Mountain climbing asks a lot of its devotees. One should ideally be in top physical condition, with all senses at peak performance, and possessed of a quality that, if it's not best described as fearlessness, is at least a willingness to ignore the natural instinct not to dangle precariously above a drop of several thousand feet.
But the climbers of High Ground, the latest film from documentarian Michael Brown, are missing many of these things. Some have been robbed of senses or mental faculties. Others have lost entire limbs. A few have been pushed to the point where the anxiety of everyday life is sometimes too much to bear — let alone the anxiety that might attend scaling a mountain. Each of these climbers has a unique wound, but what they all have in common is that they picked up these injuries as veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brown is a veteran of mountaineering films that focus on the character of climbers more than just the grandeur of the sport, and High Ground fits that mold. The director's 2003 effort, Farther Than the Eye Can See, was about Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber to scale Mount Everest. In High Ground, Weihenmayer returns as a guide rather than a subject, part of the team assisting the 11 veterans, plus the mother of a soldier killed in the line of duty, up Everest's neighbor, the 20,000-foot peak of Lobuche East.
The narrative here is less about the climb itself, though it serves as the documentary's obvious climactic sequence; the emphasis more on the varying circumstances that brought each soldier into the group. The result is a film that has less of the hallmarks of a typical climbing picture — shot after shot of gorgeous views, interspersed with the grueling drama of the climb — and more a war documentary, with a great deal of footage brought back from the war by the soldiers themselves. Brown uses this material to supplement interviews with each of the soldiers, conducted during their extensive training for the climb, as well as on the journey to the base of Lobuche.
Enlarge Steve Baskis
Spc. Steve Baskis goes on patrol in Iraq.