Jimmy Chin, Climber & Filmmaker

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1:26Hello and welcome to the Travel Diaries podcast. I'm your host Holly Rubenstein and here each week I speak to a very special guest about the seven chapters of their life's travel diaries. From their earliest childhood travel memory and the first place they fell in love with to their hidden gem and what's at the top of their travel bucket list. Today's guest is someone who has quite literally reached the very top of the world. And if his name isn't immediately familiar to you, I can almost guarantee that you'll know some of his extraordinary work. Jimmy Chin is one of the world's most accomplished adventurers.

2:09He's a professional mountaineer, climber, skier, National Geographic photographer, and Oscar-winning filmmaker. He spent more than two decades exploring some of the most remote and dangerous corners of our planet, achieving feats that most of us could barely imagine. He has been on my dream guest wishlist since I started the podcast. I've really always enjoyed following his documentaries and watching him complete these pioneering climbs across the Himalayas and the Karakoram. And his photographs have graced the cover of National Geographic and gone on to be kind of legendary in the climbing world.

2:49And it's his filmmaking that I find most extraordinary. Alongside his wife, Jimmy directed Free Solo, the breathtaking documentary following climber Alex Honnold as he attempts to scale El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. If you've watched it, I'm sure you'll never forget it. The film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature back in 2019 and it's one of the best movies. I think it's on Netflix if you haven't seen it. And together with his wife they've also made the acclaimed documentaries Miru and The Rescue which was the movie about the incredible rescue of the boys football team that was stuck in that flooded cave in Thailand.

3:30So I met Jimmy in London when he flew over a few weeks ago to promote his latest film, Everest, The Other Side, which is in cinemas now. So it tells the deeply moving story of ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilary Nelson, and their seemingly impossible dream of skiing down the treacherous north face of Mount Everest. it's a film about love, loss, resilience and the lengths to which humans will go to pursue a wild dream. The interview was recorded during a busy film press junket so we weren't in our normal studio environment. I don't love the sound, it's not as good as our normal sound quality but I really didn't want you to miss the opportunity to hear from someone as extraordinary as Jimmy So I really hope you enjoy it.

4:24And he definitely needs to come back on because we barely make it through a couple of chapters. We're just scratching the surface of his travel diaries. But I really hope you enjoy getting this insight into a world that at least for me is just so unfamiliar. It's so alien. And that's, I think, why I find it so fascinating. So from Yosemite to the Himalayas, let's get started. Here's Jimmy.

4:51me. Jimmy, welcome to The Travel Diaries. It is so lovely to meet you. Having watched you on the screens all these years, how are you? I'm good, and thank you so much for having me. My absolute pleasure, and welcome to London as well. You are definitely one of the more adventurous names I've had sitting opposite me for the podcast, but we always start right at the very beginning of my guests' travel diaries with chapter one. And this is the moment in your life that opened up the world of adventure to you. Where would that be? Well, I grew up in a small town in south central Minnesota, the Midwest, very flat, definitely not known for producing any sort of high-altitude alpinists or really any adventurers.

5:46My parents were Chinese immigrants and so I grew up with a lot of kind of stereotypical expectations of immigrants. You know, my parents worked hard to move to the States and start a life there. So I started playing the violin when I was three. I swam competitively, studied martial arts. I had very high expectations in school, and I was kind of going through the motions of like a very structured life. My parents were librarians, though, and so they fed me a ton of books. And I think, honestly, the first moment where this world of adventure and living a really exciting, adventurous life came to me through books.

6:37Which in particular? Any ones that come to mind? I mean, I have to admit, I must have read The Hobbit like ten times when I was really young. So kind of fantastical kind of thing? More just kind of this idea of escaping like sort of a smaller, more traditional life to go out into the world. And I mean, literally fight dragons, you know. But I love the idea of exploring the world and kind of learning about yourself through these kind of extraordinary circumstances. and while I wasn't running away from trolls or fighting dragons I definitely had this idea of I want to know about myself I want to see what I'm capable of that I might not have been aware of you know if I didn't face something that was difficult and scary to me and when I found climbing, which by today's standard is quite late.

7:48You know, I was probably 16, 17. It really fed all of these needs and wants I had growing up. Climbing is kind of an exercise in failure. Like you try these climbs that are really hard for you or might seem impossible for you, and you fail multiple times, 10, 15, 20 times sometimes trying to do a climb and you have to kind of come back and you start to learn a lot about anticipating and embracing failure as part of a process, especially if it's something that's going to be really difficult for you. And that really kind of became part of who I am now. And was there a particular landscape or destination itself that drew you in in that way?

