FREE: Climb Against the Odds [VHS] (1999)

The listing, Climb Against the Odds [VHS] (1999) has ended.

Like new from private collection.

In June 1998, 11 women embarked on a treacherous course up Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America. They would brave weather and climbing conditions that brought about an unprecedented number of accidents and fatalities. "It's the nature of the mountain," a guide remarks in Climb Against the Odds, a gripping documentary that chronicles the expedition. "Sometimes you win, sometimes it wins." But this was, as narrator Olympia Dukakis notes, "not just a climb." Five of the women had been diagnosed with breast cancer. All were embarking on this expedition to raise awareness and money for research (one remarks that her mother asked her if there wasn't something else she could do "like hand out brochures"). As climber Marcy Ely Wilson says, "McKinley's a walk in the park. Cancer is the big mountain."
To say that Climb Against the Odds, a film-festival award winner, is a testament to the indomitable human spirit is only the tip of the iceberg, or in this case, the tip of McKinley's 20,320-foot summit. With a two-month window of opportunity to climb McKinley, the three-week climb became a race against time, which along with the provisions, was rapidly running out, due to a storm that delayed the party for eight days. The peril they faced is vividly conveyed in footage of helicopter rescues of other climbers on the mountain. Climb Against the Odds is a vital and inspiring film, and speaks to anyone facing seemingly insurmountable challenges. The participants in this extraordinary trek are proof that, in the words of one climber, a breast cancer diagnosis "is not necessarily a death sentence. Life will go on." --Donald Liebenson