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[chuckling]
I don't need to be remembered.
[woman] How would you like
people to think of you?
Um, I guess I would leave it up to the people...
because that's--
I guess,
you know, when I-- when I say that
climbing gives me the opportunity to-- to fulfill my dreams and to-
um,
that it is something that is full-- self-fulfilling, right?
Then I guess people just have to look at my climbs and then they know who I am.
♪♪♪
[Conrad] Humans are driven to explore.
I think it's in our very nature that going back to
ten, twenty thousand years, or even before that
there was always someone in each tribe or group
that would go out into the unknown and seek out reward.
[Jimmy] You look up at a mountain, if you can see the summit,
you have to like trick your brain into thinking you have a chance to stand on top.
You kind of puff yourself up and you say,
"I have what it takes to get to the top of that mountain" as insane as that is.
[David] It's definitely risky, and it's definitely riskier than if you would live a normal life,
but people are not aware of the risks within normal life.
[Leo] I mean simply put; the more dangerous it is,
the more exciting it is, and I kind of hate that that's true, but it is.
[Reinhold] Adventuring it's not a play where we calculate good or bad.
We calculate only possible or impossible.
[Hilaree] A lot of people I know have died.
You know, unfortunately, it is just part of the deal, but we don't like it.
It's just how it is.
[Xavier] The mountain can give you strength, or it can crush you, too.
Makes you feel how small you are.
[Leo] Mountains are the finest playgrounds in the world.
They're just-- they're this epic canvas to go and play out with your friends
and do the most amazing things you can imagine.
♪♪♪
[Erik] I wasn't going to be a great basketball or a baseball player.
Instead of like just protecting myself and sitting in that dark place, I-
something told me to open myself up and say yes to like these new experiences.
I do remember as I went blind, sitting in the cafeteria
and listening to all the excitement, you know, around me, like,
all my friends are all having fun, you know.
They're all having food fights, and telling jokes, and laughing, and I was just sitting there.
And it was a stark sort of separation between me and the world.
And I thought I don't want to be on the sidelines like I want to be in the thick of things.
I want to be in the world.
And I know that when I got to the top of that first rock face, it wasn't even the top,
it was just like the top in the first pitch, and I sat like on a little ledge and-
and I can-- I could hear the valley below me, like, all the sound vibrations
moving out through space.
And I could hear the wind blowing through the trees
down below, and I just thought this is it.
[Lynn] I was a climber at heart from the get go.
Climbing came from mountaineering really,
the objective of getting to the summit of a mountain
and then out of that people realized that they had to train on technical rock faces.
So rock climbing was born as practice for the mountains.
What I'm most famous for is making the first free ascent of the nose on El Capitan,
which means that I was the first person, not first woman,
to actually climb up the face using a rope for protection in case I fell
but I climbed every single move all the way from ground to top and that had never been done.
People thought it was impossible.
[Jimmy] So, I was a rock climber first, and
picked up a camera probably when I was twenty-three or twenty-four.
Never studied photography, but just had a kind of a natural affinity to it.
I found it really engaging and-- and it came to me pretty naturally.
It was really just to capture some of the things that I was doing with my friends
and the community I was surrounded by.
We're all, you know, really passionate climbers.
Many of them went on to be some of the best climbers of our generation.
[Pasang] I grew up in Lukla. Lukla is like a main gateway of Everest region.
I used to see lots of tourists come to climb.
When I said I wanted to climb the mountain,
and also the people like saying that, "Oh, that's a male job.
Woman shouldn't do that."
[Leo] Personally, the mountains I like to climb are quite-- they're quite specific.
I don't really like the big snowy ones.
I tend to focus on mountains that aren't high altitude
that are extremely difficult.
[Conrad] I love being in the mountains.
I always pursued gravity
as a source of inspiration, challenge, self-discovery.
Climbing because it's built upon this trust, this connection,
where someone's life is literally in your hands, you have to have that balance to it.
And that understanding of how humans can work towards a common goal, and the adversary is not,
other humans, but the natural environment, it's gravity, it's the rock, it's snow, it's ice,
it's temperature, it's rain, it's food, it's self-sufficiency.
I think the passion for climbing
and the thing that I just crave to climb up the rock is just within me.
I just had this dream that I would like to be a professional climber,
and I just had any doubts about it.
Like I was a hundred percent sure.
[Emily] I just remember as a kid seeing like a boulder or something and being like,
"Oh, I have to get to the top of that. Like that's what I want to do."
And I'd spend hours doing it.
And then, to be introduced to a place where you could go do that, and it was okay,
and it was safe, and you could do it as much as you wanted to,
and there were like different difficulty levels,
and then add in the fact that I was a gymnast.
So, I was already strong and flexible, and had a lot of body awareness.
I think the combination of that was just really alluring to me.
