Peter Rhodes

Peter Rhodes appears in Attempting to Free Climb a Patagonian Bigwall (2010), a participant-shot account of an attempt on Cerro Catedral in Patagonia. The film was edited by the team—Mason Earle, George Ullrich, and Peter Rhodes—immediately after they came off the wall, and it sat unpublished for years before being posted. That provenance gives the film an immediate, unvarnished feel: no distributor polish, no retrospective narration, just footage made by the people who climbed.

The subject is a big-wall free-climbing attempt in Argentina, and the movie’s strengths come from its firsthand perspective. You watch the logistics of the wall, the interpersonal exchanges among the three climbers, and the rawness of on-wall decision-making. It reads as a document for climbers who prefer expedition footage presented in the register team members use with each other—practical, occasionally rough, and focused on effort over post-fact storytelling.

For viewers interested in Patagonia or Cerro Catedral specifically, the film provides a compact, direct window into the challenges of attempting to free a significant big wall from the point of view of the climbers themselves.