Nirmal Purja is the type of man who can shimmy up an 8,000m mountain (Kangchenjunga) with a hangover. The film 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, out on Netflix, isn’t just full of extraordinary scenery, it’s full of extraordinary endeavour. He and his team of Sherpas summited the world’s 8,000m peaks in less than seven months.
And that’s what mountain climbing is all about. You marvel at the will — some might call it madness — that spurs people on, in torrid, terrifying conditions, pitching themselves against the world’s most unforgiving terrains. It makes for electrifying, sometimes heartbreaking cinema — we’ve picked some of our favourites.
The Last Mountain
In October 2018 I spent three days watching murderous avalanches ripping down the face of Nanga Parbat, an 8,126m (26,660ft) monster in northern Pakistan that’s the westernmost peak in the Himalayas.
The thought of trying to climb it made me nauseous, but four months later the British climber Tom Ballard and his Italian companion did exactly that — and their bodies are still up there. Chris Terrill’s documentary follows Kate Ballard as she hikes to Nanga Parbat base camp to pay tribute to her big brother.
It’s not the first time she has made such a journey: at the age of four her father took her and six-year-old Tom to K2 — just 100 miles northeast — to say goodbye to their mother, Alison Hargreaves, who had died descending from the summit.
Advertisement
The film is as much a tale of obsession, addiction, stoicism and denial as a valedictory to doomed youth: when Kate calls her dad to say that Tom’s body has been found, he calmly tells her to “find something to do to take your mind off it”. So wrap up warm because The Last Mountain will leave you cold.
Available on BBC iPlayer
Chris Haslam
Everest
Spotting the icy, pyramid-shaped summit of Everest peeking through the clouds on a flight to Kathmandu brought me out in goosebumps, catapulting me back to 1998 and David Breashears’ extraordinary documentary, Everest. The 45-minute film, which features Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of Tenzing Norgay, who summited with Edmund Hillary in 1953, was shot entirely in Imax format, an extraordinary feat, given the conditions on the mountain and the complexity of the kit.
Astonishing cinematography aside — those aerial shots of climbers picking their way across ice chasms still makes me shiver — the crew was filming during the tragic spring of 1996, documented in Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into Thin Air, in which 12 climbers died on the mountain. The Imax crew went to the assistance of some of the climbers, whose rescue became part of the film. Everest is being rereleased in Imax in 2022. Prepare for an emotional ride.
Sue Bryant
The Ghosts Above
Early on in this Everest documentary someone’s tent is blown clean off the North Col. You can see it flying away through the clear blue sky, borne on a 140mph gust of wind. Later a videographer succumbs — badly — to altitude sickness. There is, in other words, no mistaking how lethal this environment is, and the sense of menace as the adventurer and photographer Renan Ozturk’s team of climbers heads towards the summit is visceral. Yes, OK, the music is intrusive at times. But that doesn’t stop The Ghosts Above offering an extraordinarily fresh — and hair-raising — portrait of modern mountaineering. Available on YouTube
Sean Newsom
The Eiger Sanction
The first time I saw Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction was in the mid-1980s in a ski club lodge set beneath a skirt of thick pine on the River Orchy in the Highlands. It was shown on a large, click-clacking VHS machine and, as my dad was one of the first Brits to conquer a hitherto untamed route on the Eiger’s North Face five years before the film’s release in 1975, he was playing host, sort of. Most of it — the scallop-edged Swiss mountains, the ridiculous climbing stunts, Eastwood’s granite-faced hero Jonathan Hemlock — left an indelible imprint on my memory and I’ve developed an unbreakable bond with the mountain and Switzerland ever since.
Available to rent from £2.49 on various platforms, including Google Play and YouTube
Mike MacEacheran
Free Solo
Advertisement
Ever had that holding-on-to-a-rising balloon dream? It’s all a bit of Poppins-esque fun in the early stages, right? Then you’re suddenly in a white-knuckle nightmare of exponentially rising stakes. That’s pretty much the premise of Free Solo, the groundbreaking 2018 documentary that follows Alex Honnold’s life-defining, life-juggling ascent of the fabled El Capitan in Yosemite with no ropes or support. Don’t be fooled by its sunset-pinkened hues; “El Cap” is a beast, a sheer, 2,308m-high slab of granite that mesmerises anyone who has ever touched fingertips to chalk.
● Photography special: the world’s largest mountains
“Everyone who’s made free soloing a big part of their life is dead now,” we hear, ominously, as the Californian climber begins his vertical quest, red-shirted like Tiger Woods in his pomp. The creation of this documentary is almost as big an achievement as what follows, with the producer and co-director Jimmy Chin juggling ethics as well as camera equipment to capture a feat that clings to the thinnest of margins between triumph and disaster.
Available to rent from £3.49 on various platforms including Amazon Prime
Duncan Craig
Force Majeure
It’s not just Everest-botherers and free soloists who find themselves in perilous situations in the mountains that show you what you’re really made of. The brilliant Swedish film Force Majeure follows a middle-class family ski trip to the French Alps. Disaster strikes while the family are eating lunch outdoors at the foot of the mountain: suddenly they see an avalanche cascading towards them. In the heat of the moment, stressed-out father Tomas abandons his wife and two children on the deck and saves himself. It turns out to be a controlled explosion. Cue huge family fallout. You find yourself wondering if an avalanche mightn’t have been the kinder option.
