Notes from Telluride MountainFilm Festival

There's snow in the mountains — on the high glaciated valleys, the steep black faces etched with white couloirs — and dandelions in the meadows. The lush canyon floor shimmering gold and willow. Gauzy bands of leafing aspen on the hills before grey loping ridges, massive peaks adrift in the sky. It's easy to feel you're flying in this country. The thin air, the dreaminess. Telluride is the most picturesque mountain town in the American West, hands down. A Victorian mining town set within the Alpine grandeur of the San Juan Mountains. A great community of artists, activists, not to mention mountaineers and outdoors men and women of all stripes. And not a bad place for a documentary film festival either.

MountainFilm. Alright, maybe the analogy is as hippy as the longhairs who took over this town in the Sixties and Seventies, but attending MountainFilm is a bit like getting a deep massage — a spiritual massage, if you will. You know it's good by the sore spots worked over, the aches as well as the pleasure experienced. A mix of apprehension and relief, doubt and elation, sorrow and hope for our troubled race causes you to seek an equilibrium, a balanced understanding of world issues. A good movie, any good story, can cause you to root against your established views.

The documentary Pandora's Promise had just that affect: causing my views to swivel. While I've been open to the possibilities of nuclear power, I've generally been skeptical of it. Yet Robert Stone's film walks us through a sober examination of the history of nuclear power, the facts of infamous disasters like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima, and parallels that story with the transformation of views of several leading environmentalists who now believe that the only way to arrest greenhouse gas emissions and still provide power to the globe is through carbon-neutral, safe, third and fourth generation nuclear reactors. The movie both upended my preconceptions and gave me something I don't often feel when considering environmental issues: optimism. It's not the end of the discussion, but an urgent call for us to get talking fast.

The documentary Uranium Drive-In, directed by Suzan Beraza, had me hoping that the stinking uranium mine would finally be approved, just to get the locals' economic suffering over with. Watch that movie and you weirdly put aside your environmental worries for southwest Colorado as you sympathize with the poor families, the desperate community, the mine workers starving for a paycheck. Forgetting the geologic, you see things through the short lens of their lives. And short as life may be, human suffering is bottomless.

The best movie of the festival, if you ask someone who saw only six of them, was Gasland 2. It was more intense than Gasland, more dire, more evil grand scheme for world domination. While in the first documentary Josh Fox left some room for the possibility to do this nasty thing, fracking, right, the sequel takes a dark turn. The nations' leading expert on concrete casing claims that ten percent of all hydraulically fractured wells will fail upon installation, and when you track the data out to thirty years, that percentage climbs to fifty percent. The oil industry, eyeing massive shale deposits around the globe, is greenwashing themselves with “clean, natural gas.” Meanwhile the EPA, in an about face, is withholding test well data from landowners and communities who have benzene and methane bubbling through their aquifers. You know it's bad when not just poor folks but even rich ones with ten million dollar homes are getting nowhere in their lawsuits against the energy companies. You know it's bad when the mayor of Dish, Texas not only abandons his home but the Republican party because his drinking water is now stinking water.

We met Anna's friend, the filmmaker Ben Knight, at his office in town: a hermit's den in the attic of a narrow Victorian, snowy peaks leaning into the window. He was hard at work editing DamNation, a Patagonia-funded documentary which he's been filming and editing for the last couple of years. We sat on the floor of the tiny room and caught up: life, art, the migratory patterns of mutual friends from Chicago to Colorado, Idaho to San Francisco. Ben has a subtle, attentive character. You can imagine him patiently behind the camera, attune, watchful as a fisherman for any movement on the line. He showed us a cut from the movie: a beautiful dense six minutes unfurling the history of dam building in the States, from the first reclamation projects of the 1800's to the latest dam removed in Puget Sound. “That six minutes of film took four months of work — shooting, researching, and editing,” he informs us. Four months to create six minutes! It was affirming to know that we writers and painters aren't alone in our solitary struggles with our medium. Dedication, diligence, doubt, moments of delight — all for the dream that drives us, all to produce a bit of beauty in the world. And in Ben's case, for the world, and its betterment. We left him to his work, alone in his perch, watching through the telescope of editing at the details of an epic landscape, the valleys and rivers of a great and important film.

Needing some raw physicality after all that movie going, I went to play soccer. If you're in the mood for some sadistic cardiovascular punishment, try pickup futbol at 9,000 feet on the full pitch at Town Park, with a ball that plays fast and skipping in the thin air, with guys from Peru and Argentina and Mexico who've acclimated to the high altitude. We divided teams, shook hands, kicked off. A quick-footed game full of good passing and deep runs. The first twenty minutes I was breathing so hard I thought my lungs would shred. A diaphragm cramp had me doubled over on the sideline for a spell of recovery. The next hour I came around, but still you had to be strategic about your sprints. There's only so much oxygen up there to go around. The beautiful game, made more exquisite by the gleaming stadium of peaks surrounding the pitch; a game played so high in the sky it makes Azteca Stadium seem like it's at sea level.

Days after the festival, we hiked the Jud Wiebe trail right out of town. After the foot bridge over a crashing creek, a steep and steady climb up the canyon side. Red rocks and leafing aspen, a slate sky behind electric green trees. After ten minutes Ada was tuckered out. “Daddy, uppy,” she begged, slumping on the trail, immovable as a ruined mule. No amount of prodding or cajoling – or the sight of her mother and grandmother Claudia disappearing around the next bend – could influence her. Soon I was the mule, loaded with a suddenly cheery princess on my shoulders, holding her by the ankles as she sang out the swollen letters carved into aspen trunks. The trail ran west a half mile, then switch-backed grandly onto a terrace of white sandstone. Wild iris, some kind of purple-petaled daisy in bloom. We sat on an overlook, drank water and ate nuts, snapped some pictures, held Ada back from jumping off the ledge into the clouds. High ridge lines saddled with snow; steep mountain faces lined with couloirs. A strange contentment to be sitting there with family, not tempted by the peaks. I still hear their call, but for now, for once, the summits don't taunt me as they once did. These days I've got other mountains on my shoulders.