Full disclosure, this short film is more about production and filming than it is about the first descent of Pakistan’s Great Trango Tower. That amazing accomplishment came in 2024 when Chantel Astorga, Christina Lustenberger, and Jim Morrison skied a successful line down the 6,000-meter granite spire’s west face.
Just a year before, Lustenberger and Morrison had attempted the same world-first with Nick McNutt, but were forced to turn around just 500 meters from the summit. That only added to the lore of the trio’s first descent in 2024, which has been labeled one of the sport’s greatest accomplishments.
With that backstory in mind, now consider the desire to document such a descent. This isn’t an everyday line or a hike worthy of a simple weekly vlog. It pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in ski mountaineering, but providing high-quality, cinematic documentation of a historic event like this wasn’t as simple as one might think.
So, for as grand of an accomplishment as the first descent was, so was the creativity and technical know-how that captured it all on film. Trango isn’t the kind of environment your everyday film director can throw money at for a couple of helicopter flyovers. It turns out documenting the efforts of Astorga, Lustenberger, and Morrison wouldn’t have been possible without the drone and camera technology available to filmmakers Erich Roepke and Leo Hoorn.
Aspiring image makers will appreciate this behind-the-scenes look at what it took to document a historic accomplishment in ski mountaineering.
