Photographer and filmmaker John Dickey’s austere, haunting new film, The Park, takes you into the spindrift-covered, ice-bound heart of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park in winter to showcase its punishing mixed climbing. With its massive storm fronts, epic winds, and sporadic ice, the park is no roadside ice cragger’s paradise. Hanging in the most miserable of conditions to film, Dickey, who spent seven years on the project, gets up-close footage of RMNP masters Steve Su, Josh Wharton, Kevin Cooper, Tommy Caldwell, and the late Hayden Kennedy scratching up the dark rock and slithering snow, and interweaves interviews with area mixed-climbing pioneers Duncan Ferguson and Malcolm Daly. As Cooper says, “It’s bad out there. It wants to eat you alive. But it becomes a natural and positive influence.”
$6/9 (rent/buy), vimeo.com/ondemand/thepark