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| The Abyss - Still from the movie. |
Well, I'm going to break from my regular routine of posting Powell River / Eldred Valley related content, and post a climbing video that I just watched instead.
The Abyss is a short, very well done film about the development of North America's highest bouldering area, not too far from the already majorly famous Rocky Mountain national park in Colorado.
It's often challenging for me to convey the exact feeling of developing an area: the challenge, the sacrifice, the love, and the reward that you experience are so unique that it can be very difficult to put into terms that climbers who have never had the same opportunity can understand.
This video deals with issues like sharing a new area vs keeping it a secret - when and why to make the transition, and when and why an area will actually take off as opposed to just being 'some other area' that though beaming with potential might be entirely ignored.
Developing the bouldering in the Eldred Valley was at first a very solo project, because no one else in town was very interested in bouldering, and anyone from out of town didn't want to travel so far just to scrub boulders (or even clean big wall routes) when they could go to Squamish and climb a life times worth of classics. This film sums up the joys and frustrations of developing an area wonderfully.
Of course, it also has all the elements a good climbing film needs - beautiful scenery, and hard climbing!
Maybe this video will get people stoked to help me scrub more boulders this season....Enjoy!
The Abyss: America's highest bouldering - on Youtube
The Abyss: America's highest bouldering - on Vimeo
The makers of the film - Louder Than 11
"Theres always a few people out there that do the bouldering development. One percent of the climbing population does 90 percent of the devlopment. It's that 1 percent...they're wired like that, it's their lifes work. It's what they'd rather be doing than anything else"- John Sherman
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