Documentary of True Story; film on IFC
This a story of the most incredible feat of endurance I've ever heard about.
Touching the void is about two friends, Joe Simpson and Simon Tates, mountain climbing Brits, who undertake to scale an Andean peak. They summit a mountain and stand on the top at 20,000 feet. Most climbers are killed getting off mountains, and this one is treacherous.
As they begin their descent, Joe makes a mis step and incurs a horrible injury to one leg; the bone fractures and splits and pushes up into his knee. Simon, his partner, soon cuts the rope binding them together, and Joe's body falls into a crevasse. Simon left him and continues down the mountain.
Joe lands on a two foot ledge inside the crevasse, below was a bottomless chasm. He calls out for Simon over and over. He makes a valiant effort to climb upward out of the crevasse, but that maneuver failed. He can't get enough grip with one crampon. His injured leg is agonizingly painful. At the end of his rope, literally, he then makes a last ditch attempt to lower himself on his rope down the crevasse, since he can't go upward.
He lands on a fragile flat ice bottom. He looks up to see a shaft of sunlight coming throuh a chink above and drags himself up a rocky ice covered surface and comes out on a glacier. The glacier is gouged with deep rifts and is impassable, so he hauls out onto the rocks and boulders alongside the glacier. Days pass as he proceeds at a snails pace, crawling and dragging his leg. He describes himself as "insanely stubborn" to keep trying but acknowledged to himself he was going to die, but he'd die trying. He finds water trickling down a rock and licks the rock--he is severely dehydrated. The water gives him enough strength to keep crawling and endure the ordeal.
He began to hallucinate and in his delerium smells something. Incredibly, he has inadvertently crawled into the rocks that serve as the base camp's latrine. He makes feeble cries for "Simon!" The guide and Simon had planned to leave the base camp that morning and Simon had already burned Joe's belongings. Inside a tent, in a blizzard, Simon and the guide hear the faint cries for help and on the verge of death, Joe was found--and saved. The first thing Joe said to Simon, who had abandoned him, was forgiveness and understanding for cutting the rope and leaving him.
What a guy that Joe is!