You can tell the end of Squamish’s climbing season is right around the corner when the Reel Rock Film Tour comes to town.
“It always happens in fall,” said Ivan Hughes, who has organized the tour for the past nine years. “Usually it coincides with the end of the climbing season, so it is always a kind of good send-off to the season. Hopefully the tour motivates people to keep climbing.”
Normally, Reel Rock features three or four short films about climbing, but this year things will be a bit different, Hughes said.
“This year, instead of several shorts, we are screening one feature-length film called Valley Uprising from Sender Films,” he said. “The film is a history of rock climbing in California’s Yosemite Valley. I’m sure they could have just made another short about it, but it is really a bigger story that needed longer to tell the whole story of the adventures and various interesting characters. The magnitude of the story just needed more time.”
Hughes, who is an avid climber and documentary filmmaker himself, said one particularly fascinating and entertaining incident covered in Valley Uprising concerned a now-legendary story of a plane crashing in Yosemite near a lake.
“According to the story, a plane crashed and some climbers learned of the incident and made their way to the site,” said Hughes. “Apparently they found the crashed plane was just full of bags of pot… and the story says they, um, then made a lot of money.”
Those larger-than-life characters carved out an “extreme bohemian” lifestyle in the valley, living on red wine and boiled potatoes, according to press about the film, clashing with park authorities and pioneering bold climbing routes while passing the torch to three successive generations of limbers.
“The film also does these amazing things with old photos,” said Hughes. “They bring these old photos to life by rendering the 2D images into 3D. It’s really a fascinating movie for both climbers and non-climbers.”
The 9th annual Reel Rock Film Tour hits the Howe Sound Inn and Brew Pub on Tuesday, Sept. 30 at 8 p.m. (film starts at 9 p.m.) Tickets are $18 and available in advance at www.whattheheck.ca.
