleeping bag over the face of the body. For a moment, I hesitated as to whether I should look at the body to see who it was, but I decided not to. I had assumed he was one of the American party who had passed away during the night."

Beck was eventually rescued by French climbers from Camp 3.

Conscience clear

One of the most fascinating moments in the short occurs when the interviewer questions Groom about this moment. Groom insists that his conscience is clear and that he did everything humanly possible to care for his clients. The 60 Minutes interviewer presses again.

60 Minutes: "Even though you left him for dead? Twice?"

Groom: "No. I didn't leave him for dead twice. The first time, it was a group decision that I should head off to find Camp 4 because I was the strongest both mentally and physically. The second time, I didn't leave Beck for dead because I didn't even know he was there."

Here, Groom pauses, and you can see the emotion roiling beneath his stoic features.

Groom: "In some ways, I wish I'd have removed the sleeping bag and identified him, and then I could have taken care of him, but that's something I didn't do. And I have to live with that decision."

Weathers: a correct decision

For his part, Weathers agrees.

"I think it was a correct decision for him to go try to help everybody. And I'm not surprised when he saw me the second time that he thought I was already gone," he says.

This moment is particularly impactful because Weathers, at the time of the interview, had yet to undergo the dramatic surgeries that would leave him with an amputated and reconstructed nose, an amputated right arm, and missing all the digits on his left hand.

Instead, in the 60 Minutes footage, his arms are swaddled in bandages, his face blackened and gruesome. Toward the end of the short, he chats with Groom and professes hope that his amputations will be limited. It's heartbreaking and immediate in a way that reading and watching later accounts don't quite reach.

The special wraps with the thought that has plagued Himilayan mountaineering ever since.

"The deaths of such experienced climbers as Rob Hall have raised serious questions as to whether adventurers who pay for the experience put not only themselves in danger but also those who guide them," the host says.

That we still have this debate today indicates that despite all the media coverage of the 1996 Everest Disaster in the 18 years since it occurred, perhaps the most important question about it remains unsettled.

In 2022, Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was discovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Now 3D scans show the legendary shipwreck in extraordinary detail. 

The Endurance was crushed in the ice and sank during Shackleton’s 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It has lain 3,000m down at the bottom of the ocean for 107 years. In 2022, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust spearheaded a search for the sunken ship. Sixty marine archaeologists, engineers, and scientists collaborated to find the mysterious shipwreck. 

The team spent weeks filming the wreck and its debris field, even releasing incredible footage of the largely intact ship. Now, a 3D scan made up of 25,000 high-resolution images shows the Endurance in more detail than anyone thought possible.

A new National Geographic documentary, airing in the U.S. on November 1, explores Shackleton's expedition and the search for the Endurance. The new footage doesn't just capture the sunken hulk of the ship. It shows the dinner plates used by the crew scattered across the floor, a boot lying amid the collapsed rigging, and even the star pattern of the ship's flooring. 

Almost pristine condition

The shipwreck is classed as a monument under the International Antarctic Treaty, meaning that nothing can be retrieved from it or disturbed. Though some sections of the ship have decayed, the ice-cold waters of the Antarctic preserved most of it in near-perfect condition.

The story of how Shackleton and his crew survived the 1914 sinking without a single loss of life is one of the great tales of polar exploration. He and his crew wanted to complete the first crossing of Antarctica. Their attempt ended before it even began and quickly turned into a mission to survive.

Trapped in the ice, the Endurance lived up to its name and endured the relentless forces of the pack ice for 10 months before it sank. The crew had to rely on their few lifeboats and limited supplies. 

In April 1916, they reached uninhabited Elephant Island. There was no chance of anyone rescuing them there, so Shackleton and five crew members set out in one lifeboat across the stormiest seas on Earth. After 1,200km in the open craft, they reached South Georgia Island. Their ordeal was still not over. A whaling station lay on the other side, but to reach it, they had to make a hair-raising crossing of the mountainous, glaciated island. It took another four months to arrange a mission to rescue the remaining men on Elephant Island.

Miraculously, every single crew member was still alive. All 28 men had survived the expedition. 

If big water, three accomplished kayakers, and one of South America's standout scenic locations is your cup of tea, look no further: This short film is for you. Kayaking Patagonia's 3 Toughest Rivers For the First Time EVER is 14 minutes of pulse-pounding Chilean goodness.

It follows French expedition kayaker Nouria Newman over two months in 2019 as she attempts the so-called Patagonian Triple Crown — descents of three wild Patagonian rivers: the Baker, Bravo, and Pasqua. Along for the ride are American boaters Ben Stookesberry and Erik Boomer.

"Why am I doing this?" Newman rhetorically asks in one interview. "I've heard about these rivers for so many years. And I've always been attracted to Patagonia, maybe because it's so far from everything else."

That sentiment tracks when you learn Newman's background. The kayaker, 27 at the time of the expedition, got her start on the water at age five when she joined a local paddling club in her home country. But even that humble beginning took tenacity. She didn't know how to swim when the sport caught her young eyes, and her parents insisted she learn before she got in a boat.

Once she mastered her swim strokes, Newman quickly became a kayak master. She competed internationally in extreme kayaking from 2007 to 2013, wracking up medals and podium spots in 2013 and 2014.

Adventure, not competition

However, Newman is a pure soul, and eventually becomes more interested in adventure than competition.

"I think I had reached my limit of it,” Newman told Red Bull. “I got injured, and I never really came back from injury, so I didn’t have the results. It was the same races over and over. I was getting burned out.”

So Newman lit out for the Himalaya in 2018. Over the next two years, she battled frosty mountain whitewater on top of altitude and logistical challenges.

Then her next trick: The Patagonian Triple Crown.

A good team is important when you're tackling some of the world's roughest water, and each member of Newman's trio added something special.

American Erik Boomer brought exceptional whitewater reading skills to the table.

"When no one else can see the line, [Erik] Boomer can see it," Newman says.

As for Ben Stookesberry? Well, there's something to be said for hard-won wisdom.

"He's probably the most experienced expedition kayaker you can find," Newman notes.

Meanwhile, Newman brought her signature fearless brand of aggressive paddling, pushing the team to run a few rapids that gave even the seasoned Stookesberry the creepy crawlies.

Big water

On the Baker, the team tackled big water — the kinds of waves, hydraulics, and pour-overs you just don't find in Europe, Newman observes. The footage is stunning as the trio splashes and flips through the huge sapphire-blue features. On water that big, coming out of your boat is an ugly scenario, so the team fights hard to stay upright as often as possible.

With the Baker successfully sent, the team started eyeballing their next objective: the Pasque. But with six weeks to kill in Patagonia, they tackled an additional six rivers between their big three, notching four first descents along the way.

"We figured most likely, we would get skunked on one or two of the rivers. So, we just decided to take our time,” Newman explained.

She makes it sound easy, but even the time the trio spent out of the water was grueling. The expedition required 160km of portaging with boats that, with gear, weighed more than 45kg.

Paddling the Pasque offered the most challenges to the team — this river had only been successfully run once before Newman's team tackled it.

Check out the entire adventure below.