[Alex] I definitely would not say that I'm gifted.
I've been pretty much climbing full-time for twenty years,
and at no point did I ever have any prodigious gift.
If you practice anything for twenty years, you're going to be pretty good at it.
[David] I knew from-- not maybe-- not the very beginning, but really early on
that this was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I wouldn't say that I am who I am, or where I am today just because I'm gifted.
To be at the very top, it's always a combination of having certain talent,
being determined, being passionate.
It's more than just being gifted I guess.
[Angelika] I'm a rock climber and an ice climber.
I think climbing was always something that was inside me as a child.
When I was ten years old, I did my first via ferrata here in the Dolomites,
and from this moment on I was just interested to touch the rock.
[Xavier] What I do is a bit of a mountaineering sports,
but I think I've taken it the other way around.
I've taken it from the snowboarding perspective.
So, what I like is you're making nice turns, nice jumps,
and it transformed itself into making bigger lines
and then go into this, bigger and bigger mountains that are more and more remote.
[Maureen] I think I had the one counselor a camp that said, "You can skip this if you want,
if you're not comfortable climbing, or it's too hard, you don't have to do this activity."
For me that just elicited kind of a, "Screw you. I'm gonna do it, if you think I can't."
I didn't think I was disabled, and I'm not disabled.
I knew that other people thought that I was
and so I just kind of set out to prove everybody wrong.
And climbing just happened to be my venue to do that.
I grew up fifty kilometers south from Mount Everest.
I quit my school when I was sixteen and I follow with trackers as a porter.
That is very normal in our area.
For me it's very difficult for me to say, "I am a professional climber,
or I am a professional mountaineer."
In my experience on the mountain,
every time we learn new things we need to tackle new situations.
I grew up studying classical music, not outdoors,
not from an athletic family, very studious.
My main hobby was reading.
Looking back, I can see that it was a very focused environment.
When I was eighteen, I started climbing and so, very radically it changed my life.
[Reinhold] I'm most thankful in my life to my mother.
She let us go.
You have to imagine, I was sixteen, my brother was fourteen,
and we went four o'clock in the morning after she prepared us breakfast.
Just a rucksack and our shoes, and the ropes.
Young boys, very young boys, still children and we went to climb.
Whether I liked it or not I had a tendency to sort of pick the weird road.
The road that didn't necessarily fall in line with what might be traditional.
Yay!
Deep water soloing for me is without a doubt, the-- the kind of purest form of climbing,
just pure movement over the water.
That's when you're climbing up faces that are over deep water, so that if you fall,
you don't hit anything, you fall into the water,
but you do have to land like a pencil, you know,
so that you go through the water and you don't hurt yourself
because if you have your arms out that slaps
and you can dislocate your shoulder and cause serious injuries.
[Chris] For me it's this really cool process
of discovering something and kind of envisioning a line.
Oftentimes, you spend years practicing the moves and refining the sequence,
until you can enchain the whole thing in one pure section of climbing.
All of these elements are there at once; the rock, the water,
the air, you know, and the fire inside.
[Adam] A climber that I really admire is Tommy Caldwell.
He's like a perfect all-rounder.
He can climb in any kind of style, or discipline.
Definitely his climbing story was not easy, losing the finger.
[Tommy] My dad was a mountain guide.
So, I started climbing when I was three years old.
I didn't think I would ever make a life of it,
you know, I figured it would just be a hobby.
When I was twenty-two years old, I was very focused on climbing
and trying to become the best I could.
And then I ended up chopping off my left index finger with the table saw.
And this was something that stressed me out a lot, you know.
Your finger is essential for the type of climbing that I was doing.
It was very important
and I think everybody in my community, kind of, was like, "Oh, that's so sad.
He was looking like he could do all these great things in climbing and then he chopped off
his finger, and it's probably over."
I think my worry about that is what spurred me on.
Like I wanted to prove them wrong.
I wanted to prove my own fears wrong.
So, there are different disciplines in climbing.
I think the most ultimate risky is free solo, but there's so much risk involved.
It's just, basically, free climbing.
So no use of gear
and you just climb up the wall, but every mistake can mean death.
I can see why people like it.
I can see how amazing feeling it can be, like, going five hundred meters off the ground
and just having-- having nothing else than just your back and climbing shoes,
but it's a risk that I don't want to take.
[Lynn] Alex Honnold, very famous American climber, when he's free soloing, he's not all excited
because if he was he wouldn't be able to climb as well as he does.
So, he has to mitigate that and push the-- those negative feelings out.
In fact, I think he's pretty well engaged in what he's doing and-
and those negative thoughts might start to enter and he pushes him away.
"No, no, no. I'm in control." I think he's totally convinced that he's in control.