8:42Yes, certainly Yosemite. Yosemite is this extraordinary valley in California that has these giant, beautiful granite walls. And as a climber, it's kind of the ultimate place to rock climb because the objectives are huge and El Cap, when you stand underneath it for the first time as a climber, it might as well be like going to the moon. It looks so massive, almost incomprehensibly so, this giant ocean of granite. And I had all these goals, you know, to climb El Cap when I first got there and to climb El Cap in a day. You know, normally it takes two to three to five to seven days to climb El Cap.

9:36And my goal was to climb it in a day at some point. And once I did that, I realized that actually Yosemite was just the training ground. And then I started getting inspired to the bigger mountains, the greater rangers of the world, like the Karakorum and the Himalaya and really taking what I learned in Yosemite and applying it to even bigger objectives. And what did your parents who, you know, were going for your conventional route in life think about this kind of pivot? They were not very happy. You know, I I think they had a very kind of specific idea for me and for my life, which I totally appreciate.

10:26I mean, I think there was always a lot of love in my family. I knew that my parents loved me and they sacrificed so much for me. But in their mind, the best life looked like a very traditional, specific path. Like, I grew up thinking there were three jobs. You know, I could be a doctor, a lawyer, or go into finance. And maybe a fourth one, become a professor, you know. Like, it was very structured in the way that they kind of imagined success. And, you know, from a pretty young age, I knew that I wouldn't be any of those things. I did well in school, but I needed something more. So they were quite distraught because I moved into a little beat-up car when I was 21 and drove to Yosemite.

11:24And I told them, hey, look, I'm just going to climb and ski full time for a year and do odd jobs and just get it out of my system before I start my real career. But of course, you know, one year turned into two, two turned into three, three turned into four. I ended up living out of my car from when I was 21 to 28. I was literally a climbing bum, vagabond, following the seasons, the ski seasons and the climbing seasons and the mountain climbing seasons around the country. And I started doing expeditions. But the beginning of it was really difficult. You know, my parents were not supportive of it because they were worried.

12:15My dad used to say, you know, I call my dad and my dad used to say, look, our language is 5 ,000 years old and there is no word for what you do. Of course, we're worried. And I would call my sister. I have an older sister who's amazing. She's six years older, and she's always taken care of me and always been really encouraging of me to follow my own path. Of course, I'm like the youngest, right? And I would say, hey, how's mom doing? And she would say, well, she just keeps saying, I've raised a homeless man. you know and so I was very guilt-ridden and there was a lot of doubt because I knew it didn't fit in any box not even not to not to say just my parents but you know it wasn't very common in society that you would just take off and, you know, live out of a car or sometimes in a cave.

13:32Like I was just kind of living wherever I could. I was pretty much homeless. So I was just really devoted to this, to climbing, which I knew gave my life meaning and purpose. Like the moments where I really got to experience that sense of deep satisfaction and that sense of awe being in these amazing extraordinary landscapes those those fleeting moments fed so much to me that I I knew that it was something that I wouldn't be able to walk away from what were some of the those fleeting landscapes that kind of fed into that desire? Well certainly Yosemite like I said but then as I started climbing more in different mountain ranges in the United States like the Sierras and the Tetons, the Rocky Mountains up in Canada as well, then I started dreaming of these places I'd seen pictures of, like the Karakoram.

14:39And the Karakoram is basically the northern part of the Himalayan chain, and it's in Pakistan. So I put my first expedition together to the Karakoram, and it was beyond anything I'd even imagined from reading about it and looking at the pictures. I mean, the scale of the mountains and the altitude of the mountains was just so magnificent and overwhelming and that's what I wanted to feel you know when you walk into these ranges it's awe-inspiring and I think that experience of awe and and is something it's like one of the great experiences we can have as humans and so I was really addicted to that it wasn't so much the adrenaline people are like oh he's an adrenaline junkie it wasn't that it was that sense of awe.

15:31Really? So it's more about like the natural beauty of the world and the connectedness to that. Yeah, and experiencing it, putting your hands on it and climbing up these really astounding kind of formations that are inspiring to look at, but they're even more inspiring when you're clambering up them and seeing the view from there. Today's episode is supported by Una Italian Hospitality. You know how much I love Italy. And it's summer I'm always happy to return to once summer is over. An autumn weekend in Rome, a winter city break, a few days tucked away in the Tuscan countryside. There's so much to enjoy throughout the year.

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17:49You know, it requires extraordinary focus. You're thinking about the next hand movement, the next step. But are you able to take a step back while you're being that extraordinarily single focused and take in the environment? You're taking it in all the time. Yeah. And also, I mean, there is another aspect of climbing that I find extraordinary is how present it makes you feel because everything else falls away. It's like you're so focused in the moment. And that's, you know, an experience that I think we often try to attain through sitting meditation. But for me, it comes most powerfully through climbing.

