In Gagne’s article, she did take that much.
White out snow storm movie#
(Photo: Bleecker Street Films)īut the vast arsenal of items Bales packs-I mean, she took everything you can imagine, including extra pants, extra jacket and other layers, socks, mitts, bivy sack, space blanket, multitudes of heat packs, electrolyte cubes, a full Thermos of hot chocolate (the movie shows an array of 25 items including two Thermos flasks), ice cleats, whistle, poles, and of course a hat (in the movie she seems to have two hats) and headlamp-is basically true to life. “John,” the hypothermic stranger found huddled in the snow. And it drove me a little nuts that fake snowflakes kept accumulating, unmelting, on Watts’s mouth and teeth like popcorn, to signal hardship. The quibbles worth going into are that, with some experience in the hills, you will think that on a classic trail Bales wouldn’t have been struggling perilously up such steep, untouched scree, nor have grimly postholed on up the steeps in heavy snowfall when she was prepared all along, knowing the forecast, to retreat. No, I certainly didn’t remember Bales dropping into a 20-foot spruce trap. Some of them I thought were dopey but fairly harmless. (Photo: Peter Cole)Įr-wasn’t the story a little slim to stretch into a feature film? So, yup, various touches were added in the film, drawing it out and snazzing it up. Mount Washington showing the glacial cirque of Huntington Ravine, an ice-climbing center. This year the account came to the big screen, starring Naomi Watts and the story from Appalachia is in theaters now (Gagne gets a credit). I read that story, marveled, shared the link with family and friends was moved by her determination and by the mystery and humanity of the ending. First appearing under the title “Emotional Rescue,” the story gained traction the next year when reprinted by the New Hampshire Union Leader as “Footprints in the Snow.” The disbursement of the story began in 2018, when Ty Gagne, a New Hampshire climber (with experience rock climbing in Rumney and rock and ice in Franconia Notch and Crawford Notch), hiker, and freelancer on the side of his fulltime job, published a haunting 5,000-word account in Appalachia, this country’s longest-running mountaineering journal. The story began in October, 2010, with an hourslong rescue effected single-handedly by Pam Bales, who was an experienced hiker, a volunteer with Pemigewasset Valley Search and Rescue Team, when she encountered the stranger by following strange sneaker tracks in the snow. Here he is on top of Hitchcock Gully, Mount Willard, with Ron Reynolds, a teacher who taught him to climb and is now a mountain partner. Ty Gagne, left, wrote a story in Appalachia that went to the big screen. Many things both are and are not quite right in this account of a hiking rescue that in every way is a mountaineering tale. That’s because, much as we might wish it otherwise, Infinite Storm was filmed in the less costly Slovenia. Set at the junction of three storm tracks, the mountain at 6,288 feet has a fatality record like peaks three times its size ( recorded 161 deaths as of 2019).Įxcept the mountain on the screen seems craggier somehow than those of the White Mountains. And the cirques and creamy white ridges of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, a major climbing-hiking draw, beautiful until seething with the ferocity of its weather. A green-black mountain forest under the kind of filigree of snow that accentuates landscape features. The film is superbly cinematic: We see an aerial shot of a mountain highway, as sinuous as the river alongside it, and later that same aspect in a mirror image as someone drives the other way. My friend and I had arrived at the matinee intending on sushi afterward at Whole Foods down the street, and emerged hurrying to the soup bar. Infinite Storm is visceral its details, sounds and both sky-high and foot-sole-low film angles will make you cold.
On Mount Washington, even if it is filmed in Slovenia. She calls him that all the way down the peak, dragging and cajoling him in a blinding snowstorm. He won’t tell her his name, so she gives him one, “John”-and that is what Pam Bales calls a soaked, hypothermic, resistant stranger she finds huddled on the flanks of Mount Washington. Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+
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