He's such a good climber and most of the time you're following cracks,
so it's the traditional style of climbing, jamming your hands and feet in the cracks,
and that's pretty solid as opposed to hanging off your fingertips.
He knows he's doing something risky,
that something unexpected could happen, but it's very unlikely.
But he's willing to accept that risk to live the life that he lives. So for him it's worth it.
I mean I've definitely had many moments where--
where I think, you know, if something goes wrong,
or if I fall off, or you know, if any one of the handful of factors happen,
like, yeah, I could potentially perish, for sure.
Yeah, I mean there are tons of things that I would never free solo.
The difficulty rating doesn't mean as much for free soloing as it does for-- for rope climbing
because something that's like rated quite difficult could be just a matter of fitness.
It's just a matter of like holding on to the hold long enough, and so,
if you have that level of fitness, it could feel quite safe.
Whereas something that's rated quite easy, it could be smooth like a mirror
and you just slide right off.
Even though it's easy I mean it's just really insecure.
The risk is the likelihood of falling off and that totally depends on the terrain,
and depends how difficult it is, depends how skilled the climber is,
depends how much preparation went into it.
Weather conditions like skin conditions like how your shoes feel
just like a lot of different things going on.
And the things I've just done so much easy so long in my life
that I feel like I've experienced a lot of the things that there are to experience.
[Emily] Maybe in order to achieve that feeling, that like, powerful feeling,
he needs something as difficult as that
because everything else is just not hard enough.
And you have to have like the utmost confidence in yourself,
and in what you're doing, and in your skills.
And that's a really empowering thing, to feel that and to get to the bottom or the top
and be like, "I just did that and I mentally did that, more than anything."
[Maureen] You know, I'm on ropes and equipment, but I still get this really Zen-like focus
because I don't want to fall.
Maybe my attitude would be different if I was totally fine just falling over and over,
and taking giant huge woofers, but because I don't, I get that focus while I'm climbing.
And I can imagine that someone like Alex, he's climbed so much where he started to lose
that focus because climb is just climbing again.
So, I'd have to imagine that's just another way to sort of recapture that ultimate sort of
laser connection between you and the rock.
[screaming]
[Steph] There are really serious consequences.
It's not the same thing as just sport climbing, or climbing with a rope where,
"Oh, I fell and nothing happened, but I was scared."
That's a different consequence level.
When you're in the mountains, when you're
climbing without a rope, when you're jumping off a cliff,
there is a very serious consequence,
which is that you can get really injured or you can die.
I mean occasionally with climbing there is like a thrill where,
you know, something unexpected happens, or you get really-
really afraid and then you overcome it.
I mean, you know, there are, of course, moments
that-- that are sort of, more of the conventional thrill-seeking.
But for the most part, I think climbing provides that deep satisfaction
of like doing something challenging, and doing it well,
and putting a lot of effort into it,
and just, you know, like that long slow grind.
[Leo] It's not the same as snowboarding, or B.A.S.E. jumping.
It's very slow,
which is fundamentally different to most of what people call extreme sports.
It's a really drawn-out process.
You have to constantly decide whether you're going to continue or not,
and you're faced with those decisions.
Then they're not split-second reaction-based decisions.
They're very, kind of, informed, problem-solving, experience-based decisions.
[Tommy] I don't climb to pursue the typical adrenaline rush
that you think of, like, what B.A.S.E. jumpers get a thrill
out of like that instantaneous adrenaline rush.
Like generally, that's not a part of rock climbing.
If that happens, it's a bad thing.
[Steph] I would say one thing about jumping, and one reason that I do it,
and that I think people do it, is that it is very emotional.
To have that moment of standing at the edge, and making that decision to go,
and understanding there's no going back, it's such a powerful encapsulation of life,
of knowing what you think should happen, and what you want to happen,
but also accepting that something unknown may happen.
Wingsuiting is always inherently a little more special.
It takes a little more effort and it is a very different experience
to be flying off the edge of a cliff.
You have the visual experience of a bird for a very short time, and so, you're flying,
and looking down, and looking here, and looking there,
and deciding if you want to go steeper, get higher, and where to turn.
I think when you're new, the whole emotion is like, "I can't believe that I get to do this."
And it works. And it's this kind of like, "Wow."
Now, from where I am I feel that it's just really a very powerful,
magical experience to be able to do such a thing,
but I also understand the costs that it has.
And so, I have a very different perspective than perhaps in the first or second year,
when it was just super wow, and, yes, I know things happen,
but whatever, it won't happen to me and...
Whoo!
[Leo] If I ever felt like I was gonna die, I wouldn't have done it
and there were jumps that I walked away from, lots of them. You don't think that.
You think you're gonna have a hell of a ride, you're doing it for fun,
and then you're gonna do it again, and again, and again, you're gonna do as many that day
and as many the next day as you possibly can, and-
and every time anyone jumps off a cliff, they don't think they're gonna die.