18:36and there's other aspects of it too you know it's like the shared experiences and the bonds you create the friendships you create and we I feel like you've already segued us so neatly onto our next chapter which is the place where you learn the most about yourself I mean all these climbs have formative hugely formative moments but was there one um in particular that changed everything for you? Maybe it was this one, I mean, and we'll come on to it. I mean, every experience I've had in the mountains and climbing objectives has built upon itself to go a little further. That process taught me so much about myself.

19:24It taught me a lot about facing really big challenges and objectives and originally they were just climbs but that mindset really started to shift even across to my life as a photographer. I never studied photography you know and I made it a goal once I started to shoot a little bit that I wanted to shoot for National Geographic and you know they set the gold standard and then I wanted to shoot a cover for National Geographic. And then I applied the same mindset as I started making films, because I certainly had never, ever even thought of being a filmmaker, much less taken any sort of courses on filmmaking.

20:05And it was the same process. I just threw myself at it, committed to it, learned, failed, failed, failed, failed, learned, failed, you know, over and over again, but knew that that process would eventually lead me somewhere. And fast forward to today, and we're here to talk about your documentary film, Everest, The Other Side. Oh, Jimmy, that was quite a watch, I have to say, full of emotion. Just extraordinary. Can you take me back to the beginning before everything happened? What was a film that you thought you were making? and what did it then become? After Free Solo, the film about Alex Honnold free soloing El Capitan, I thought, well, I was so happy that I'd finished that film because I thought I will never make a film that feels higher stakes or more anxiety-inducing than that.

21:07And somehow I found it, or it found me. and you know when Jim and Hillary first approached me about making a film about their dream to climb and ski the direct north face of Mount Everest I already knew them for a long time I knew Hillary for 20 years and I wasn't surprised when they came to me in terms of their trajectory like what they were going to want to do next because not only were they close friends but they had really kind of accomplished and achieved, you know, some of the greatest first descents ever. And when I say first descents, it's to climb a route and then to ski a line back down that's never been skied.

21:57So that's called the first descent. They had already done the hardest first descents in the world, and they had just finished skiing the Lhotse Kuloha, which I had been eyeing for many years. And I knew that the only thing left that was more challenging and more serious and more committing than the Lhotse Kular was the direct north face of Everest. And that line on Everest has sort of a mythical quality to it. You know, people in our world have always known that that is the ultimate ski line on planet Earth. And so, like, what do you mean by that? Well, like in climbing and in skiing, a lot of it also comes down to aesthetics.

22:45You know, what's a really beautiful line. And when we walk into a range as climbers and skiers, you immediately can identify, you know, what is the most stunning, most beautiful, most aesthetically pleasing, most direct line in the range. So when you go to the Himalayas and you see the north face of Mount Everest, this is the biggest, most direct line on the tallest mountain on Earth. And it literally bisects the north face of Everest, which looks kind of like a giant pyramid. From the summit, almost a plumb line straight down, is the direct north face. and that's it's like it was created you know to be the greatest ski line on earth so that's how you feel you feel like it was created to be to be a ski line rather than like me as a non-skier looking at it being like how could anybody look at this and think it should be skied down it's almost like the complete opposite there's very few people in the world that can even look at it seriously and say okay i want to ski that well the two most likely people on the planet to have a chance of skiing it was you know Jim and Hillary this was as serious as it gets and I love stories about people pushing the human potential people doing things that have never been done before and the vulnerability that comes with pursuing a dream where the margins of success are so low and the chances of failure are so high you know that's a very tried this previously yeah I tried it in 2003 because I had a dream of doing it too, but over the course of the next 15, 16 years, I'd kind of decided that it probably wasn't in the cards.

24:42Not for this lifetime, maybe for another one. So I had kind of put it away, but when Jim and Hillary came to me with it, it was really going to be impossible for me to say no to them. And I remember when they asked me I felt a mixture of total dread and a sense of excitement and inevitability. And I knew that they were going to go try it with or without me. But what I saw was this story about pursuing an outrageous, impossible dream. But I also saw an extraordinary love story. And I also knew about Jim's history. and his life and what he'd been through. Just to explain to the listeners, Jim, had this horrendous tragedy happened to him where he had lost his wife and children in a plane crash.

25:42He faced extraordinary tragedy in his life, and yet he was able to pick himself up off the floor and really find love again, which is another extraordinary risk to take. When you've lost someone that, you know, your partner and someone that you were deeply in love with, to be able to come back and even risk loving again was, to me, really inspiring. and the choices that Jim made in his life to not only survive, but to thrive and to really live with such deep intention because he understood what a privilege it is to be alive every single day. And I thought that that story and their story was something that anybody could relate to.

26:45You know, everybody's suffered loss, whether that's a family member or, you know, people have lost their children or they've lost their job or they've lost a dream. You know, people all understand what it means to grieve and to feel that sort of loss that's, you know, can tear a hole through you. And to be able to see someone who's suffered that but come through it, and not only come through it but, you know, go on to live this extraordinary life and fall in love again, I thought was a very compelling idea underneath this, you know, dream to climb and ski the direct north face. Yeah. And then, of course, tragedy occurs again and we lose Hillary.

