immy Chin is waiting for me
at the summit. I took an aer-
ial tram; the man behind
some of the best alpine expe-
dition images in recent years
ran 5 miles up 4,000 verti-
cal feet. Here, far above the
Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
treeline, the pro climber and
his wife, Chai Vasarhelyi,
start tromping southbound. The jagged
peaks above and around us are glazed with
snow and ice, a craggy wonderland lorded
over by the skyscraping spire of Grand
Teton in the distance. The 44-year-old part-
time Jackson resident eagerly points out
where he likes to climb, go for a run, and
ski downhill when he is at work and at
play—with him, the line between the two is
hard to delineate.
Chin—an award-winning filmmaker
who’s climbed to the top of Mt. Everest and
trekked across 300 miles of the Chang Tang
plateau in Tibet—is almost constantly on
the move. Adventures and documentaries
and photo assignments have taken him all
over the world, from high elevations in Ant-
arctica to the radio tower atop One World
Trade Center in New York City. On this
particular cloudless day, Chin is not under
pressure to skip town. “I try to spend as
much time as possible in Jackson,” he says.
“But the reality is, sometimes I’m here just
long enough to do laundry and repack my
bags and fly to Greenland or wherever.”
He and Vasarhelyi, an accomplished filmmaker herself, had just
completed post-production on Free Solo, a documentary that was
shown at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals this fall. Most
climbing movies, no matter how dramatic, have a tendency to re-
main niche projects, but this one stands a good chance of crossover
success, as it traces Alex Honnold’s 2017 untethered ascent of
Yosemite National Park’s legendary granite wall, El Capitan. The
audacious act stole headlines, and Chin’s crew was there to capture
it all, making their way up the rock face alongside Honnold. “The
film isn’t just about climbing,” says Chin as he downs apple slices on
a boulder beneath Cody Peak. “It’s about hard choices in life, about
ambition and dreams and relationships—really profound things
that great challenges can bring out in people. That’s what drives me
these days.”18 OCTOBER 2018 ❖ SUNSET
TAYLOR GLENNTravel