Available to rent from £1.99 on various platforms including Google Play and YouTube
Katie Gatens
Cliffhanger
Some may tut at my introducing the lowbrow element here, but this 1993 action movie starring Sylvester Stallone and John Lithgow has all kinds of awe-inspiring mountainous moments — if the plot twists, terrifying stunts and Stallone’s acting don’t leave you gasping, then the snowy peaks and sheer rock faces of the Dolomites, standing in for the Rockies, will. In among daring rescues and dastardly deeds you have characters skiing and parachuting off mountains, people leaping over crevasses and swimming under ice, and all the crampons, pickaxes and carabiners you could wish for. Yes, it was criticised for certain rock-climbing inaccuracies. But in this Die Hard up a mountain, disbelief — like the climbers themselves — is easily suspended.
Available to rent from £2.49 on various platforms, including Google Play and YouTube
Liz Edwards
The Lord of the Rings
Advertisement
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is about Frodo taking the One Ring to the volcanic Mount Doom. The actual climb of Mount Doom only takes up a few minutes of the third film, but the whole story speaks to critical components of mountain climbing: preparation, support from friends and overcoming your own doubts. It’s often said that “getting to the start line is the hardest part of an expedition”, and while Frodo had to fight Nazgul and Uruk-Hai to reach Mount Doom, his journey reflects the funding, training and self-belief that every mountaineer needs before they start to climb.
Available to rent from £3.49 on various platforms including Amazon Prime
Ash Bhardwaj
What are the soul-stirring mountain films and series that have stayed with you? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this page for your chance to win £250 towards a hotel stay
Peak performance
The rock climber and GB paraclimber Jesse Dufton, 35, has conquered some of the world’s toughest ascents, from Greenland to Scotland — despite losing his sight to a rare disease
I started climbing when I was two years old. My dad’s a climber and he took me up the Idwal Slabs in Wales. We’d go bouldering every year in Fontainebleau in France too.
I was born with terrible eyesight, and at the age of four I was diagnosed with the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa. Gradually, I lost what little sight I had. By the first year of my PhD I couldn’t read anything, and now I have only a little light perception in a narrow field of view — I know my hand is right in front of my face, but I can’t see it.
Advertisement
Knowing my sight wasn’t going to get any better forced me to grow up quickly. When I was a child climbing with my father, he would go up first and I’d follow on a top rope, so that if I fell nothing too serious would happen. But when I was 11 he taught me to lead.
At best, I’ve always had terrible vision, so I’ve never known what I was missing. When I climb on my own now, I work by feel, taking it hold by hold. I also climb a lot with friends, and my partner shouts if there’s a big crack or a hold.
In 2017 I went on a five-week expedition to the Stauning Alps in Greenland. They’re 200km from any form of civilisation — there are more polar bears than humans. You’re totally self-sufficient, carrying your kit in 100kg pulks (short, low-slung sledges). Daytime temperatures were minus 15C, dropping to minus 30C at night in the tents.
We skied a 100km loop. On our second glacier, the Bjornbo, none of the mountains on the left side had ever been climbed. We managed two: Sue’s Spire and Boughfell.
I was climbing with Molly, now my wife, and three of my mates. Molly was acting as my sight guide, and to do that you have to be a great climber. The five of us were the first people to make those ascents. It was about 1,100m. You’re putting your feet on powdery snow and hoping it will take your weight. Boughfell took more than 11 hours. I proposed to Molly at the top.
Advertisement
One of the most memorable climbs we’ve done was the Old Man of Hoy, a sea stack off the northeast coast of Scotland — which we filmed for Climbing Blind, a documentary for the BBC. You’re on a 137m-high pillar of rock that comes straight up out of the sea.
I don’t get vertigo, but on Hoy you hear waves crashing below and feel the wind rushing up. That climb was near my physical limit. The most difficult part was a slot cut into the tower called the Coffin. There’s a roof above you, and you have to climb out and around it. If you fell off you’d dangle like a yo-yo on a string with no way to get back down to the ground.
The toughest climb I’ve done is Forked Lightning Crack in Yorkshire. It’s a wall that overhangs, so there’s nowhere to rest — it’s just sustained, hard climbing. Sometimes you have a gibbering fit halfway up, thinking you’re going to die, so the hardest part was the psychology.
Despite climbing my whole life, I’d never heard of paraclimbing. But I was selected for Team GB, and I made it onto the podium in my first competition with people who had better sight than me, and I became national paraclimbing champion (B1) in 2018.
Covid makes planning more tricky, but I’d like to be the first blind climber to achieve a first ascent in Antarctica. I also want to climb Castleton Tower in Utah, where Tom Cruise was filmed for Mission: Impossible 2.
If I can show people that you don’t need to wrap up kids in cotton wool because they have a disability, that’s valuable. Being a blind climber seems improbable, but when you see it done it forces people to re-evaluate what’s possible.
Jesse Dufton is an ambassador for the outdoor clothing company Montane (montane.com). He spoke to Graeme Green
