In the high-stakes game of big-wall climbing, the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru may be the ultimate prize. Sitting at the headwaters of the sacred Ganges River in Northern India, the Shark’s Fin has seen more failed attempts by elite climbing teams over the past 30 years than any other ascent in the Himalayas.

The layout of the 21,000-foot mountain’s perversely stacked obstacles makes it both a nightmare and an irresistible calling for some of the world’s toughest climbers. Hauling over 200 pounds of gear up 4,000-feet of technical, snowy, mixed ice and rock climbing is actually the simple part of this endeavor. After crossing that gauntlet you reach the Shark’s Fin itself: 1,500 feet of smooth, nearly featureless granite. There are few pre-existing fissures, cracks or footwalls. It is simply a straight sheet of overhanging rock.

To undertake Meru, says Jon Krakauer, the bestselling author of Into Thin Air, “You can’t just be a good ice climber. You can’t just be good at altitude. You can’t just be a good rock climber. It’s defeated so many good climbers and maybe will defeat everybody for all time. Meru isn’t Everest. On Everest you can hire Sherpas to take most of the risks. This is a whole different kind of climbing.”

In October 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk arrived in India to tackle Meru. What was meant to be a seven-day trip with the equivalent amount of food became a 20-day odyssey in sub-zero temperatures, thanks to the setback of a massive storm that showered the mountain with at least 10 feet of snow. Like everyone before them, their journey was not a successful one. But they had reached further than anyone else, beaten back just 100 meters below the elusive summit.

Heartbroken and defeated, Anker, Chin and Ozturk returned to their everyday lives, swearing never to attempt the journey again. But they faced sudden physical and emotional challenges back home, too, challenges only exacerbated by the siren song of Meru, one that Anker perhaps heard the loudest. By September 2011, Anker had convinced his two lifelong friends to undertake the Shark’s Fin once more, under even more extraordinary circumstances than the first time around.

MERU is the story of that journey—one of friendship, sacrifice, hope and obsession.

Conrad Anker

Climber

Conrad Anker has made a specialty of climbing the most technically challenging terrain he can find. This search has taken him from the northern realms of Alaska and Baffin Island,to the farthest southern reaches of Patagonia and Antarctica, where in 1997, with Alex Lowe and Jon Krakauer, he climbed Rakekniven, a 2,500-foot wall in Queen Maud Land. That climb led to both a film and magazine piece by National Geographic, an organization with which he frequently collaborates. As captain of The North Face Athlete Team, Anker urges climbers to be boots on the ground in observing the changes wrought by man-made climate change. He is also civically active in his home state of Montana, serving on the boards of the Montana State University Leadership Institute, Protect Our Winters, Bozeman Ice Tower Foundation, Gallatin County Fair Board and the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation.

conradanker.com

Jimmy Chin

Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Climber

Jimmy Chin lives a life of art and adventure, combining a career as a photographer, documentary filmmaker and a 14-year veteran of The North Face Athlete Team. In the past decade, Chin has collaborated with, filmed and photographed some of the world’s most progressive athletes and explorers while participating in breakthrough expeditions around the planet. He has made notable first ascents in the Karakoram, traversed the Chang Tang Plateau in Tibet on foot and skied first descents in the Himalayas. He is one of the few people to ski Mount Everest from the summit. Chin shoots for a wide variety of commercial and editorial clients. His photography has graced the cover of National Geographic and garnered recognition from Photo District News, Communication Arts, the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Lowell Thomas Journalism Awards. Chin has shot and directed documentaries, television and commercial projects for The North Face, Pirelli, Apple, National Geographic, Working Title and RSA Films. As a professional athlete, he has been featured in National Geographic, Outside, People and Men’s Journal. He splits his time between New York City and Jackson Hole, Wyoming with his co-director and wife, Chai Vasarhelyi, and their daughter Marina.

jimmychin.com

Renan Ozturk

Cinematographer, Additional Editor, Climber

Renan Ozturk is an expedition climber, filmmaker and landscape artist. His cutting edge first ascents, mountain murals and short films have taken him from the high Himalayas to the remote jungles of Burma. Ozturk has pushed the art of filmmaking in extreme locations in particular through his use of lightweight technology. His video “dispatches,” produced during expeditions, bring the adventure to a worldwide online audience in near real time. Through digital recognition and top film festival awards, Renan’s visual storytelling style is on the cutting edge of the outdoor industry.

renanozturk.com

Jon Krakauer

Author

Jon Krakauer is an internationally acclaimed best selling author. His works include Eiger Dreams, Under The Banner of Heaven, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. For the past two decades Krakauer’s writing has been published in the likes of Outside, Architectural Digest, Rolling Stone, Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and National Geographic. His 1996 book, Into The Wild spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a feature film directed by Sean Penn. Into Thin Air, meanwhile, redefined the genre of adventure writing and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in literature.

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Jenni Lowe-Anker

Artist, Author

Jennifer Lowe-Anker’s paintings are rendered with the vivid color and rich texture of livestock marker, a folky medium that is intended for marking the hides of sheep and cattle. Lowe began using the oily paint-sticks in 1985 while a student at MSU and since graduating in1987 she developed a style that is now her signature. She and her husband Conrad Anker reside in Bozeman, Montana with their sons, Max, Sam and Isaac. Lowe-Anker is the author of Forget Me Not, a memoir published by Mountaineers Books and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for literature. She is president of the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit created in memory of her late husband that works to bring a safer and better life to indigenous mountain people in Nepal.

jennilowe.com

Director's Statements

“I’ve spent much of my life in the mountains as both a climber and as a professional photographer. I always wanted to make a film that gave an audience the visceral experience of going on a difficult alpine big wall climb. I hoped to give people a glimpse of the stakes, the risks and sacrifices involved.

But I also wanted to show that following your passions is not always a beautiful thing. It can be fraught with internal conflict, doubt and intractable compromise. I often ask myself: Where do you draw the line between following your heart and your responsibility to others?

When you’re making a movie on a mountain, the camera is an added appendage; one you often wish you didn’t have to carry. While shooting MERU, it was a real struggle just to keep the two small cameras we carried from getting destroyed.

I always say the rules of filming on a mountain climb are fairly straightforward. Shoot whenever you can. Don’t hold up the team. And don’t drop the camera.”

—Jimmy Chin

“As someone who isn’t particularly comfortable with heights, it was important for me that MERU be more than just about mountain climbing. It’s a truly personal story, one about pursuing one’s passions, though in this case those passions are unusually extreme.

In these kinds of stories, people often get caught up in the accomplishment, but there’s another side, of course. Being married to Jimmy, I’m especially interested in what the female characters in the story—the ones back home, often wringing their hands—had to say. How did they tolerate the risks these climbers, their closest family members, take as part of their professional careers? What drove their lives, and what kept them steady?

Despite the fact that this film reaches an apex of 21,000 feet, I felt MERU had to also remain firmly on the ground.”

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