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 Athlete to Athlete Interview
 Mark Synnott with Jimmy Chin July 2001 The North Face athlete Mark Synnott uses his unique perspective to get to know the rest of our athlete team - who they are, what inspires them, and what lies ahead. Jimmy Chin and I have been friends for several years, so this recent interview was a great chance for me to catch up with him and find out what's been going on in his busy life. When he answered his cell phone, he sounded very tired -- who wouldn't be after returning from an epic powder day at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jimmy is widely admired in the mountaineering community for his alpine climbing and big wall adventures to obscure areas of the Himalayas. While other climbers jockey for position on well known peaks, Jimmy and his crew are strolling through valleys where every peak is unnamed and unclimbed. Jimmy Chin is truly one of America's great adventurers…and a fantastic photographer to boot. Mark: I've heard through the grapevine that you have been really busy lately. Where are you now and what have you been up to? Jimmy: Well, I'm actually feeling really worked right now because I just got home from an amazing day of skiing at Jackson Hole. We have been getting dumped. I usually spend most of the winter hanging out here, doing as much skiing as I can. I am really into skiing. Mark: Me too, except that I live in New Hampshire and we've had an awful winter. You better not rub it in! Jimmy: [chuckle] All of my free time is spent skiing, either at the resort or in the backcountry. Jackson is a unique resort because they have an open gate policy, meaning you have really good access to the backcountry from the resort itself. You can head out as far as you want, or just ski out of the boundary for a while and then ski back in at the bottom to catch another lift ride back up. Mark: You're killing me dude. Sounds like a tough existence you've got. But what about the avalanche danger? Jimmy: It's something you have to assess all the time. Just recently we were out skiing something that we had just done the day before. That night the wind had switched directions and scoured the face clean. Then it switched again and seriously loaded it up. We cut a few things loose that day, but for the most part we manage to avoid getting in trouble. It's pretty big terrain, stuff that could slide. We ski aggressively, but our crew is very experienced and safe. Most of us teach avy courses or have done so in the past. These days I have to admit that I spend more time skiing than climbing. Mark: So how about work? I assume you must have to do some of that when it's not a powder day. Jimmy: Of course. I have been doing a lot of traveling, doing slide shows and participating in some North Face engagements. But more than anything I've really been working hard on my photography. Mark: I've been seeing your photos published all over the place. Seems like you're doing really well with that. Tell me more. Jimmy: Well, photography is a really good job for me because I like working for myself. Honestly, I don't function that well when I have a boss and set hours - that's just not my personality. I get to decide when and where to work and for the most part I can choose who I work with. I just got back from an amazing ice climbing shoot up in the Canadian Rockies. I went up there for a couple weeks and hooked up with a bunch of the big guns, people like Kim Czismazia, Will Gadd, Sean Isaac, Abby Watkins and Rich Marshall. I guess the only down side to shooting so much is that these days I'm spending a lot of time behind the camera instead of in front of it. So, it's cutting into my climbing time, but it's a worthy compromise, I'm starting to realize. If I ever complain, my friends set me straight about how good a deal I have. There are definitely worse ways to make a living. I think sometimes people don't realize how hard a job this is, though. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes, like sitting at the light table for days after a shoot. I love it though, because this is a job where I can combine my creative energy with my technical climbing skills. Mark: How long have you been doing it, and how did you support yourself before? Jimmy: I've been shooting for a long time, but doing it full time as a job for the past three years. Before that I was an instructor for Nols. Teaching at Nols was a great experience and it's something that I really appreciate having in my background. Instead of just guiding, I felt like I was teaching, stuff like rock climbing, backcountry survival skills, first aid and natural history. I also taught and learned a lot about expedition behavior and group dynamics - that stuff has come in handy on my personal trips Mark: Any other trips you've done recently, other than Canada? Jimmy: Yeah, Conrad and I flew to Europe in February to try the North Face of the Eiger. I guess you could say I've been kind of getting shut down recently, because we showed