This winter, Thunder River Theatre Company (TRTC) has mountains on the mind. Next week, the nonprofit opens its third show of the winter, “K2.” The play is named for its setting, the second-highest mountain in the world, where two men confront mortality and the meaning of life.
In preparation for that show, TRTC last weekend hosted real-life mountaineer Mike Marolt to discuss his experiences in high elevations. Audiences were also treated to a showing of the documentary “Shishapangma: Ski from the Death Zone.” The short film covers Marolt’s first 8,000-meter-peak ski descent with his twin brother, Steve, and their friend and mountaineering partner, Jim Gile, in 2000.
As a child, Marolt dreamed of being a baseball player, or a ski racer like his father, Olympian Max Marolt. But when he was 12 years old, his dad had the twins pack the family station wagon with ski gear, then drove them up Independence Pass to climb and ski what locals call “4th of July Bowl.” It was early July, and the young Marolt said that experience forever changed how he and his brother thought about skiing.
As they grew up, skiing and mountaineering became steadily more interwoven in their lives. The pair climbed and skied Alaska’s 20,310-foot Denali in their 20s before turning their sights to even loftier heights. They and Gile attempted 26,414-foot Broad Peak in 1997 as a pure climb; Marolt said they were dreaming of skis for nearly the entire endeavor. While they didn’t end up making the summit of the peak on the Pakistani-Chinese border, they did share their permit with Ed Viesturs, who encouraged them to attempt another 8,000-meter expedition when they had the chance.
The Marolts’ mountaineering passion and lingering question about skis above 26,000 feet led them to plan the trip to Tibet’s Shishapangma, which at 26,335 feet (8,027 meters) is the lowest of the world’s 14 highest mountains. They brought photo and video equipment on that trip. The footage turned into a film and an episode of the 2000s television show “Danger Diaries.” It also became the start to Marolt’s mountain film career, and a key piece to how the trio funded their mountaineering expedition trips moving forward.
During Marolt’s high-elevation endeavors, he and his climbing partners have had to face extreme natural hazards and human frailty. Early in their Shishapangma climb, they helped in the attempt to save a Taiwanese climber suffering from high-
altitude edema. Despite their efforts, the man died in Steve Marolt’s arms.
Thunder River will explore the dangers and the tedium of high-elevation mountaineering when “K2” opens on Friday, Feb. 13 until its closing night on Sunday, March 1. The two-man show’s characters, Harold and Taylor, are stranded at 27,000 feet on one of the world’s most dangerous mountains. The play contemplates personality, challenge, values and sacrifice as the two characters confront life-threatening circumstances in thin air.
“There is something so thrilling and completely challenging about producing this show,” said director Missy Moore, “because of the technical requirements that this play demands and the given circumstances that the actors must believably portray. This play has been on my bucket list to direct for decades and I think that it is so exciting that TRTC has the tenacity to produce it and to bring another exhilarating play to our patrons and community.”
Actor Elijah Pettet looks forward to the intersection of his passions in the project. “I’m extremely excited to do this performance because it combines my love of mountaineering, safety and the outdoors with my love of theater. Throughout the process of building the set [which is a mountain], stunt coordination, safety briefings and acting, I am absolutely in my wheelhouse 100 percent of the time.”
In conjunction with the show, TRTC will host a special Thunderchat evening on Wednesday, Feb. 18 with Alan Arnette, Fort Collins-based mountaineering journalist and climber. Arnette climbed the world’s Seven Summits (the highest mountains of each continent) between 2010 and 2011 while raising money for Alzheimer’s research in honor of his late mother. In addition to having climbed Mount Everest four times and all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, Arnette summited K2 in 2014; at the time, he was the oldest American to ever do so, at the age of 58.
Tickets for TRTC’s K2 are available online at www.thunderrivertheatre.com or by calling 970-963-8200. General admission costs $45 per ticket, and premium seats cost $60 each. The show starts at 7:30pm on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays after it opens next Friday, and matinee performances are at 2pm each Sunday through March 1. Tickets for the Feb. 18 conversation with Alan Arnette are $45 each for general admission.