Jimmy Chin spent his twenties living out of a 1989 Subaru Loyale, splitting time between Yosemite and the Tetons, sleeping in a cave in Camp 4 and a chicken coop in Jackson while his parents — both librarians in Minnesota — wondered aloud if they had raised a homeless man. Three decades later he is an Oscar-winning director, and his new book, Rules to Live By (Celadon), mixes memoir with conversations from ten people who have done things their own way: Yvon Chouinard, Yo-Yo Ma, Simone Biles, Ridley Scott, Kelly Slater, Annette Bening, war photographer Lynsey Addario, conservationist Kris Tompkins, Alex Honnold, and retired SEAL Team 6 command master chief Bill King.
Speaking at his first book event at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Chin admitted writing the book was harder than any climb — 'there's a reason I'm a filmmaker' — but the stories he told were pure adventure. The most revealing: he nearly refused to make Free Solo. When he told producer Evan Hayes he'd been mulling a documentary about Honnold, the project was green-lit by National Geographic instantly. Then Honnold mentioned he was thinking about free soloing El Capitan, and Chin called to say he was out. His fear was simple — what if the cameras caused the fall? What changed his mind was knowing Honnold better than almost anyone: the most calculated, brutally honest climber he'd ever met, who built his ability by nudging his comfort zone outward a little at a time, for an entire career. Chin's crew of elite climbers followed three rules — friends first, climbers second, filmmakers last.
Chin is also candid about the hardest call in mountaineering: turning around. On Meru, he and his team ran seven days of food into 19 days on the wall — and walked away 100 metres from the summit, a decision Bill King pressed him on when SEAL Team 6 invited him to speak at an undisclosed base. His advice for anyone whose plans go sideways, on a mountain or anywhere else: separate perceived risk from actual risk, park the imagined dangers, deal with the real ones, then execute. Humour helps too — King told him it's the trait that gets SEALs through training, and Chin says the same holds at altitude.
So why should a traveller care? Because Chin's whole philosophy is really about how to spend a life outdoors well — and how to come home. His latest film, Everest: The Other Side, follows Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson's attempt to climb and ski the North Face of Everest; Nelson later died in the mountains, and Chin's reflection doubles as an honest look at why people keep going back. The book's closing chapters, built around Chouinard and Tompkins, are about keeping wild places intact for the next generation — which is, ultimately, a travel story too.
For anyone drawn to Yosemite's granite, Everest's big mountains, or simply the question of what's worth the risk, Chin's answers are worth the read.
Story via Outside Online.
