Final Ascent (2019)

The life of Scottish mountaineer and writer Hamish MacInnes is told in this documentary feature film by Robbie Fraser starring Hamish MacInnes and Michael Palin.

Hamish started climbing at the age of 15, and later did two Everest expeditions – the one he made at 24 years old costing a mere £40. He has climbed all over the world, in the Amazon where he was accosted daily by tarantulas and bird-eating spiders, in the Alps and in the Himalayas – and, of course, in his beloved Scotland. He has lived a lot of his life in Glencoe, and has worked on films with Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery.

Many of the practices Hamish developed in his life are now used by mountain rescue teams around the world. He has lost many, more than fifty, friends in mountaineering accidents and has faced death more than a few times himself. He can sense avalanches and has been involved in many rescues of people trapped under them. He says being in an avalanche is exactly like drowning.

At high freezing altitudes Hamish used visualisations of breathing in heat, taken from an idea from a boyhood book, to keep him warm. To watch this film you would wonder why anyone would climb mountains. Hamish quotes an Arabic saying “He who goes to the mountains, goes to his mother.”

Hamish was sectioned in later life for being ‘a danger to himself and others’ – something he disputes and is offended by. He seems to have been misdiagnosed as having dementia and was not well treated in the mental hospital. Hamish helped cure himself of the apparent amnesia he had by rereading the books he wrote during his lifetime – over 40 of them. He says he has regained 98% of his memory.

There is a constant score underneath the film which at times I wished would cease but this is an interesting look at the life of a man who was instrumental to modern mountaineering, developing techniques and equipment. The final ascent referred to in the title is about an incident in the mental hospital to which this remarkable man was committed.