You don't feel-- it's not-- you're not playing Russian roulette.
You don't feel like you're throwing the dice and chancing life.
You feel like you're gonna take a more aggressive line, and fly harder, and swoop this,
and do that, and have a high-five at the bottom, but that's what everyone thinks.
Set, go.
Some of the experiences that you have in the outdoors certainly, B.A.S.E. jumping,
skiing, high-speed sports, it's undeniable that you have a full-on adrenaline rush
and it is a straight up... [simulates rush]
You know, when-- when you land or when you get to the bottom, or when you come off the wave,
it's you know, you shake it and your eyes are on stalks
and that's an adrenaline rush, definitely.
And it is addictive.
[Xavier] You know, the harder and the further you push yourself,
the more at the end of your run you're gonna get this--
this bum-- this-- this explosion of feelings and-- and I think that's-
that's when we have this kind of adrenaline people stereotype a little bit,
but-- but I think that, eventually,
you know, the pleasure of what we do truly comes after.
It's not on the moment because it's, uh, it's too intense to-- to enjoy it.
[David] It just doesn't make sense to reduce it to one single feeling.
It doesn't make sense to reduce it to say, "I'm doing it for the adrenaline rush."
It's way more complex and, in my opinion,
the reason I do it is because it's self-fulfilling to me.
I like it when I stand in front of a of an untouched face of a mountain.
And if I can look up and imagine the way I'm gonna climb up
you transition that idea into something that's actually reality, right?
That's-- that's a beautiful thing in my opinion.
From an outside perspective, I fail most of the times
because I-- most of the times
I don't make it up to the summit when I go on an expedition.
[Alex] Well, I think that that for me the biggest rewards with climbing
are sort of like a deep satisfaction with reaching the summit,
or not necessarily with reaching the summit even,
but deep satisfaction from the process.
I mean it's very satisfying to know that you've put a lot of effort into something,
and you've eventually gotten some kind of return from it.
When we make it to the summit of a Himalayan peak, the journey is only half over.
There might be a little bit of elation, but there really-- there isn't like this
great moment and the clouds open up and Beethoven's 9th plays in your head
and you're like, "Yeah, I made it." You know all this chest thumping stuff.
It's more like you're very humble,
you're very respectful because you still have to make it down.
[Hilaree] There's trips that I have put
years and years and years of effort and planning into.
You know from the outside and especially, if you're watching a film about climbing
or something, you're always moving and you're in the mountains, and, etc.
, but there's these huge chunks of time where you're--
you are-- you're stuck, I mean, you're in a
tiny-- tiny tent and you can't move because there's a storm outside, or
the weather is such that you can't retreat from where you are on a mountain.
Like, "What the hell am I doing here? Why am I here? I should be home.
I should be, you know, taking my kids to soccer practice and instead
I'm like stuck and I'm not moving. I'm not doing anything."
So. there's this really
crazy balance of having to be able to move on a moment's notice
and get right into the thick of scary climbing,
right alongside being immobile for like, you know, sometimes days on end.
And you get to the top, and it's kind of like you do expect fireworks to go off and like,
you know, the red carpet to be rolled out, and like something amazing is gonna happen,
but, of course, it doesn't and you're just at the top.
And sometimes you have a great view,
sometimes it's like socked in and you can't even see anything.
Sometimes I also question by myself that why you really like to do this, you know.
Even like, sometime in the mountain it gets so cold.
I don't get like enough food. I'm sh-- I cannot sleep at all that I also questioned by myself
like why you are doing it? But I don't have an answer because I love it.
It's not necessarily to be on the top.
I found positive energy on the mountain.
It's so different power.
I feel that every time I go there.
[Chris] You know there is a risk that you could dedicate years of your life to something
and come up empty-handed.
I think that's-- that's one of the interesting experiences in personal battles
that you have while working on these climbs is that it really forces you to question:
"Well, why am I doing this when I've been forced to give up."
That's when you shed all these layers and you have these very perfect moments
where you're able to just climb as if you were light as a feather.
[Tommy] I climbed a route I called the Dawn Wall,
where I took seven years of just trying to prepare
and I'd go-- go to that wall for two or three months a year and practiced the individual moves.
And then I would train the rest of the year, and it was--
I never really knew whether I was gonna be able to do it.
And so, that was kind of pushing my mental endurance as far as I could.
At times you feel elated, you feel you can get to the top and the sun seems a little brighter,
that you know, the sky seems like a deeper shade of blue,
and other times it can be like a loss of your relationships.
Like, some of these climbs become so entrenched in us that when we finally do them,
it can almost be a letdown.
So, what's the point of doing this? It's anti-climactic, you're kind of like, "Okay.
