Jonathan Waterman

Follows Jonathan and Deborah Waterman climbing the north side of Mt. McKinley, and Jerome Ruby and John Faulkiner who ski down on the west side of the mountain.

In Alaska, there have been many disputed claims to the first conquest of Mt. McKinley, and locals still insist that the honor belongs to three miners who climbed on a bet, armed with homemade climbing irons and bags of donuts... The documentary is the first episode of 'Mountain men', a British documentary series looking at the achievements of pioneering mountaineers. The series, accompanied by unique archival materials, detailed maps, and photographs, invites us to follow in the footsteps of these fearless explorers, and tells us their stories with all the romance and audacity, bravado and suffering, courage and miscalculation intact.

A modern ascent of Mount Logan in the Northern Yukon of Alaska, retracing the steps of a 1925 expedition. American Jon Waterman leads Simon Wells, Joseph Runyan, Allen Jewhurst, John Dyer and Rick Atkinson to climb Prospectors Peak on Mount Logan. They mushed with dogs up the Chitina, Logan and Ogilvie Glaciers to 4100 meters on the King Trench route and then climbed Prospectors Peak. The program includes some black and white archive material.