The Moonflower

Friday evening, Bec and myself along with a few other friends from Lancaster took the train up to Kendal to catch the premier of The Moonflower new film from Posing Productions. Jon Bracey and Matt Helliker were there, along with Alastair Lee who introduced the film. It chronicles there ascent of a new route on the North Buttress of Mt. Hunter in the Alaska Range. which they named the Cartwright Connection in honour of Jules Cartwright, a British Mountain Guide who tragically died while guiding the Piz Badile a few years ago.You can see the trailer below:

Cartwright originally envisaged the line as a companion to his route The Knowledge ED4 on the same buttress, which he climbed with Ian Parnell in 2000, although feeling that the climbing on this new line may be of a more sustained nature. In may of this year Jon Bracey and Matt Helliker set out to complete this line, which they did.

The Cartwright Connection, Alaskan
 Grade 6: 5.8 A2 AI6 M6, 2000m 

I won't ruin much of the story now as I think its best saved for when you watch the film, which I think it great. The lack of footage of a lot of the actual climbing, and the quality of the camera work done by the climbers could be criticised but I think this gives a real raw look at what climbing a bit alpine route it like. I think Alastair Lee might of been a little short on footage to work with as I'm pretty sure I saw some of winter climbing on the Ben at one point that he'd subtly woven in! On the other hand, some of the aerial footage and time-lapse photography that accompany that taken by the climbers is very impressive.


Bracey and Helliker climbed the route in a clean but slow style, carrying a portaledge and plenty of food. It will be interesting to see however in the coming future if this route has the potential to be climbed fast and light in a single push style as some of the route on Hunter, and many of the other big mixed test pieces in the Alaska range already have.


So, an excellent achievement for the alpinisits and a great film. I highly recccomend buying the DVD or downloading it from posing productions here. It's certainly solidified by ambition for a trip to Alaska.

Kendal Mountain Film Festival

Its the annual Kendal Mountain Film Festival this weekend. So far I've booked to see the world premiere of 'The Pinnacle' which documents Dave Macleod and Andy Turner repeating the Smith - Marshall famous week climbing on the Ben last winter, which should inspire me a bit for our CIC weekend in March! I've also got tickets to the Snowsports evening on the Friday, theres a few ski films being shown, and Glen Plake is there so that should be pretty cool as he is THE guy from Blizzard of Aaahhhs.

The trailer for the event as a whole is below:

Calgary Mountain Film Festival

After a weekend of climbing and skiing last weekend and a fairly hectic penultimate week of term this week of handing in assignments and wrapping other things off I decided to take today off from anything too adventurous and chill out, lying in to well past lunch. Well thats my excuse for not having a partner to go climbing with! Anyhow heading out to Nakiska with Ian and some friends of his tomorrow to rip it up, more new territory to explore.

To the meat of this post though - an e-mail dropped in to my inbox a few weeks ago from Spirit West, one of the premier outdoor retails in the city which has developed a bit of a community around it (for you Brits think Needlesports or old Rock n' Run and you won't be far off) advertising the Calgary Mountain Film Festival; which is part of the bigger event known as the city's 'Outdoor Festival'. I hadn't heard of it before, which isn't surprising considering this is only the second year its run and with perhaps, the most famous mountain film festival in the world preceding it by a few months in Banff just an hour away. Anyhow I did some reading and it looks like they've got a really good line up of films and of speaks, I'm particularly keen to see Will Gadd talk about his ascent of Hunlen over in BC and see the film. There are 4 separate evenings for the films, but the best value seems to be to buy a weeks pass of $39. I've got finals that week but I'm going to try and make as many of the films as possible as its only a few stations away on the C-train in Kensington. So if your in the city next week (April 19-25th) make sure to get down, its looks good. To whet your appetite theres a trailer for the Banff Mountain Film Festival below, which included many of the films that will be being screened next week.