Well, now I like-- I climbed this-- this wall and now I'm just gonna walk down
the easier way. I, basically, just chose the hard way."
If you look at it literally, it's so stupid, you know.
We intentionally find the most difficult way to the summit of a mountain.
Sometimes not even to the summit, you know.
It's just about finding the hardest way and you maybe touch the top.
Obviously, the summit gives you kind of an obvious destination.
It gives you something to aim for, but it really isn't about-- about getting to the top.
If it was, you would always go the easiest way.
Many people think it's the climb up for reaching the summit. Why?
The mountains are much more beautiful from below.
They are not up-- beautiful from up there.
It's only a massive stone and some ice.
The key moment of a climb is afterwards.
Coming out of these dangerous places and feeling like survival is the key of life.
And going between possible and impossible means that we are on the limit of our possibilities.
Before going to Everest without oxygen, all the doctors and the physicians
said openly worldwide that it's not possible.
We can prove it with our numbers.
We can make a calculation that the lack of pressure in high altitude
above eight thousand five hundred meters is so bad that nobody could move up there.
And Everest is eight thousand eight hundred and fifty meters.
But their calculation was wrong.
Amazing.
They did a wrong calculation and we prove that it is possible.
Sometimes no summit during the expedition,
but I am always happy even no summit because I control the dream.
Because I know very well, if I have a big dream
about this summit, the risk factor is also bigger.
The thing is people would typically associate risk with danger.
So, I hate to say that it's riskier to have big dreams
because it's not necessarily more dangerous. I mean some-
some big dreams are just more audacious or require more hard work,
more preparation, but they aren't necessarily dangerous.
And I've certainly had a lot of big goals or big dreams in climbing
that aren't dangerous at all, they just require, you know,
buckling down and training quite hard for a long time.
Argh!
[Adam] I don't say that everything I climb is hundred percent safe.
I always try to value the risk, if it's worth it or not.
And I think, eliminating all the risk from our life, like, destroys all the fun.
[Leo] What is acceptable or unacceptable risk? There's no hard and fast answers to that.
It's not a finite question.
The truth is you make those judgments that are based on your experience, your knowledge.
There's a fine line between badass and dumb-ass.
There's a fine line between bravery and stupidity
and it's not easy to recognize where that line is, but you know when you cross it.
There's no point in taking on like real risk just for a cameraman.
It's so difficult to film real hardcore climbing.
So, I mean anything truly extreme you're never gonna see real footage of,
it's just too difficult to get.
I think that in the in the Sendero Luminoso footage,
it's one of those things where the film seems so extreme,
but it's like way less than the actual experience.
The most poignant scene is this clip of me making some kind of
difficult moves on like a thin vertical face.
I mean it looks quite scary.
We went back and filmed that the day after I'd actually done the real free solo.
And so, the climbing that I felt comfortable enough
on that I was willing to do it again and again,
and just repeat it on command
and we, obviously, skipped the stuff that was like truly extreme
because there were some parts of that climb
that I'm like, I will do that once and that's it.
Because I don't want to die, you know, I don't really want to fall to my death off a wall.
I'm sort of hoping to die at ninety-four, you know, with a couple of grandkids,
like just all peacefully.
[Steph] I feel like the human brain is not very good with risk.
I think that's partly based on our evolution and what's happened to us as humans
in the last two hundred years with the advent of so much technology,
so much change from the preceding thousands of years.
There's so much attached to safety and sustainability in terms of being careful,
in trying to provide for what you think might happen,
and taking a lot of precautions, and then there's also just luck.
And to me it's kind of fifty-fifty and that goes for everybody in life.
We see standing on top of a cliff as very, very dangerous
and we're extremely upset about that.
And then we go back and we drive the car and, you know, everyone drives cars,
so our brain now thinks that's okay.
And we just don't do a very good job at really rationally,
and objectively understanding risk.
That is why sports that involve any sort of fall potential, they really grab our imagination
or our attention and play on our emotions so much.
[Chris] I feel pretty safe climbing up my limit twenty meters above the ocean
and to other people maybe that seems kind of risky.
You know these cliffs that we're climbing on, they've been around for millions of years
and they've always just been random cliffs,
but when we come to them and we've discovered these interesting pathways,
and we kind of bring this interaction to them,
they become something much more than just stagnant rocks, they come to life.
It's rare when all of these things come together to find something that's just
barely possible.
Oftentimes, these climbs I have to work on, over and over again, and they do require a lot of-
a lot of suffering, a lot of frustration, kind of beating your head against the wall,
but for sure, I think, accidents in climbing happen when we're not scared,
or when you get too comfortable doing something.
[screaming]
I think the biggest difference in-- in mountaineering and climbing is that in climbing,
you have to get rid of the fear because you're doing something that is relatively safe,
while climbing a mountain, fear can be something that saves your life.
