Review of The Rest of The Everest

The Rest of Everest is a podcast created by filmmaker Jon Miller to fill in the gaps left behind by his film, Everest: The Other Side, which was released in May of 2005. This film documents the 2003 journey of Colorado University student Ben Clark, one of the youngest and most experienced mountaineers in world, on his climb to the summit of Mount Everest. Clark is 23 years old and has undertaken numerous international mountaineering expeditions, including the summiting of Mount Kilimanjaro, expeditions to Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, as well as many missions in the Himalayas and the Rockies. Before Miller created this film, he managed the no longer existing Northern Colorado Bureau for CNN Headline News Local Edition. Miller and his production company, Treeline Productions, based out of Fort Collins Colorado, worked with Major King, the Northern Colorado Bureau photographer for Denver’s ABC affiliate channel to produce the film. However, with over 80 hours of footage, and a film edited down to just 84 minutes, there is a lot of Everest that isn’t seen by most people. Miller, King, and Clark work together to produce this weekly podcast, which was launched in 2006.

Episodes are posted every Wednesday and can last anywhere between 10 and 40 minutes. They are not comprised of completely raw footage from the hiking trip; the segments are edited by Miller and supplemented by commentary from the team members. Some of the episodes can be pretty tedious, as I’m sure is the nature of at least some aspects of climbing Everest. You can follow the climbers through their preparatory stage, their arrival at base camp, their initial ascent, health problems, boredom, bad weather, and more. The episodes are generally well shot, revealing landscapes and intricacies of the mountain that are not often seen, and well edited, with interesting narrations by Miller. Many segments also include photographs that Clark took along the way.

One of my favorites is episode 25: Back at Base Camp. The footage for this segment was taken at about the halfway point of the trip, and it includes beautifully clear stills of the climbers on their way up the mountain. Yet the point of The Other Side of Everest is to accurately represent the long and arduous journey to the top of Everest, so the best way to view these is probably to start with the first episode and work your way through.