Much more than just watching some films, this event is a chance to meet other local climbers. We will have another raffle this year; we already have a voucher for a free avalanche level 1 course from SMC, two day passes to The Arc climbing gym, and we're working on more! Like last year, we will have booths from local SAR units. This year, we're hoping to fill Ramo Auditorium to capacity (380 people). Bring your friends!
More information at our website: http://alpine.caltech.edu/Reel_Rock. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. The show starts at 7:30 PM and the location is Ramo Auditorium on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. You can find directions and ticket info on the website. You can buy tickets on the phone via 626-395-4652.
This is in addition to the Banff FIlm Festival that we screen every March. We will screen this in March 2012, but this year it will be in the humongous and elegant Beckman Auditorium (1000 person capacity). More info on Banff: http://alpine.caltech.edu/Banff
If you want to stay informed of all our big events, please "like" us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CaltechAlpineClub
Here are film descriptions from the Reel Rock website:
- Origins: Obe and Ashima: There's a nine year old girl from New York City taking the bouldering world by storm, and her name is Ashima Shiraishi. Under the tutelage of her passionate coach, Obe Carrion, this tiny master is crushing competitions and raising the bar for climbing's youth. Obe brings her to bouldering's proving ground, Hueco Tanks, TX, where he had his own big breakthrough 13 years earlier, and Ashima rips the place apart.
- Race for The Nose: Welcome to the wildest competition known to man -- the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan. For 50 years, the best climbers in the world have been one-upping each other on this massive granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, racing up 3,000 feet of vertical rock in under three hours, and risking life and limb to shave mere seconds off the record time. We follow Dean Potter and Sean Leary on their attempt to break this legendary record on the classic route that has been the scene of epic rivalries, brutal accidents, and remains to this day a hotly contested prize.
- Sketchy Andy: American climbing dirtbag Andy Lewis is taking the discipline of slacklining into the future as he solos the worlds longest high-lines and masters the hardest aerial tricks, all the while pushing his equipment to the limit. As Andy goes higher, harder and faster with climbing, slack and BASE, we all have to wonder how far he can go before it’s one step over the line.
- Ice Revolution: At British Columbia's spectacular Helmcken Falls, a revolution is taking place, led by Canadian maniac Will Gadd. After 30+ years of ice climbing, Gadd has finally realized his dream of climbing radically overhanging, heinously difficult ice. Gadd and Tim Emmett dodge exploding 30 foot icicle bombs and send the hardest pure ice climb in the world, but they swear it's just the first step in a whole new direction for the sport.
- Project Dawn Wall: Tommy Caldwell is the master of big wall free climbing. He's devoted the last decade of his life to opening free routes on Yosemite's El Capitan, rewriting climbing history in the process. Now he's three seasons deep into his ultimate project - the seemingly impossible Dawn Wall. Joined by bouldering specialist Kevin Jorgeson, Tommy makes his first big ground-up push, pulling pitch after pitch of 5.14 first ascents before an epic storm shuts the team down until next year…
- Cold: Over the past 26 years, 16 expeditions have tried and failed to climb one of Pakistan's 8,000 meter peaks in winter. In February 2011, Simone Moro, Denis Urubko, and Corey Richards became the first to achieve this alpine dream by summiting Gasherbrum II, surviving -50 degree temperatures and a massive avalanche. Richards captured both the glory and the pain of their adventure in this raw and moving, first-person look at modern super-alpinism.
