Sometimes a man has to do something dangerous for no reason.It’s like what George Herbert Leigh Mallory, British mountaineer and missing person (last known sighting was while ascending Everest in 1924) said when asked why climb a mountain. “Because it’s there.” So cryptic. So manly.
And if Mallory is considered a paragon of manliness, consider this: he wasn’t even American. I’m not even sure if he had ever experienced a Chicago-style blizzard. You know the kind I’m talking about, when the snow makes the streets so unnavigable that the city has to create great municipally funded synthetic mountains so high you cant even see the Whole Foods on the other side. These mountains plead with us. They beg us and shout at us and seduce us and guilt us into accepting their challenge. “I’m here,” they say, “climb me and touch the face of God.”
And who picks up the gauntlet? Exactly the people you first think of when thinking of mountains and bullfights and the Spanish Civil War and other manly things: the good people of Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based media and design company. Show them a city-created snow pile, and they’ll pick two of their most rough and tumble employees to climb it. And on top of that they’ll make a thrilling, heart-stopping, roller coaster ride of a documentary about it. And I present to you “Above The Sun”. Watch it. Because it’s there.
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