up the day that a six week high pressure ended. It dumped a meter of snow right after we arrived, which put the face completely out of condition for the rest of our trip. It was supposedly an epic climbing season over there this winter, but unfortunately we missed it. Mark: Here in my office, I have one of your pictures from your K7 expedition pinned up on my wall. It is a beautiful shot, but I'm even more impressed with the climb itself and the style in which you guys tackled it. Most people have never even heard of this peak, so tell me a bit about how this trip came about? Jimmy: Well, I sense maybe you have gone through this same life stage where you're trying to decide whether to get a job, go to school, or just climb. I asked myself this question and decided to climb, and if I was going to climb I wanted to really make the most of it, to really go for my dream climbs. One place I had always wanted to go was Pakistan. I saw some photos of Nameless Tower when I first started climbing and I said to myself, 'this is the most insane looking mountain I've ever seen.' I wanted to take the climbing skills that I had learned in places like Yosemite and the Tetons and apply them in a remote, alpine setting. Then I ran into Peter Croft in 1998 shortly after he had returned from the Charakusa Valley, which is in northern Pakistan. He was raving about these incredible towers and I said to him right there that I would like to go. He stopped, looked at me and said, very seriously: "You should." So then I started really thinking about, how can I do this? With a lot of work, I managed to piece together a full dirt-bag-style expedition with four of my friends. Mark: These trips are really expensive, I know. How did you guys put it together? Jimmy: Believe it or not, we sold 500 t-shirts, and we made $10.50 per shirt. We told people the money was going directly to the expedition fund, which it was, and a lot of people helped us out. Mark: Actually, now that you mention it, I have one those t-shirts. I got it from your partner Doug Workman. Jimmy: We made over $5000 on that deal, which helped a bunch. The rest we paid for ourselves, from working as Nols instructors. Brady Robinson and I went in a month early and climbed this spire called Fathi, which tops out at around 17,500 feet. It was our first really big route and we did it in a single push. After climbing Fathi we met up with Doug and Jed Workman, and Evan Howe. Just like Peter had promised, base camp was a beautiful alpine meadow with flowers, streams, rocks everywhere, alpine objectives everywhere. That's when we saw K7. It was so proud that we kind of wanted to poach it right then and there. But of course we couldn't do that because it is a restricted peak near the disputed Siachen Glacier. At that time you could not get a permit for K7. We only had a trekking permit, which allowed us to climb whatever we wanted under 6000 meters, but nothing higher. Since we paid for the trip ourselves, there were no pressures whatsoever, and the whole thing was a totally laid-back, mellow but super fun experience with good friends. We also had great weather and managed to climb several high quality new routes. I wish all my trips were like that. Mark: So I take it that you decided to go for K7 the next year? Jimmy: Well, not exactly. The summer after that we ended up in another unexplored and previously closed area called the Kondus Valley, which is even further east than K7.This place is even closer to the line of control. Mark: You've kind of lost me here Jimmy. How in the world did you end up in the Kondus Valley? Jimmy: You're right. Neither of these trips would have happened without the help of Galen Rowell. He was the one who had been to the Charakusa with Peter and Conrad in 1998 and had shown us some inspirational photos, and he was also the person who had suggested the Kondus Valley. I was basically some kid off the street who he didn't even know who was hitting him up for information, but he totally went out of his way to help us. You see Galen was in this area in 1978 with Kim Schmitz and some other guys and he said that there was tons of rock. They didn't know quite how good it was, but Galen had some photos and it did indeed look amazing. So we decided to head in there to climb sub-6000 meter rock towers. Luckily, the Ministry of Tourism agreed to give us a trekking permit to the area. Mark: This sounds incredible Jimmy, especially when you consider that no one had ever even heard of this place. I certainly never had. Tell me more about the environment. What were the mountains like? Jimmy: The peaks range from low 5000 meters all the way up to 7500 meters. There is a lot of big alpine stuff to do around there, and many of the peaks are still unclimbed. We were anticipating that we would be heading up high onto the glaciers, but on the walk in we found this unbelievable wall at the confluence of two valleys, right above a village. Not only that, there's this incredible line going right up the gut of it. There was no way we