The image lingers. Pender Harbour film maker and photographer Dianne Whelan, while camping on Mount Everest last May, remembers the hand - still covered with hair and skin - emerging through the ice of the receding glacier. While clambering on the rocky slopes at 5,700 metres on the world's highest mountain, Whelan came upon the disembodied hand and recognized it as one of the more ghastly effects of global warming. As the ice recedes, it reveals the frozen bodies of the many who have lost their lives. The hand might belong to a climber from any country, as many have attempted this peak, or it could have been that of a native Sherpa who had made a viable business out of guiding climbers to the summit.
Confronting death on Everest fascinated the film maker and drew her to the mountain's base camp. "It's a compelling place to be," she said. "It's the world's highest mountain and a free-for-all as to who goes up it."
The environment was harsh and ugly, barren of living things. She struggled with exhaustion, a 10-day headache, high altitude illness and a fast-paced resting heartbeat.
She also had to deflect threats of censorship by a Nepalese government-assigned bureaucrat who accompanied her and who was concerned with Everest's image to the world. She had to trust the others at base camp, climbers and Sherpas alike, even though a political rebellion was taking place in the country, and trust in herself when emotionally stressed. She also needed to make a film and to find several characters on the mountain who could be entrusted to take hand-held cameras to the summit.
"It was unique," she said.
She chose to live there for 40 days based on an Arab proverb: in order to know people, you must spend 40 days with them. By about day 30, true colours are revealed, reports Whelan. Fear and anger emerge.
"The film is a portrait of the human soul that intrigued me - to see who we are - to be in a crisis moment with another climber. We all want to believe we are the person who would save another, but I pass no judgments," she said.
After 40 days living in a tent perched on the rocky slopes without Internet contact, Whelan trekked down Everest and flew home to Pender Harbour to find that, in her absence, she had been nominated for three Leo Awards, an honour that acknowledges the best in B.C.'s television and film production, for her previous documentary, This Land. Still physically drained from her exertions, she nonetheless attended the Vancouver ceremonies and was awarded best overall sound and best short documentary program.
The film, produced in co-operation with the National Film Board, recounts Whelan's adventures in March 2007 when she and seven men set out to cover more than 2,000 km of the harshest terrain on the planet, Canada's north. They confronted blizzards, labyrinths of crushed sea ice and near-impassable glaciers, with temperatures hovering around -50C, to raise a flag on the northernmost tip of Canada, scarcely 412 km from the North Pole. Whelan was the first woman to accomplish the trip and possibly the first to undertake it without proper training.
Why flirt with danger?
"I consider myself an adventurer," she smiles, and at age 45, she shows no signs of slowing down.
Stories about her trips are available in multi-media: the documentary This Land was shown at a local Film Society screening, a book published by Caitlin Press, This Vanishing Land, is full of lively details, and now the NFB has produced an audio version available at http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/thisland.
Over the next year, Whelan will be working on the 80 hours of Everest footage in her Garden Bay studio, and viewers will likely see episodes from it during two proposed one-hour television specials.
Whelan loves film and considers it the most powerful artistic media of our times. Although she had been a photographer and film maker for many years, she credits a course she took in 2006/07 at Capilano University in their documentary and small unit production program as giving her solid grounding in shooting with high definition, high end cameras.
"It's given me a competitive edge, because now most film makers are shooting in HD. It allows for smaller crews and a more intimate feel," she said.
A few months ago, Capilano awarded her an alumni prize for her achievements. Typically, she was not on the Coast to receive it - she was on her way to Everest.
