For Winter – The National Geographic Society
This film brings about immense pride from within. I am proud of myself for saying yes, for getting on that plane, and for coming home safely. In between it was a true test of grit that I perhaps wasn’t totally prepared for. As the Location Sound Mixer for the project, I not only had to ascend the mountain with the required survival gear, but also document the journey and take all the necessary equipment along the way.
In May 2022, Alison Cristicello, director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab, led an expedition to the summit plateau of Mount Logan to drill what would become a record-breaking ice core sample. Ice cores help scientists get a readout of the climate history in a region in ways that are yet to even be discovered. Since the ice cores can last in perpetuity it’s pretty wild to think that some of the data don’t even have a method to gather the information yet.
But the information they do get is vast – everything from Co2 concentration, to whether there was a forest fire or volcano that year, and a multitude more lie within the layers of millenia-old ice. Mount Logan is unique in that it offers the world’s largest non-polar ice sheet. At over 5200m in elevation, we climbed (with camera gear and batteries) for nine days to reach the summit plateau, and area so vast that it could fit Mont Blanc, The Matterhorn, and Mount Kilimanjaro all on the plateau at once.
The scale of this area was nothing short of unbelievable. Being able to claim having been on the world’s largest massif is not one that many people get to make, and not one I took lightly.
A week before leaving I caught Covid. I almost bailed but said that if I were to test negative before leaving, I’d be okay to go. That was pretty naive. Although I did go, it was a struggle to get up there as well as to stay at such a high altitude for so long. But I was one of the lucky ones – not everyone made it out of there on their own volition. Several people were heli-evacuated and four people caught a severe stomach bug that slowed our process climbing.
The big deal with high altitude is that your brain is running on less oxygen. People don’t realize how much oxygen the brain needs to run efficiently. Well, it’s quite a lot and you sure notice when you don’t have too much of it. It’s essentially a slow descent into madness and the longer you’re up there, the more palpable that descent is.
It was an incredible experience and I’m glad to have been a part of it, but credit really goes to these glaciologists doing it all the time. We just had to document it which of course had its own challenges, but sure doesn’t take a doctorate to figure out what we need to do to succeed.
The trip had a ton of ups and downs, most of which were ups, and I met some great people and got paid to explore some of planet Earth’s most inhospitable yet immensely beautiful terrain. I can’t wait to see the finished project! The film premieres October 31st at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Keep an eye out here for more screening dates!
