Film Honouring Canmore Guide Larry Shiu to Open in More Than 40 Taiwanese Theatres

In the fall of 2024, Canmore mountain guide Patrick Lindsay stood beneath the north face of the East Peak of Yushan in Taiwan, where his climbing partner and best friend, Canmore guide Larry Shiu, died in a fall two years earlier.

Lindsay’s return to the mountain is at the heart of Back on North Face, a documentary by first-time filmmaker I-Hsin Wang that opens in more than 40 theatres across Taiwan on Nov. 20.

Bow Valley audiences, however, will have to wait. Wang plans to return to Canada in the summer of 2027 to organize small screenings and is still looking for a Canadian distributor.

The film follows the friendship between Shiu and Lindsay, who met in 2008 in Kamloops, B.C., where both were enrolled in Thompson Rivers University’s two-year Adventure Guide Diploma program. They later lived together in Squamish, B.C., while working toward their certifications as apprentice rock guides.

To pay for their guiding exams, the pair did rope access work, in which technicians use climbing ropes and harnesses to reach and repair hard-to-access parts of large structures. Their jobs included replacing the sails on Vancouver’s Canada Place and working on the roof of BC Place.

Both settled in Canmore in the early 2010s and continued climbing together. They went on expeditions to Alaska, including climbs on Denali and a 30-hour day on the Moonflower route on Begguya (Mount Hunter). They climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and travelled to Kalymnos, Greece, where Shiu witnessed Lindsay’s proposal to his now-wife.

“There’s a lot of people who are searching for good partners out in the mountains, and we were really fortunate to find someone who … we both got along really well in the mountains,” said Lindsay, who owns Ridgeline Guiding in Canmore. “We knew each other so well, and you could be in tune with the other person’s body language in ways that you aren’t with other people.”

Shiu was an alpine guide certified by the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (ACMG) and an apprentice ski guide. According to Lindsay, he was one exam away from becoming a fully certified mountain guide, which would have made him the first Taiwanese person to reach that level of certification.

“It’s hard enough to become certified as a mountain guide … you added on moving and all the different cultural and language barriers,” Lindsay said.

Lindsay nicknamed his friend “The Taiwanese Machine,” a play on “The Swiss Machine,” the nickname of the late Swiss mountaineer Ueli Steck. It stuck after Lindsay filmed Shiu powering up a slope on the Bugaboos-to-Rogers Pass ski traverse. Lindsay said the nickname was about stamina, not speed.

“To be honest, he was never very fast in the mountains, but he loved being out there and always went,” Lindsay said.

Taiwan has no glaciers. Shiu had started bringing members of his former Taiwanese university mountaineering club to the Canadian Rockies to learn glacier travel and alpine skills, and Lindsay helped with the trips.

On Oct. 6, 2022, Shiu was attempting a first ascent of a new route on the north face of Yushan’s East Peak, which at 3,869 metres is the third-highest summit in Taiwan. Lindsay was not with him. Shiu fell on the first section of the climb.

On climbs like Shiu’s, climbers can protect themselves from falls by placing removable metal devices in cracks in the rock and attaching their ropes to them. On the wet, mud-filled north face, Lindsay said, finding secure places for that equipment was difficult. When Shiu fell, some of that gear pulled out. He hit the ground and died of a traumatic brain injury. He was 40.

“We don’t know exactly why he fell, but he fell,” Lindsay said. “When he passed, there was a part of me that was sad that I wasn’t there to help keep him safe.”

After Shiu’s death, Lindsay took over the program for visiting Taiwanese climbers. During the group’s two-week trip to Canada in June 2023, he began sharing stories about his friend.

“A lot of these Taiwanese mountaineers knew of Larry, but never really knew him … they really started to get to know Larry through me,” Lindsay said.

On the summit of Mount Rhondda on June 22, 2023, the group held a moment of silence for Shiu, and Lindsay left a message in the summit box. Wang, one of the participants, asked him why. After the trip, Wang reached out to Lindsay about making a film.

Lindsay had wanted to visit the site of the accident since Shiu’s death but could not afford the trip.

“My motivation was actually very simple: to help Patrick, my mentor and friend, come to Taiwan and fulfill a wish he had held onto for two years,” Wang said.

Lindsay left for Taiwan on Sept. 30, 2024. He spent about a month there, including roughly a week filming on the mountain, where the team visited the accident site and retrieved climbing gear.

Lindsay said he wanted to climb Shiu’s route to honour him but was not comfortable with the idea.

“This terrain is actually pretty serious, and we don’t really want to double up on this accident,” he said.

The face has two cliff bands separated by a section of scree (loose rock). Instead of attempting Shiu’s route, the team established a new route on the upper cliff, above the accident site. The route is about 200 metres long, graded 5.10a, and named “Shiu Be Here.”

“His last name is Shiu. And so a little bit of a play on words: should be here,” Lindsay said.

Lindsay, Wang and a third climber, Su Jun-Yi, made what Lindsay believes was the route’s first ascent.

Others from Shiu’s life also appear in the film, including Graeme Taylor, Shiu and Lindsay’s instructor at Thompson Rivers University, and Canmore photographer Tim Banfield.

Lindsay said the film, which runs for over an hour, captures Shiu’s “cheeky sense of humour” and his “devoted love of the mountains,” but that no film could capture all of their years together.

“You can’t do justice in an hour, or however long the film is, for how many years we’ve been doing quite epic things together,” he said. “But it does start to paint the picture, which is good.”

Lindsay flies to Taiwan on Nov. 16 to help with the film’s release.

Wang said his team is exploring Canadian distribution and is considering selling streaming rights to platforms such as Netflix or HBO, though nothing is confirmed.

Lindsay has suggested submitting the documentary to the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, with a shorter version of the film running about 20 minutes.

“If anyone in Canada reading this article is interested in helping us bring the film to Canadian audiences, please feel free to contact me directly,” Wang said. He can be reached at [email protected].

Losing Shiu was not the first time Lindsay had lost a friend in the mountains.

“None of us are invincible. No matter how much you know, you’re always accepting a certain level of risk,” he said. “It’s definitely more about the people and the relationships that you build … without that stuff, the mountains are just unnecessary risk in some ways.”