It takes forty days to know the mountain.

Each spring, over eight hundred climbers attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. The conditions are challenging, and without warning can become life-threatening. Some make it to the top of what is considered the world’s most majestic mountain, but others are not so lucky, and in the attempt to reach the elusive summit, many more have tragically lost their lives. Not all are recovered, their bodies left to the mountain.

In the spring of 2010, filmmaker Dianne Whelan travelled to Everest. In this personal and eye-opening exposé, Base Camp: 40 Days on Everest, Whelan shares gripping stories of Maoist rebels, avalanches and dead bodies surfacing out of a dying glacier. From Base Camp, she interviews climbers, doctors and Sherpas all living for months on end in the belly of the mountain as they wait for a weather window to summit the top of the world. In this push to achieve the summit, many do not survive. Woven into the personal stories is the devastating truth of the human impact on the mountain and the eerie and unforeseen effects of climate change.

But in coming to know the mountain and its people, Dianne must also confront the truth of her own ambitions, and the toll they take on her physical well-being and her relationships. Through immersing herself in the challenging and captivating world of Base Camp, she must find her own path away from ego and judgment to a place of humility and forgiveness.

Dianne Whelan is an award-winning Canadian photographer and filmmaker residing in Garden Bay, BC.

The subject of her first book, This Vanishing Land, references her experience as an embedded media person on a historical Sovereignty Patrol in the Canadian High Arctic. Her recently-released National Film Board documentary, This Land, is based on the same journey and has won several awards, including Best Short Documentary at both the Planet in Focus Film Festival in Toronto and the 2010 Leo Awards for BC film and television. The film can be viewed online here.

A multi-media web project on her Arctic journey was released in June 2010 and recently won Best Small Multimedia Site at the Online Journalism Awards.

In April 2010, Whelan traveled to Nepal and Mount Everest Base Camp to direct and shoot her next documentary film (currently in post-production for release in the fall of 2011) which is also the subject of her forthcoming book.

www.diannewhelan.com

Dianne Whelan's profile page

…a worthy addition to the literature of the world’s highest mountain. As a down-to-earth narrative of trekking to and living at Everest Base Camp, it is valuable reading for anyone contemplating going there.

Mike Nash, Canadian Alpine Journal 2014