[Conrad] Fear keeps me alive.
We all have our fear. Fear is self-preservation.
So, are you gonna step out into a busy intersection? No, you'll get hit by a truck and be gone.
So, you're always analyzing each situation in terms of what that risk brings to you
and what the potential rewards are.
So, when I go to a mountain there's just this moment where you
step up off the ground, and you're on a cliff and you're in a sea of gravity,
and you make a mistake, and you can pay the consequences.
You can break a leg, you can injure yourself and you can die.
[Alex] I mean with-- with climbing, fear is a little bit more complicated
because then you kind of have to separate whether it's justified or not,
like, whether it's just your mind running away from itself or if you're actually in danger.
And if you are, what does that mean and how should you try to mitigate that danger?
Is it a rational fear? Do it-- am I experiencing real risk right now,
or is it just this human instinct that says, "Hey, it's not normal to be eighty feet
above your station and on a rope that's as thick as your finger," and you know.
But we all still have that primal fear that we have to learn how to turn off,
and when you're in the heat of the moment, it's really hard to separate the two.
Like you can be convinced you're in real danger, even if you're not.
And that's something I struggle with.
I'll get really scared and then have to either myself, or my partner,
just talk myself down and say, "Your risk here is actually really low, we're fine."
[Conrad] Moving snow and ice is my greatest fear, my greatest worry
and so, if you're rock climbing, falling is that's the potential, but you can control that.
You can place the gear, you can choose to do routes that are well protected,
you can really dial in that-- that safety net that you have in rock climbing,
and choose not to go up on it because you are going up, you can turn around.
But when you're climbing on Himalayan Peaks that are glaciated by their very nature,
you have to assess that risk of where that ice and where that snow is.
[Xavier] Danger can come from so many different situations, you know,
it can be a change of temperature,
it can be a cornice that's really far away above you,
the snow stability is a big, big, factor in what we do and it's a very challenging one.
There can be rocks falling, they can be you falling, and it's such a paradox
because you're up there, it's sunny, it's beautiful, it's powder, it's the most fun,
and the most exciting thing to do, but at the same time in a split second
it can go from an amazing day to-- to the worst day of your life.
[Angelika] In Canada climbing in Helmcken Falls this was actually quite a dangerous place,
and in the beginning, when I got there,
I wasn't that aware because there was this huge cave
with all these hanging icicles on it
and then there was huge waterfall coming down.
And the waterfall creates a kind of cone on the base and then you walk on this cone,
but this could also collapse or there are crevasses.
And in the beginning, we moved on this a little bit easily and in the evening, I said,
"Okay, this was maybe too dangerous.
We should really take care when we walk there."
You know with ice climbing you have to really be aware that ice can break
from one moment to another.
That the whole Icefall can even come down, if the temperatures are wrong.
So, this is a discipline where you should have quite a lot of experience
to calculate how the quality of ice is.
I think out of the twenty or so people that I've known quite a while that have died
in the mountains, most of them died in avalanches or from ice falls.
So I'm a rock climber because rock is a little more solid.
I think the risks are less in that environments.
You know have I been on expeditions where I thought I was going to die?
And the answer is yes, I have. But I've also seen
death come out of the blue and just take away life in the most innocuous of situations.
I don't want to die and I don't go into the mountains
seeking death by any stretch of the imagination, but I also want to live,
and live a life that has given me experiences and stories and adventure.
I think it's a really, really fine line between life and death
and we're so close to it all the time and we don't talk about it.
But I feel like we should actually be more comfortable talking about it
because this is one thing that we all share, like, everyone in the world.
No matter who you are, nobody is going to survive.
I mean I'd rather live a long happy life, obviously.
That said, you know, there are risks I am willing to take to live a really fulfilled life,
and, if I get unlucky, then I get unlucky and that's just how it is, you know.
[Steph] I do go through life saying, "Yes, you know, we are human. We are gonna die.
We don't know when? We don't know how? It can come from nowhere."
It's not necessarily because you did something wrong, you know.
Sometimes things just happen, right?
[Xavier] Personally, I really don't want to die in the mountains.
You know, you hear quite often, "Oh, you could-
you know, he died doing what he loved and whatever."
But I'm not playing with this and I have been almost dead a few times in my life,
and you don't feel anything in a way, and I'm not scared
of whatever afterlife that could be, but I'm scared for-- for others, you know, to be in pain.
Of course, everyone's afraid of dying, you know.
That's the end of the ride.
No more fun when you're dead.
You know, if you could think after you got killed, you would feel like an idiot like,
"Oh, I went up there and did that? Like that's ridiculous."
