Blind Mt. Everest climber's journey now on DVD

From the Sacramento Bee:

"For a sighted person, climbing Mount Everest is one of the greatest physical challenges on the face of the Earth. For the blind, it's been deemed virtually impossible."

As mountaineers gather at staging areas to prepare to summit the highest place on earth in May, that quotation takes on even more significance. It's from the recently released DVD "Touch the Top of the World" (Sony Pictures, $24.95, 89 minutes), based on the best-selling memoir of Eric Weihenmayer, the first blind person to reach the Everest summit.

Starring Peter Facinelli and Bruce Campbell, the film tells the story of Weihenmayer's childhood struggle with a genetic disease that would eventually cause him to go blind at age 13, his path from schoolteacher to professional mountaineer and his determination to climb Everest.

The film goes to great lengths to highlight the contributions Weihenmayer's parents made to his success. They insisted that he stay in public school even though he struggled with his failing vision; they also encouraged him to compete in wrestling during high school.

The movie includes plenty of facts about the perils of attempting to summit Everest – for example, only one climber in every six makes it to the summit and back alive. These are mixed in with a few shots of Weihenmayer's climbing buddies coaxing him across crevasses and using handbells to guide him through icefalls.

Weihenmayer's team was on Everest for 48 days. They spent six weeks on the first sections of the climb, acclimating to the elevation and working with Weihenmayer to increase his climbing speed before they tried the summit.

More a movie of flashbacks than climbing scenes, "Touch" focuses on all the achievements of Weihenmayer's life: a high school wrestling match, his first day as a teacher, his first climbing lesson. All these ordinary things that become extraordinary when you remind yourself of his blindness.