Photographer Jimmy Chin_ Climbing Yosemite _ Nat Geo Live

Ultimately, the process of climbing is very rewarding to people. It's very difficult physically, but it's also a very kind of cerebral sport. It's slow and methodical and you have to think. You can't move very well when you're scared. You have to be able to kind of control that fear and maintain your breathing. There's very real consequences when you make mistakes. You make a wrong move when you're free soloing and you fall hundreds or thousands of feet and die. So, I grew up in Mankato, Minnesota. My parents were from China. They were both working at the university. This is actually my backyard. I grew up in the flatlands. If you go outside of Mankato, you can stand in spots where there's cornfields 360 degrees. I think a lot of people think it's a very unlikely place for an alpinist to come from. In some ways, it prepared me well because it was really cold. I grew up with a lot of expectations from my parents. They wanted me to do a lot of different things. I started playing the violin when I was three and a half. I did a lot of different sports. I swam competitively and studied martial arts. I was competing every weekend. There were a lot of expectations to do well, especially in school. I always thought there were only three things I could be when I grew up. That was a lawyer, a doctor, or a businessman. When I went to college, I studied international relations and Asian studies. I focused a lot on international law and policy. During that time, I really fell in love with climbing. I also grew up skiing. There was a little hill behind my house called Mount Cato. It's about 400 feet high. It's actually not a hill. There are cornfields on top. It's a river valley. The hill that drops from where the cornfields start into the river valley was my ski hill. If I did well in school, I got to go skiing. I always knew that I had this little song that I would sing. It was based in Chinese. It was basically like, I want to go outside and play. I would just repeat it over and over. They'd be like, well, go finish your violin or go finish that. I'd be like, okay. I knew I wanted to go outside and play. In college, I skied on the ski team and then I found climbing. After college, I went to the Bay Area. I was looking for a job, thinking that I would find something in the professional realm. I couldn't get myself excited about it. I made up my mind. I had this great idea. I was like, hey, mom, dad, I'm going to take a year off. I'm just going to get it out of my system. I'm going to climb and ski full time. Don't freak out. It's really temporary. I've got to do it for me. Essentially, their worst nightmare was realized when probably close to seven years later, I was still living in the back of my car. Just doing odds and ends for jobs, shoveling roofs and waiting tables. But really, in love with what I was doing and where I was spending my time, I would wake up in the back of my Subaru in Yosemite or in the eastern Sierras or in the Tetons. I would just think there's no other place that I would rather be. I just felt so fortunate. Every day, I knew that since I wasn't doing anything else, I was going to throw myself at climbing and skiing and really taking myself as far as I could in that realm. Yosemite was a very influential home for me. I spent a lot of time there over the course of seven years. I made a lot of friends. I felt like I found my community there. People that were really passionate about what they were doing. Every day, you'd go out and climb. Really living the good life. After spending a lot of time there, my aspirations changed. I really wanted to go and take what I learned in Yosemite to some of the greater ranges of the world. It was in Yosemite that I picked up a camera for the first time. I took a photo with a friend's camera who wanted to be a photographer. I took a photo with it. He eventually tried to sell his photos. A client bought one photo and had it be the one that I took. At the time, I could live on nothing forever. They paid $500 for this photo. Of course, now I know for the usages that they used it for, they should have paid me many thousands of dollars. At the time, I didn't know. I was like, if I take one photo a month, I could do this forever. I was like, okay, this is awesome. I'm sure some photographers probably cringe. They're like, he has no sense of creativity or the tradition of photography. That was really how I started. I didn't really have a sense of wanting to be an artist or a photographer in any other way than to continue what I was doing. I took a camera and I started to head out into the world. Really, Yosemite is a special place for me because it launched me into this career. Over the course of the next 10, 11, 12 years, I traveled the world and really got to shoot on some really insane assignments with some amazing people in some amazing locations. I think after traveling around for years and years and really sometimes spending 300 days a year on the road, I've come to find that my heart really is in places that are close to home. Yosemite kept drawing me back. I don't think it was an accident that I pitched this story to National Geographic about Yosemite. Part of the story is definitely about the culture, the climbing culture. I really wanted to capture the cutting edge of climbing, what was happening there, and then what the lifestyle was. I remember when I spent time there, we always laughed. We were like, yeah, there's a leisure class at both ends of the economic spectrum and we know which one we're at. Ha, ha, ha. All you did was climb and watch your friends up on the wall. I hear a couple guys messing around on the alcove swing. It's this giant swing. It goes 200 feet up in this overhanging cave. When you went off the end, you would just fly over the valley. I was trying to get an interesting angle, so I had Jumard up the rope. I was hanging off the rope and I was telling this guy, hey, okay, run off the end. Then he'd run off the end and I would hold on for dear life. I got lucky with one of these images. Also very critical on this shoot was my good friend Mikey Schaefer. He was incredible on this shoot. He took very good care of me while I was running around trying to figure out what to shoot. He made sure I didn't fall off the cliff. We spent tons of time moving gear. Very little time shooting. To get one shot sometimes took two days of prep on the front end, getting all the gear up. You'd spend three, four, five days sometimes just to get a shot. We