AllMovie

Sitting on the border of the Canadian Yukon and Alaska, Mount St. Elias is the second tallest mountain in either nation, and also one of the most difficult to climb. Standing at 18,000 feet, the mountain is subject to high winds, bitter cold and frequent storms, conditions made worse by the mountain's location near the Gulf of Alaska. But in 2007, two experienced mountaineers from Austria, Axel Naglich and Peter Ressmann, teamed with an American colleague, John Johnston, to try something never done before -- climbing to the top of Mount St. Elias and skiing back down in the longest vertical descent ever attempted on skis. Filmmaker Gerald Salmina and a small camera crew tagged along to document the great adventure, and Mount St. Elias is a visually striking portrait of three men attempting the seemingly impossible in one of the most beautiful but forbidding locations on Earth. Mount St. Elias was an official selection at the 2010 Seattle International Film Festival.