We have spent three evenings this week attending the Banff Mountain Film Festival which has been showing here in Nelson. The following information is taken from the festival magazine for you: 'just days after the Banff Film Festival finishes in the Canadian Rockies, the World Tour begins with approximately 480 screenings around the world. Between November 2007 and October 2008 over 200,000 mountain film enthusiasts in 32 countries will share the heart stopping action and mountains of inspiration' Apparently this year there were 296 films submitted to the competition, of which 55 were selected to be shown and of those 30 of the best go on the World Tour. Over the three evenings we saw some stunning films ranging from just 7 minutes through to hour long documentaries from around the world. The adventures included skiing, snow-kiting, mountain-biking, mountain-uni-cycling, canoeing, deep water solo climbing, mountaineering and rock climbing.The scariest film was of a female base jumper - this is where you throw yourself off a very high mountain then open a parachute just before you meet the ground - very scary stuff - she was the top of her sport and then had an accident which she was lucky to survive. She fractured her leg in 33 places and was going through surgery to be able to walk again. It was very interesting to hear her psychology behind jumping and also her thoughts on the accident.
There was also a great film of a young lady biologist who was interested in observing a group of wolves who had never had any contact with humans - her film footage of the wolves was spectacular.
Needless to say we were extremely surprised and very pleased to see that there was a climbing film called 'Committed To Grit' which was part of a film based in The Peak District on climbing at Burbage and Stanage Edge. It was really nice to see the Peak District countryside again! It was also impressive to see one young chap climbing a new route called 'The Promise' which is the hardest route in England and is graded E10.
The whole Festival was an excellent opportunity to see some adventure sports, we think that there will be some showings in England too, so if you get chance we would certainly recommend attending. We think we shall both be looking for an opportunity to try some instruction in ice-climbing at some point very soon!
Well we are currently acclimatizing to the colder weather - it has been around -3 degrees today and it looks like we are expecting more snow over the next couple of days.
As we are awaiting our first big dump of snow we have posted for you this week a picture from the bridge at the end of Banff Avenue looking towards the mountains that we took when we were over in Banff in March this year.
That's about all for this week, next week we shall hopefully be able to post more snow pictures and in a couple of weeks we shall be off to the ski hill and will certainly share some pictures with you.
Enjoy your week and we look forward to hearing your news.
Love Rachael, Shaun, Harley and Phantom
xx