27:34And I wondered, you know, what with the loss of NIMS also recently, Do you think that with these huge losses in your world, that people's ambitions will alter when such kind of figureheads have passed? Yeah. I mean, I think that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that no one's getting out of here alive, right? That we are, there's one inevitable end that we will all face. And I think people go through life ignoring that. I never really thought about it that way. And people are really fearful of facing their mortality. I actually find that it's not something to shy away from, that it's really important to look at.

28:26Because for me, it's helped define a lot of the decisions I make in life and how I want to live my life. There's the cost of risking too much, but there's an extraordinary cost of risking too little. And, you know, we have a finite amount of time here. And without really thinking about your mortality, you lose sight of that. You just think, oh, it's, I've got plenty of time. I mean, that's one way to look at it, but really it's finite. I mean, you can average it out and say, okay, well, let's say my inevitable end might be at 80. That's a good guess. You can count the number of weeks it is until that time.

29:12You know, how many more weekends is that with your kids or with doing the things that you love? You know, I think it's, for me, I always, I'm very aware of how finite the time is. I think we all think we have some sort of control over when it happens, how it happens, you know, where it happens. And while Nims passed away climbing in the mountains, Hillary passed away skiing a line that she wanted to ski. you know people pass every day in all kinds of circumstances unrelated to being in the mountains and you know life is risk right there's when you walk out the front door get in your car you're taking some extraordinary risks are they as kind of obvious not really but if you look at it objectively it's like there's there's risk everywhere so with that in mind tell me then when you got to the top and that moment which is so moving euphoric how did it feel for you this was going to be my third summit so I've been up there before and I've been planning on this expedition.

30:38I've been planning all the shots. Like I had a really specific shot list for the summit. I'd been thinking about it for years. I had talked my team through it and I knew we had a limited amount of time up there. So I was thinking about it, even on those last 10 meters getting to the summit. And I was thinking, thinking, and then I stepped foot on the summit. I embraced Jim. I looked over into Nepal. I could see the whole Himalaya spread out in front of me, and the whole shot list just flew out the window. And I was almost having this out-of-body experience, just taking in everything. And I could hear myself thinking, because I was really emotional.

31:28I completely lost it. And I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing and making sure I'm staying on task. And but it was really emotional. Like the previous six years or the previous 20 years of dreaming about this moment of climbing the direct north face all of a sudden landed on me. And I didn't really have a choice. I couldn't quite compartmentalize it. So it was it was really an overwhelming moment. Yeah, it was really, really wonderful to watch. And now looking to the future, our last question is always about the destination that's at the top of your travel bucket list. Be that one last massive adventure that you want, or more, or just a place that you really want to get to.

32:19Jim and I get this question a lot in terms of like, what's next? And we both laugh because we're like, there's not really a bigger, more difficult objective on planet Earth for us. And so there's all kinds of places I would still love to visit. A lot of the places that are really meaningful to me are the places I've actually been before, but I now want my kids to experience it. And so this last spring, I took the kids for spring break out to Nepal, and we trekked up to Everspace Camp together. So it's like re-experiencing these places through their eyes and seeing it for the first time through their eyes again is really kind of something I find really meaningful.

33:16And my son, James, is 10, and my daughter, Marina, was 12 when we did it. And it was like three weeks in the Himalayas, and it was really beautiful. Are they going to follow in your footsteps, do you think? I hope not. No, I mean, I think my job is really to give them a really deep breadth of experiences so that they can choose the path that they want to choose. And hopefully they're inspired by the things that I do, but more so the mindset that comes with it. Thank you, Jimmy, for sharing your wisdom with us and your beautiful film. Thank you for sharing your travel diaries. Lovely to meet you.

33:59Yeah, thank you.

34:04oh well a massive thank you to jimmy for joining me on the podcast his latest film everest the other side is out now and i can tell you if you watch it you're going to be gripped it's uh incredibly powerful film and i don't think i breathed for for two hours yeah it's it's worth watching it's in cinemas now if you enjoy the podcast don't forget to hit follow or subscribe on your podcast app. It means that you'll get a fresh dose of Wanderlust in your podcast library each week. Two, in fact, now that we have unpacked on Sundays. Although we have a couple of Sundays coming up because of destination specials where there won't be a Sunday episode.

34:46I'm really pleased to hear that you're enjoying them though. And I look forward to keeping those up. It's been great speaking to people in the industry and getting these additional nuggets of insight. So thank you for your feedback on those. If you want to follow me on Instagram or TikTok, I'm at Holly Rubenstein. I always love to hear from you. In the meantime, wishing you all safe travels and sending loads of love.

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