A Low-Key Film Role for a True High Climber

In the action adventure “Vertical Limit,” Ed Viesturs has a handful of lines and never appears in any of the high-adrenaline scenes set on the Himalayan mountain K2. In fact, he never even makes it out of base camp.

So much for art imitating life.

Viesturs, who has a cameo role in “Limit,” is the real deal. He not only climbed K2, he also survived an avalanche during a rescue of a snow-blind climber on the world’s second-highest peak.

“If you climb K2 and walk away, you say, ‘Thank you very much. I’m not coming back,’ ” said Viesturs, who has climbed Mt. Everest several times but K2 only once. “It’s one of the most challenging and difficult mountains.”

A celebrated mountain climber who was featured in the Imax film “Everest” and several documentaries on high-altitude climbing, Viesturs is the only “Limit” cast member who has lived many of the adventures portrayed in the pumped-up action film.

“As a climber, avalanches are what I fear the most,” said Viesturs, a 41-year-old father of two who lives in Seattle. “They can be so big. The movie wasn’t too far off with the size and monstrosity when they come flying down from 10,000 feet above you. It’s like a thousand freight trains . . . and there’s no way to survive.”

OK, action films always exaggerate reality, but just how unreal is this one?

“It’s based on true-to-life [situations], but hyper-explode that realism 100% and put in everything that could go wrong in eight lifetimes, packed into two hours of climbing,” Viesturs said of the Sony film directed by Martin Campbell.

In “Limit,” Peter Garrett (Chris O’Donnell) sets out on a daring rescue mission to save his sister, Annie (Robin Tunney), who is trapped in a crevasse with an ailing guide (Nicholas Lea) and an irascible billionaire (Bill Paxton). Against Viesturs’ advice, O’Donnell takes three teams of two up the mountain--each outfitted with canisters of nitroglycerin to blast out sis.

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While Viesturs said the jagged peaks and ridges of New Zealand’s Southern Alps were a good stand-in for the Himalayan mountain, he noted he’s never toted nitroglycerin in his pack. “Well, it’s not in any of the climbing manuals,” he joked, noting that detail probably came from the writer’s imagination.

But the drama of “Limit” isn’t far-fetched. A dilemma O’Donnell’s character faces in one scene, for example, reminded Viesturs of the near-death experience of mountaineer Joe Simpson.

Simpson was roped to his partner on a peak in the Peruvian Andes. As the pair descended the mountain, Simpson fell into a crevasse, and his partner, who was farther up the slope, was slowly being pulled into the void.

“So should two die, or do you cut the rope?” Viesturs said. In Simpson’s case, his partner cut the rope. (Simpson survived the fall and--crippled, starving and frostbitten--crawled out of the crevasse and into base camp two weeks later. )

Even the characters in the movie have some basis in reality. The two nude, sunbathing stoners from Australia, who provide a little comic relief amid all the derring-do, are based on two British brothers who “brew beer at base camp, joke around, talk bad toward women but are safe and solid climbers,” Viesturs said, though he’s not naming any names.

But no one stood in for Viesturs, who played himself. He was first signed on for a behind-the-scenes role of leading a second unit film crew to Pakistan to the base of K2 (even though most of the action was shot in New Zealand). But the shooting was in spring--prime climbing season in the Himalayas--and he was off summiting the peaks Monaslu and Dhaligiri in Nepal.

Then he was cast as a BBC cameraman who was supposed to be following Paxton’s billionaire character, but the six-month shoot would have taken a heavy toll on his speaking engagements. Finally, he was cast as himself, though Viesturs said that didn’t make it any easier to get through his first Hollywood part.

“Here I am making my debut at 3 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “It was pretty chilly. My biorhythms are at their lowest, there’s 400 people watching me deliver my lines.” Viesturs said he was relieved to have finished in three takes.

In the film, Viesturs calls the rescue attempt “suicide” and tells O’Donnell: “You’re willing to risk six lives for the sake of three. How do you feel about that?” The next line was supposed to be “Ed, your brother died on Everest.” But on the set Viesturs pointed out that he doesn’t have a brother and he wanted the dialogue to reflect who he was. So the line was changed to “Ed, your best friend died on Everest”--an allusion to climber Scott Fisher, who died during the tragic 1996 season on Mt. Everest, which was popularized in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air.” When that tragedy played out, Viesturs was at base camp with the Imax team and was one of several climbers who went up to help.

It was with Fisher that he climbed K2 in 1992. During the climb, they had been asked to help rescue a climber who had spent the night just below the summit and was exhausted and snow-blind. At one point on the slope, in bad weather and surrounded by crevasses, he and Fisher had roped themselves together, and Viesturs dug a small hole with his ice ax to tuck into if an avalanche swept down.

Just as he finished, a spindrift avalanche engulfed Fisher--one Viesturs described as “small and powdery.” “It wasn’t enough to instantly kill us,” he said.

Viesturs anchored his ice ax and held on for dear life, but as the wall of snow tumbled over him, so did Fisher. The rope tightened, and Viesturs was pulled down the mountain with his buddy. “We were tumbling together. . . . It was very quiet, and surreal,” he said.

The two composed themselves and continued up the mountain, found the hiker and helped her and her partner descend to base camp. Ten days later, they returned and summited K2.