You know, like big ice faces where you know it's too warm and there's like big
truck-size daggers of ice pointing down the face,
and you know, there's a ninety percent chance you stand on top of that thing,
and a ten percent chance that piece of ice comes down and kills you, or hurts you.
You know, that's just like, not good odds.
[Pasang] When I was on K2, 2014,
where I was in the Nepali women team on the K2
and for the summit day in the K2, the bottleneck is like a most dangerous part.
It was like a big serac hanging over and it can collapse any time without a warning.
So, under the serac I had to stop like two hours and every moment I was like praying.
I was like, "Oh, my God! If this serac falls down, what's gonna happen?"
I was just looking at the serac.
I just got very emotional. I was just crying.
The first time I cry on the top in the mountain was K2
because I had to go through lots of challenges.
It took lots of effort to come there, convince all the family, friends,
raising funds, and beyond that-- they are safely on the mountain.
I was just emotional and I was just crying.
Still I had little fear inside me, you know?
Because most of the accident happened going down from the mountain.
How you deal with fear and how you react to it, is I think, perhaps where
people in the adventure game who do high-risk stuff-
I think in some ways we're a lot better at dealing with it. We know,
you isolate the real stuff from the imagined stuff and you compartmentalize it,
and you process it rather than running away from it or living in constant fear.
There are some physical, and some psychological tools that you can use
to process it, and push it to one side.
Just having that, like, anxiety over trying to beat one's fear and conquer it,
like, that's just not the solution because it's not gonna go away. We're all humans.
We're all afraid.
We need to stop being afraid of being afraid and just learn how to work with it.
[Tommy] I think I am the most scared when I'm not on the climb,
when I'm thinking about it before, or after.
Usually, on the climb I'm so engaged in the moment that I don't experience a lot of fear.
I don't think, but that's kind of scary in itself.
Like sometimes, I go and do these risky climbs and then I get home
and I'm with my children and I'm thinking to myself that maybe I pushed it too far.
All that we get-- the more experience we have,
the fear is coming in us, especially, before we start.
Normally, the fear is the fear of the fear.
Only if I am able in advance of an expedition. advance of an activity,
to go in balance, or to put in balance, fear and of course I can stop.
And the fear is telling me, "You are going above your abilities."
So, I have to train better, I have to study better, I have to prepare myself better
for the adventure it is-- which is in my mind.
[Jimmy] Probably the thing that scares me more than anything is not having meaning in life, or
not having purpose, not having something to be passionate about.
[Hilaree] Without that suffering and that hardship,
I don't think you get the great joy of passion up here. So,
you have to experience both, otherwise, you're just living kind of in this flat line.
[Leo] I think part of this game is about setting challenges for yourself, and-
and trying to achieve them.
And if you achieve them easily, even if it's a very difficult objective
that's not-- it's not that rewarding.
We did a first ascent on a cliff called El Capitan in Yosemite, and
I did a new route called the Prophet, which took a long time.
I first tried it in 2001, and didn't finish it until 2010.
We faced such incredible obstacles to overcome it, not least of all, a massive storm.
You know we were in a waterfall for nearly three days hanging in a,
you know, hanging camp in a portaledge on this
on this giant wall. We're really wet, electrical storms.
For the first two days of the storm, we were still kind of hanging on to the hope
of success of actually getting to the top of our climb,
but then for the last day and a half of the storm
success was out the window, and it was survival.
We weren't even hoping to do the climb anymore. We were just hoping not to die.
And then the storm finally finished, and the sun came out and I managed to do it.
I managed to find the energy and the strength within to-- to pull out
probably the single hardest piece of climbing I've ever done,
in the most suboptimal, physical condition I could imagine.
[man] Here he is, victorious.
Yeah.
The harder you try, the more you struggle, the more you suffer, the more you value it.
[Adam] I might be naive that climbers willing to spend that much time outside
doing maybe a bit pointless activity is just climbing up the wall, or piece of rock
are just a little different, yeah.
[Tommy] I do see the life of a full-time climber as
pretty self-serving and I struggle with that.
Like I'm out trying to experiencing things for my own benefit a lot of the time,
and I hope to change that life,
but sometimes I wonder if I should have changed it years ago.
[Lynn] I think you just have to make those decisions about what kind of person you want to be
in the world, and if you're somebody like Tommy, he's inspiring people, I think.
It really is a very personal experience when you're climbing even if you have a partner,
when you're actually climbing, it's you and the rock.
But that doesn't mean you have to be a self-serving person in every aspect of your life.
That's more a question of balance.
[Leo] There's no question that finding balance between, you know,
a healthy normal-ish lifestyle
and performing at a top level is a difficult thing to do.
I mean in more mainstream sports, for example, Olympic athletes,
the most self-obsessed people you'll ever meet. You know, they have to be.
In adventure sport, in risk sport,
you know, some ways it's even worse because you know most Olympians don't die performing,
whereas, in this game, people do and they do frequently.
