Alpine bouldering. First Ascents. Controversy. Free Films.
Welcome to Abyss, a 47-minute feature film produced by Louder Than Eleven and posted free to YouTube. Mount Evans is unique that you can drive up to 14,000ft. From that vantage point, one can see a lot, including a (potentially) undiscovered boulder field right smack in the middle of the Front Range of Colorado. Sure enough, Jon Glassberg and Rich Crowder stumbled upon just such a landscape.
Is it actually a new crag though? Only 20 minutes from the car, how has it possibly not been seen before? Perhaps its a “secret area” – one that some know of, but have deliberately kept off the radar. That’s right – before the days when everyone posted every rock they stepped over to Mountain Project, people would deliberately keep areas to themselves. You had to know the right people, and if you ran your mouth and a bunch of rando’s showed up, you caught grief.
Sometimes its nice to have a place to yourself. To set the tone. To pick the plums. To climb virgin stone without tickmarks and grades and beta and all the BS that comes with them. Selfish? Sure, but climbing is selfish. Therein lies the dual nature of Abyss. The crew from the film kept mum about it over the off season so they could have their fill, they’d never heard anyone else speak of it, which meant one of two things – they’d legitimately found something new and special, or they were busy keeping secret about a spot others had been very successful in keeping equally secret.
Enough about the meta, WHAT ABOUT THE FILM? Good and bad news, its a lot of meta. There are a ton of interviews that span the philosophical – is it ok to keep a place a secret? Is there a moral obligation to tell others about a spot? Heavy hitters like Joe Kinder, Peter Beal, John Sherman, and the Chris’s (Shulte and Sharma) weigh in.
Is there hyperbole where someone draws an analogy to murder vs manslaughter? Yes. But beyond all that, is there still LT11 high quality climbing footage overtop a bumping hip hop\techno soundtrack? Also yes.
This is a film that asks a lot of questions, and while I think its less good than the similarly philosophical Rocky Mountain Highball, it still balances the talking with some gorgeous shots. Ascents of every difficulty from V3 to V13 are given nearly equal screen time which is nice, and the cast of characters spans generations and opinions.
On the whole hoever, I find this film disagreeable. Right after justifying secrecy in the name of minimizing environmental impact (less hype – less people – less impact), people are shown rapping down and chalking the entirety of a sizeable arete. Well that and they included a segment about minimizing the hype in a film hyping up the area. And perhaps its because I’m a low altitude ninny, but I have a hard time feeling like a lightning storm during a bouldering session is a life-threatening endeavor. Frankly there are a lot of opinions expressed in this film I find exceptional, and plenty others I find questionable, but I suppose that’s the point. All that doesn’t begin to come close to the controversy it stirred with other locals who claim they got there first.
Verdict: Watch It. I know, I know, I just talked a lot of trash, but that wasn’t because it was a bad film, its because its a controversial film. For that reason, I think its worth the watch – it’ll make you think, make you form an opinion, and make you a more thoughtful climber.
The Who:
Jon Glassberg, Paige Classen, Matty Hong. Rich Crowder, Chris Shulte, Mayan Smith-Gobat, Ben Vernon, Ben Spannuth, David Wetmore, Matt Wilder
The What:
Mt Evans, CO
Face to Face
Dead Reckoning
Slattitude
The Brig
Rule of 3rds
Cape of Good Hope
Decompression Slab
Decompression Sickness
Mayans Crack
Stowaway
Death to Traitors
The Hull
All Hands on Deck
Death from Above
Black Blood
Dead Mans Chest
Poop Deck
Dive! Dive! Dive!
Rock Lobster
Do or Die
Knives Out
Iron Lung
Gold Fish Face
Walking on Water
Overhead
Matt’s Slab
Gold Blood
Sandbar
Doubloons (5.14)
