Last night, The Sharp End premiered at the launch of the 3rd Annual REEL ROCK Film Tour at the Boulder Theater. Woohoo!

All 1,000 tickets sold out so fast we added a second night. The crowd was huge and rowdy and ready for action. And that’s what they got: three hours of cutting edge films, gear give-aways, and straight up partying. The rain-spewing Gore-Tex/Windstopper mobile test chamber was out front, a burly pull-up contest ensued, free shwag rained down from the stage, the beer flowed and the lights went down for the show.

The program began with the unveiling of the REEL ROCK contest winners. To our delight, we had an awesome collection of entries and winners in this first year of the contest (the response to the Judges Choice Award winner “Chalk It Up” was particularly raucus).

Then came a hit list of shorts from some of the hottest films of the year: ‘The Aerialist’ by local Brad Lynch and visionary Dean Potter; On Sight, great new film out of the UK by Alastair Lee, Grand Canyon Walls by Pete and Josh, and Big Up’s wild South Africa bouldering.

The films were broken up by a typically mayhem-filled gear giveway with Timmy O’Neill going dangerously extemporaneous on the mike.

Then came the feature film: ‘The Sharp End’, which we were working on until midnight before the big premiere, because Dean Potter flew in from The Eiger at the last minute to hand-deliver tape of a mind-blowing BASE free solo fall. And it all came off great. We are super thankful to all the amazing climbers and jumpers who made this film possible, to the gret support of our sponsors, and to a thousand other people who helped us long the way. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to crash out for about a week.

The climbing world has been waiting for somebody to try this. For Dean Potter, it was the next step in his progression beyond the known limits of climbing.

This week, Dean successfully free soloed the route Deep Blue Sea on the north face of The Eiger. It’s 600 feet of gently overhanging limestone with a 5.12+ crux, which posed a huge risk of falling. To overcome the risk element, Potter employed his old safety: super-light B.A.S.E. rig, which, if he fell, and stuck the right position, would save him from death.

We captured it all with cameraman Jim Hurst for our imminent release, THE SHARP END.

The Eiger FreeBASE will also be featured in our next segment for NBC’s JEEP World of Adventure Sports, airing October 11.

The route takes the blue streak up the most prominent wall

THE SHARP END is the latest Sender Films production. It’s the feature presentation on the REEL ROCK Tour ‘08. We thinks its our best one yet.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Click here to pre-order the DVD.

We’ve got another offering on the New York Times website. This time its a video about the crazy sport of tower jumping in the Czech Republic.
Check it out here.

We arrived in Chamonix to find Jonny Copp and Micah Dash two-thirds of the way up an attempted new route on the Dru getting thrashed by a storm. Seems like every place we go with these guys there is heavy weather, epic suffering and gallows humor (see the previous post, “Shut Down.”) Needless to say, it is hard to film. But that’s the deal with fast and light, first ascent, on-sight alpine climbing, which Jonny and Micah have refined to a cutting edge and slightly demented art form.

The not-so-petit Dru in storm (photo: Jonny Copp)

In climbed-out Chamonix, where new routes are hard to come by, a window of opportunity opened up when the west face of the Petit Dru collapsed twice over the last eight years (see the massive white patch in the photo), erasing the existing routes and leaving a brand new face for two enterprising American climbers like Jonny and Micah.

Micah and Jonny’s storm bivy (photo: Jonny Copp)

They were forced to descend in the storm, nearly got crushed by a collapsing bergshrund, and after a couple days partying in Cham, they are planning to go back up there. Meanwhile we will be shooting some cool footage on the Aguilles, and of course, joining in on the fete.

Jonny and Micah rehydrating

Nick and Izabela survive a massive avalanche.

We are here in Arco, Italy, at the foot of the 4,000 foot Monte Brento, where Chris McNamara has been doing some sick wingsuit BASE jumping and terrain flying for the upcoming film, “THE SHARP END”. Trailing him on camera is the rock steady Damien Dykman, and so far we are getting some great footage despite the near constant rain. At every lull in the storms, these two badasses jump and skim the cliffs and shoot footage that rivals the Wachowski brothers, only this is better than the Matrix, because it is real. Check out a raw video from Chris’ chest cam here.

