The North Face presents: ADRENALINE - ft. Daniel Woods & Nina Williams
2024 · 24 min · Bouldering, Documentary · Mellow
This 24-minute film follows Daniel Woods and Nina Williams through a Colorado winter bouldering season, documenting attempts on several hard problems: Adrenaline (listed here as FA, V16 / 8c+), Freakshow (V15 / 8c) and The Heist (V12 / 8a+). Cinematography is credited to Bobby Sorich; the footage emphasizes the weathered, low-temperature conditions and the repeated attempts that characterize winter sends in the high plains. The film's value is in showing the logistical and physical constraints of winter bouldering: skin management, short workable windows, and the psychological cost of mounting repeated attempts in marginal conditions. Rather than spectacle, it foregrounds process — how conditions and mentality have to align to put these particular lines down — and records two of the sport's most accomplished boulderers working those margins in Colorado.
Review
A winter bouldering film that treats conditions as the subject, and it is right to. Daniel Woods and Nina Williams work through a Colorado winter: Woods on Adrenaline, a first ascent at V16, and on Freakshow, the 40-foot Pinecliffe problem he upgraded to V15 after breaking a hold on the second ascent; Williams on The Heist, Kevin Jorgeson's 30-foot V12 highball in Eldorado Canyon. Bobby Sorich shoots it.
This is for climbers who understand skin management, short workable windows and the psychological cost of repeated attempts in marginal conditions. The film foregrounds all three. Skip it if you want warm rock and sends in sequence. This is cold, and the sends come when the weather allows, not when the edit wants them.
What works is Freakshow. A 45-foot fall potential from a sloping landing, a crux that changed when a hold broke, and Woods reading it in three sections, is the best explanation of what a hard highball is that I have seen. Williams on The Heist, over three sessions with sketchy falls, is the honest counterpart. What it gets wrong is Adrenaline itself. A new V16 should be the headline and the film gives it less than the other two lines.
In Sequence, Patagonia's film on Katie Lamb, is the other Colorado bouldering film, and it is about craft rather than cold. Adrenaline is about weather. Both are about patience, and this one is the harsher of the two.