had hundreds and hundreds of meters of rope, thousands of feet of rope, constantly climbing up and down El Cap. This is a very common scene. I'd be shooting. I'd turn around and Mikey would be like, did you get it, man? I'd be like, yeah, I think I got it. He'd be like, all right, let's get out of here. I like this photo only because this is signing up to stay in Camp 4. I really think climbing is a very cerebral sport. It's very slow. It's very methodical. It requires a lot of mental discipline. It often requires a lot of planning. I thought that was interesting. You show up at 6 in the morning and people are waiting to sign up and everybody's reading. It could be trashy stuff, I don't know. I think the three styles of climbing that are really getting pushed is free soloing, which is where you're climbing without a rope, free climbing, which is where you're climbing with a rope but it allows you to push the technical aspects of it, so the really, really difficult physical climbing. But there's some mental space that you can reserve, extra mental space you can reserve for the climbing because you know that if you fall, the rope is going to catch you. And then there's speed climbing. In terms of free soloing, undoubtedly the greatest free soloist that ever lived is this kid, Alex Honnold. Here he's soloing Separate Reality, which comes out this 40-foot roof. It's almost 1,000 feet off the deck. And I'm absolutely sure that I was way more terrified than he was at this moment. He's pulling the lip. Here he is soloing on 2,000 feet off the deck on Half Dome. And of course, Thank God Ledge. And this is called Thank God Ledge because it's actually one of the biggest ledges that you get on that face and it's obviously not very big. It's a very sheer face. So back to El Cap. I want to talk a little bit about one of the final areas of climbing that is being really pushed, and that's free climbing. There are two guys that have been working on this route, one of the longest, most sustained, most difficult routes on El Cap probably in the world. And that's Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgensen. Tommy on the right, Kevin inside the Portaledge. And they're climbing at night because it was too hot to climb during the day. This is a fairly common scene on El Cap, hanging out in the Portaledge solar panel because they've got their iPhones up there, they're working. It's like their apartment, essentially. And they'll go up there for a couple of weeks and just hang out up there and work through these different pitches. They have to kind of stock camp and then they move in. It's kind of regular life up on the wall. Again, they're climbing at night because it's cooler and the rubber on the shoes stick a little bit better and it really comes down to it. All of the climbs have different names and some pitches have different names, which is like a rope length on a route. So this route has 36 pitches on it and some pitches will get different names. And there's kind of some famous pitches on El Cap that you hear about that are notorious for being difficult. To give you an idea, I liked one of the pitches. It was called something like lifting the car off the baby pitch because that's the kind of effort and strength it requires to do that. I was like, wow, that's a good name. They're like, yeah, what do you think? I'm like, I think it makes a pretty good point. And then finally, the base jumping, which is a very contentious issue in Yosemite because it's illegal. But a lot of climbers have started base jumping because if there was base jumping allowed in Yosemite, it would be just like rock climbing. It would be the center of the universe for base jumping. It's like the ultimate place. And a lot of the people there cannot help themselves. Here they are in squirrel suits and they'll literally fly for two minutes without pulling their shoes. And they'll proximity fly across the faces and then turn out to the valley and fly all the way across to the other side and then turn all the way up and go down valley and then come back. There's this whole system of communications. They've got spotters to make sure they know the schedules of the rangers. And there's all the, like, I'm delivering the pizza. And it's like, okay, ready for delivery. It's a cat and mouse game for sure. And it's been kind of serious. But part of the reason for this base jumping is that a huge part of the goal for them is to link these different formations in the shortest amount of time. Because, again, speed is one of the things. So they want to link the south face of Mount Watkins in the background with Half Dome and El Cap all in a day. And obviously the fastest way down is when they get to the top of Half Dome they run off the edge. And then they get to the bottom and then they're down two hours faster than if they had to hike. So that's kind of like, it sounds funny, but the final evolution in climbing might be flying. So it was really great to spend time with a lot of guys that I used to spend time with and also watch this new generation of climbers come up. The final little edit video is kind of an on-assignment piece that is a little overview of the shoot. I've been assigned to shoot a feature story for National Geographic about the climbing culture and the cutting edge of climbing that's happening in Yosemite today. I've had almost 60 days of shooting in this alley. We've had some pretty epic days. Yosemite is the epicenter of climbing. A lot of the greatest climbing feats in history have happened here and they're happening right now. I started climbing here 15 years ago and making a community here with all the other dedicated Yosemite climbers. So it's really special for me to be able to come back here and shoot with my peers. Climbers don't perform in an arena or a stadium. They don't have stands full of fans watching them. Really, I see my job as being able to tell that story. I'm carrying loads today, top of El Cap, and hopefully get a couple of shots. Climbing in general is about understatement. I think it's impossible for people to express their experiences up there. About to drop in and shoot with Leo. I think Yosemite climbing has a certain purity to it because the climbers are up there battling it out, pushing through physical and mental challenges far from the eyes of the world. There's nobody there to see it. To be able to bring that story back, bring those moments back to people, is really inspiring for me because it's part of my life's work. Cool. I think that's it. Thanks.