could pass it up. Mark: Who were the people on this trip and did you have a liaison officer or a guide? Jimmy: The other people were Steph Davis, Dave Anderson and Brady. We didn't have a liaison but we did have an officer from the Pakistani military who accompanied us. The best thing about this trip was that we got to meet General Tahir. He is the Brigadier General overseeing the entire northern region of the country. Obviously he is a very important man because this is the area in Kashmir which has been under dispute with India for so long. For some reason, I'm not sure why, General Tahir was really, really psyched to help us out. He was the one who had agreed for us to be allowed in this closed area. After we climbed the tower, which incidentally was an amazing climb, we named the tower after him. Mark: Tell me about the General? Jimmy: He is extremely friendly, very westernized, and spoke perfect English. It turns out that he had served as a liaison officer for Reinhold Messner back in the day, and Reinhold had instilled in him a deep respect for mountains and mountaineering. We spent a lot of time on that trip hanging out with members of the special forces. These officers were pretty close to our age and were very well educated. Being able to communicate so openly with them was a great cultural exchange for us. At the end of the expedition the general had a banquet for us and he asked if there was anything else that we wanted to climb. Brady and I had been dreaming about K7, and we knew that it was further away from the fighting than the Kondus Valley. So we asked if we could climb K7. The General looked into it and managed to get us the permit. I think the last time they gave one out was in 1986. Mark: I have seen pictures of this peak and it is totally inspiring. Tell me more about it. Jimmy: It's like a fortress with a lot of gendarmes, turrets, and big granite buttresses. It's really steep on every side and has a very well protected summit. A very complex mountain with approximately 8500 feet of vertical relief. Mark: Has it ever been climbed? Jimmy: One time, by a Japanese team that sieged it for three months and fixed 6000 feet of rope on it. We were really psyched to try and climb it in a single push, capsule style with four ropes. Mark: How did Conrad Anker end up getting involved? Jimmy: Conrad had seen K7 when he visited the Charakusa in 1998. I wouldn't have even been looking around this area if it hadn't been for those guys. K7 was a peak that really struck a chord with Conrad. I was doing a photo shoot with Conrad and I told him that Brady and I had a permit for K7. He was pretty stoked. We were psyched to have him too, because Conrad is really easy to get along with and we figured we had a thing or two to learn from him. It worked out really well. We got hammered on the route but managed to have a pretty good time together. Mark: What do you mean by hammered? Tell me what happened up there. Jimmy: The climbing was going really well and we were making good time, but then on day five it started snowing. Not real windy but lots of big wet flakes coming down. It snowed for the next 10 days. We were on the wall for 15 days and we had only planned to be up there for eight. So we had to do some serious rationing. There was one point when we sat in the portaledge for five days straight. We pretty much just laid in there and tried to conserve energy and not eat too much food. Mark: What's it like to sit in the ledge for five days? Jimmy: You know what it's like. Days just kind of roll into each other. You lay around and have a lot of time to think about stuff. I think it's good for you. Mark: I still can't totally picture what the route is like. Tell me how you guys had broken it down. Jimmy: Well, the climb starts with a long snow gully leading to a 1500-foot wall. Above the wall is a hanging snowfield that leads to another 1500-foot wall, then a complex summit ridge with deep snow and another 500-foot wall, then some mixed climbing to the summit. Our plan was to climb capsule style to the summit ridge, then cache most of our gear and go fast and light, one or two days to the top. We never got a chance because of the 10 day snow storm but Brady and I are definitely going back in the summer of 2003. Not sure about Conrad, but we'd love to have him if he can swing it. Mark: If you find yourself looking for a recruit, let me know. Jimmy: For sure, I will. Mark: Got any other adventures coming up that you can tantalize me with? Jimmy: I'm not really planning anything huge at the moment, mainly just because I've been out of the country for half of the last year, and I've been working really hard on the photography. I do have plans for Alaska though. I'm not sure what, or with whom. Mark: Funny you should mention that because I've been looking for a partner to join me on a ski mountaineering adventure up there. Maybe we could go together? Jimmy: Wow, that would be awesome! Let's see what we can figure out. |
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