America Wild. The name of a movie, a metaphor for the star!
.
Recent Huffington Post Film Story by Stephen Weir
 |
| Rachel Pohl - photo by George Socka |
“ I don’t work
out. I don’t diet. I don’t prepare before climbing,” confessed
23-year old mountain climber Rachel Pohl.
“ Why can I (climb up a near vertical rock face) do it? Thank my mother and father for their DNA!”
The modest
adventurer is starring in "America
Wild: National Parks Adventure".
She doesn’t simply climb mountains, she preternaturally finds
pinkie sized breaks in sheer rock faces. One foot on one side of a stone
crevice, the other on a different rock face altogether. And between her legs? The
great abyss.
 |
| publicity still - Devil's Tower |
America Wild, a new Imax movie narrated by Robert Redford, recently
had its Canadian premiere in Toronto. It
has begun showing at museums, galleries and Science Centres all across North
America. The 50-minute movie, funded in part by the American Government, is a homage
to the 100 year anniversary of the US Park Services in the US. The 70mm large format cameras follow Rachel
and two male companions as they have climbing and biking adventures in parks from
Alaska, to Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming to Utah’s Arches National
Park and onto the everglades in Florida.
It was at the Ontario Science Centre in
Toronto that I talked to the hat-on-backwards rock climber about the experience
of making death defying crack climbs in front of the uber-sized film cameras.
Crack-climbing,
according to the film, is described as being
a more “physically dramatic art form than rock face-climbing –climbers
use their body parts as levers, jamming hands and feet at jig-saw tilts into
the fissures until cliff, skin and bone meld together.”
 |
| Rachel Poehl |
It makes for
exciting visual action – but took Rachel Pohl to her physical edge. “That climb
would still have been hard if I could have felt my hands, but not only were my
legs maxed out my fingers were completely numb.”
“The big
difference between simply climbing rocks and doing it for the camera is the
amount of time it takes to climb for the cameras. The Imax camera for the ground shots is 300
lbs and close to 100 lbs for shots of me climbing. For example when I was crack
climbing Devil’s Tower we had to get
that camera 300 ft off the ground (to look down on me as I climbed).”
Devil’s Tower is
an igneous rock horn that sticks 900 feet up into the air in the badlands of
northeastern Wyoming. It looks like a
cross between the stem of a pumpkin and Richard Dreyfus’ mashed potato mountain
in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which in fact showed Devil’s Tower as a
UFO magnet!)
There are about
400 parks in the United States, protecting a staggering diversity of
landscapes, creatures and out door adventures.
This movie shows the best of the best.
 |
| Publicity Still - Three Penguins |
“In the making
of this film, we visited more than 30 national parks, looking for things we’d
never seen before and images that blew us away. Physically challenging? Of
course.“ said Rachel “There
were days where it was really cold. We had snow. We had rain. We had all sorts
of adventures not only climbing at that temperature but also we needed the
patience to wait hours and hours and hours to wait for the light to be just
right for the shots to manifest!”
The movie is
being heavily marketed across North America. One of the most imposing and
frightening images being used is the young climber and her buds on top of Arches National Park’s Three Penguins, a
trio of sculpture-like 130-foot towers that sit atop a 100-foot pedestal. They
stand unwavering atop of the cocktail-table-sized summit with jaw-dropping,
360-degree vistas of the entire park at their boots.
“I think the whole
experience of climbing in US Parks is unique because of the variety of rocks
and the variety of elevation,” she continued. “I went from climbing Three
Penguin’s sandstone cracks in southern Utah to driving ½ a day away and then
ski mountaineering in California. That is what makes it so special. I didn’t
have to cross (international) borders to go from one type of climbing to a completely
different experience.”
“This is my first
film and through this process I have somehow become comfortable with public
speaking– like here with you! I also became used to filming so that process of
rock climbing with the camera watching and thinking about how millions of
people were going to see that shot was very intimidating but at the same time
it allowed me to rise to the occasion and perform better than I thought I
could.”
Comments