Cedar and Alex hanging out in the Elbsandstein

We just got done with three weeks shooting for THE SHARP END on the uber-traditional sandstone spires of Eastern Europe. The team included a bevy of bold and rad climbers: Cedar Wright, Heidi Wirtz, Renan Ozturk, Vera Schulte Pelkum, Alex Honnold, Matt Segal and Topher Donahue. But even these guys were pretty gripped by the local ethics: you can’t use chalk, you can’t use metal gear like cams or nuts, and all you have for protection are knotted chords (which seem like they wouldn’t hold a falling caterpillar) and an occasional rusty old ring bolt every 40 feet or so.

Bernd Arnold barefoot solo

We spent a week following the legendary Bernd Arnold (who still pulls down hard and barefoot solos 5.10 at age 62) around his home crag of the Elsandstein in East Germany, and another 10 days in the Czech Republic, where we got scared out of our minds on death routes during the day and recounted the heroics over endless glasses of pilsner in the pub at night.

Alex Honnold gives the knots a try

The Czech town of Adrspach is a classic climber community. Oldsters and young alike take part in a tradition that dates back a hundred years. But don’t go it alone out here. We highly recommend local guide Tomas Pycha, who is a great guy and the perfect inside man in this labyrinth of rock: www.tomadventure.org

Renan captures the scene. Check out his stuff here. Also check out Nando’s field videos of our trip here.

Pete filming Heidi on a classic Czech crack

Matt runs it out on the towers

Beer at 10 in the morning before a long day of tower jumping. Tomas, on the right, was our illustrious guide. Peter, on the left, is a ballsy tower jumper who broke his foot later that day. But Cedar — who stuck some big jumps — was not much better off (see below).

We spent a week in Yosemite with Ammon McNeely, the notorious “El Cap Pirate,” thus named because of his out law nature and his habit of he raping and pillaging the hardest, scariest lines on the Big Stone. Ammon was true to form, hooking and beaking on tenuous edges, taking massive gear-ripping falls, and laughing it off. He even took a deliberate 70 footer WHILE drinking a King Cobra. The dude is frickin tough. And he will one of the crazies featured in our upcoming film, THE SHARP END. Stay Tuned.

Sometimes, you just have to go for it. So when Jonny Copp and Steve Hsu called us from Calgary to report that they were gunning for a winter-conditions ascent of the dreadfully snow-caked North Face of Mount Alberta, we cobbled together a last-minute Sender Team to document the duo’s hairy mixed climb. (We are currently working on a piece with Jonny for our upcoming release, THE SHARP END).

Alas, Canadian weather laid waste to the hopes of any good shooting or summit bids. After a full day of climbing fractured limestone corners with thin protection and dodging spindrift avalanches, Jonny and Steve cut a bivy ledge into a snow arete two-thirds of the way up the face, hoping for a break in the storm. When the storm persisted into morning, they descended.

But the sudden spring storms left an opening for a little fun in the snow for new Sender team member Wade Johnson, and aerial cinematographer John Mans. Stranded in the base camp hut, Wade, Jonny and Steve were left with little option to sit around the well-furnished hut, listen to the serenade of collapsing seracs on the peaks around them, and carve turns in the chest deep sugar snow. Poor guys.

(photo credit: Steph Davis)

When we heard Dean Potter was out in Utah trying to do the first “base line,” we didn’t know what it was, but we wanted to shoot it. Whatever Dean is up to, it tends to be wild. And this would be no exception.

The B.A.S.E. line, it turns out, is the first attempt to walk a very long slackline – 180 feet in this case, the longest Potter has ever walked – with no safety leash, and only a B.A.S.E. rig to protect from a 400-foot splatter into the talus below.

We pitched The New York Times on this act of visionary climber extremism, and the paper sent a curious reporter up to the rim of Hell Roarin’ Canyon outside Moab, where Dean, accompanied by wife Steph Davis and filmmakers Brad Lynch and Jim Hurst, had rigged the airy one inch- spectra and was attempting to bust out the B.A.S.E. line. Check out The Times website for our video and the accompanying article in the newspaper of record.

Here is the video. Its titled “A Walk in the Clouds.”

Here is the article

Dean Bailing
(Photo credit: Steph Davis)