John Harlin

John Harlin III will give a special presentation prior to the Spokane premiere of the IMAX movie "The Alps," based on the story of John and his father. Two show times: 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Tickets $15 through Ticketswest. #####

John's father was a renowned American alpinist who lived with ... (more)his family in Switzerland and climbed in Europe in the 1960s. He envisioned and obsessed over a new route on the infamous Eiger North Face (first climbed in 1938, and celebrated in Harrer's "The White Spider"), eying a direct route straight up the face to the summit--a "direttissima." After years of planning, in 1966 and on the day the rest of his team summited, John the father tragically died when the rope he was ascending broke, causing him to fall 4,000 feet to his death.#####

John his son returned to climb the Eiger North Face 40 years later. A life-long climber, writer, and the current Editor of the American Alpine Journal, John Harlin III's "The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father" tells the story of not only his father's obsession with the mountain, but his own as well. All leads up to John III's own climb of The Eiger Nordwand in 2006, which he agreed to have filmed by the production crew of McGillvray-Freeman and resulting in the IMAX film, "The Alps."