Reel exhilaration

Imagine for a second dangling hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging by your fingertips to the side of a sheer cliff.

You try to gain a better hold, but exhaustion makes your once powerful grip slide off the wall as if it was made of glass. In less time than it takes to finish a gasp, you drop more than 20 feet before the safety rope, piton and carabiner work together to save your life — even as your body slams against the rock face.

Pitting themselves against an unforgiving mountain is a challenge that drives many adventurers to risk their lives time and again. Others find the same exhilaration bolting down steep slopes on skis, mountain bikes, skateboards and snowboards.

Some get their adrenaline rush by plunging off stationary objects and freefalling for seconds before deploying a parachute. Death, severe injury or at the least blood-oozing cuts and scrapes are just a miscalculation away for devotees of extreme pursuits.

Thanks to helmet-mounted cameras and lenses that can zoom in on action like never before, one can ride shotgun with these modern-day daredevils and never risk a bruise. Proof is on the way.

This Thursday evening, Canada’s Banff Mountain Film Festival’s “Radical Reels” will light up the screen in the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College. The event is being hosted by Shenandoah National Park Trust and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, with all proceeds going to benefit the park.

In about the time it takes to watch a feature-length movie, the audience will view 10 short films ranging from a few minutes to 17 minutes in length. This ensures an almost nonstop parade of human triumphs, crashes and near-catastrophes.

Many people are familiar with the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, which Blue Ridge Mountain Sports has been bringing to Charlottesville for 14 years. That event is a screening of some of the best short films shown at the festival each November.

Film subjects range from mountain-related activities to cultural events, such as the saving of an ancient Buddhist temple in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang.

“Radical Reels” is a different cat altogether.

“I think of ‘Radical Reels’ as Banff’s gnarly little brother,” said Meagan Stewart, program coordinator for Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. “It’s all about fun, adrenaline and a bit about an independent spirit.

“Basically, what we’re doing is taking the most radical, highest-adrenaline films from the film festival competition, and then condensing everything you would see at Banff into one night.

“We don’t show any of the cultural or environmental films. That doesn’t mean these films don’t have substance. We look for films with a story, just like we do with the festival, but we’re only selecting adrenaline-sports films.”

The gnarly little brother’s pace doesn’t allow for incidental chatter or nonessential puffery. All that is left on the cutting room floor.

“We want this to be fun and feel like a party,” Stewart said of the event, which being presented in more than 30 venues throughout Canada, Germany and the United States. “The films aren’t exactly the same as you would see here during the festival.

“They’re special edits we work on throughout the year, so they’re a little different, but still convey the spirit of what you would see in Banff. For example, this year we have a downhill skateboarding film that was originally 52 minutes in length.

“We worked for months going back and forth with the filmmaker to get it down to [13] minutes. Now it’s a film anyone can enjoy, where before you really had to be a skateboarder to want to sit through the whole thing.”

When the nine-day film festival started in 1976, “Radical Reels” was a special evening feature. It proved so popular that, in 2004, it was put on the road to help nonprofits like SNPT raise money.

Susan R. Sherman is the executive director of SNPT, which was founded in 2004 and opened its Charlottesville office last year. She was staffing an information table at the Paramount Theater last March during the World Tour screenings when she was approached by a representative of Deuter.

“Deuter is a major outdoor outfitter, and a national sponsor of the Banff Film Festival,” Sherman said. “The representative told me there was this great festival called ‘Radical Reels,’ and, just like Banff, they like to partner with nonprofit groups.

“He thought we’d be a perfect group to sponsor it. We knew there was a love for the Banff festival here, and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports readily volunteered to be our corporate co-sponsor.

“Getting help from Blue Ridge Mountain Sports was tremendously important. It seems like a real and natural fit for both of us, because they support the outdoors and so do we.”

SNPT is the official nonprofit fundraising partner of Shenandoah National Park. Its mission is to provide people with opportunities to help shape the future of the park by funding projects and programs that protect its natural and historic resources — and enhance the experience people have when visiting it.

Sherman said that three priority projects currently in the works will benefit from Thursday’s fundraiser. One is the creation of a new trail at Big Meadows that will help educate visitors about the challenges of air quality in the park.

“That trail is going to be encircling the air-quality monitoring station that already exists at the park,” Sherman said. “The second project is an education program called Teacher-Ranger-Teacher that brings teachers into the park for two consecutive summers.

“The teachers work with park rangers to develop educational programs that they teach in the park, and then bring back to their classrooms. It’s a great way to use the park as a living classroom, and also to start educating the next generation of park stewards.

“The third project has to do with the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the park in 2011. There’s a yearlong celebration planned, with events in the park and the communities surrounding the park. As the nonprofit partner of the park, we’re heavily involved in making that celebration successful.”

Stewart said one of the reasons “Radical Reels” has proven so successful as a fundraiser is that it attracts people of all ages. Even a person who hasn’t been on a bicycle in decades can enjoy watching a mountain biker pulling off a back flip, or zooming between trees at breakneck speed.

“When we first launched the tour in 2004, we thought it would appeal to the 18- to 25-year-old crowd,” Stewart said. “What we found is that we get all ages at the show, and it’s about an equal mix of men to women.

“It’s definitely an outdoorsy crowd, but we get a good number of armchair adventurers as well. Some people bring children, but we don’t encourage that, because there is some coarse language.

“And there is definitely some extreme situations in the films. It’s an adult event, for sure.”

People can get a taste of what’s in store by visiting the trust’s Web site at www.snptrust.org. A trailer of the films to be shown can be accessed at “featured now” on its home page.

“Charlottesville is a gateway community to Shenandoah National Park,” Sherman said. “We’re doing everything we can to help promote the park and encourage the city and Albemarle County to embrace it as their own.

“Attending this event is a fun and easy way to help support the park. It’ll be an evening of great films and an opportunity to win wonderful raffle items.

“What we’re all working to do is preserve this incredible park that deserves to be protected in perpetuity.”

The Banff Mountain Film Festival’s “Radical Reels” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door, and are available at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports in Barracks Road Shopping Center and online at www.snptrust.org. For more information, call 293-2728 or send e-mail to info@snptrust.org.