Watch as the pigeon goes...
[Conrad] Why do we climb? People are always asking me this question.
Why do you go do this? Why do you put yourself in risk
and the potential of pain for your loved ones?
And it's a form of self-actualization and you can find that in writing poetry,
creating symphonies, being an artist, being great in business,
all these different ways that when you can really focus
your abilities and get into that flow state and do something exceptional.
And I'm fortunate that I found out that climbing was that moment for me,
and that was my drive, and that was my motivation, and,
yeah, obviously, it's not for everyone, but
licorice, the candy, isn't for everyone either.
[Jimmy] And I think that that's probably the challenge everybody faces
whether they're a professional athlete, or extreme athlete, or you know, hedge fund manager,
or doctor, a lawyer, there's always kind of the difficulty
of balancing ambition with the rest of your life.
[Tommy] I think that the real reason we climb
is because it gives us this intimate connection
with nature, with our climbing partners, with each other.
I've gone on trips with Chris Sharma, and Alex Honnold, and I-- you know,
I see these people inspire me,
and then I just call them and ask them if they'll go on a trip with me.
And then, I get to know them, intimately, and they become really good friends.
And that's a really great thing about climbing.
We're humans, we're built to connect.
Intense experiences build that connection more than anything else.
[Erik] We didn't-- we couldn't even get the Sherpas to join our team at first
because they thought that blindness was unlucky
in Nepal. And-- and then this one Sherpa Ang Pasang had climbed Everest twice
and he said, "No, I think you make, you know, your own karma and-
and you make your own luck." And so, he joined our team.
And on the South Summit I was
changing my oxygen bottle and I said, "Do you think I have enough
oxygen to get to the summit and get back again to the South Summit?" He's like, "Yeah."
And I'm like, "Okay, you're a hundred percent? You're sure?" You think that, you know,
you can see the gauge and I have enough to get to the summit and get back down to this point
because you know after the South Summit,
you go across the knife-edge, and up the Hillary step, and across.
You're kind of out there. You're kind of vulnerable.
And he's like, "Yes, it's good."
And so, yeah, we climbed across together and he was right behind me.
And I thought, you know, like this is a guy with like a family, and if I had died,
you know, if I had like fallen down
and couldn't get up again that guy has linked his fate to me.
Like he's gonna die with me and he's accepted that.
Whenever I think about that I always get choked up because I I-
I think that's like the greatest honor of my life that people have done that for me.
[Pemba] Danger is not mountain.
The danger is ourselves.
The last survivor of an ill-fated expedition to the top of K2
was airlifted to safety today.
Eleven other climbers died trying to conquer the world's second highest peak.
[Pemba] When I was in mount K2 in 2008
and some people they are two hundred percent
interest to climb K2,
they don't want to quit the expeditions, or they don't want to stop the climbing,
and they want to take any kind of risk to get on the top,
and they're always thinking summit, summit, summit.
Many people on the top, 6:30 p.m. in evening.
Some climbing without oxygen, they are almost finished, you know, too much exhausted
and many who climb with supplementary oxygen,
the oxygen was run out, those guys they are in really bad situations.
I found almost fifty percent of people they cannot get down safely.
They get very weak, mentally and physically.
They become mad-- madness.
Eleven people they stay on the mountain, they never came back.
After summit, they never came back home.
Some fell down, some swept down by avalanche,
some people just they sit down, and they say, "I want to sit down here."
Next day after the summit, I climb again from high camp
on that mountain because still some people they are alive on the mountain,
but they cannot come down themselves, they need your help.
If I can save one human life also, really, really, important
for family and for the community.
Radio handover for the wilco and he want to talk with...
Finally, I able to bring some people down and that makes a little bit happy for me,
you know, after that big tragedy and sadness.
For a human, probably for other creatures, it's like-- it's like an injury.
This thing happens and you're really, really damaged and really hurt.
When Mario, my husband died that was an experience
that really made me get a better look at my thoughts.
For me it was more a question of do I keep living or not
because I was in so much-so much pain.
Being with someone and then, them being gone.
That's a really powerful experience
and it does cause me to literally live every day as though it's my last.
And it's not just because I B.A.S.E. jump, and climb, it's because
I know that living creatures die and we don't know when that happens, ever.
He changed me a lot, in all good ways
and I was just so lucky to get to be with him for as long as I was.
He is part of my every day and that's really wonderful.
Like I'm-- I'm actually really thankful for that.
I have lost a surprising number of friends along the way and mostly in accidents.
And,
you know, there's such a small difference between
a non-event and a life-changing or fatal one.
Small decisions have massive consequences and that's true of everyday life,
but it's much clearer in the adventure realm when, you know, all day, every day,
you have to make decisions and there are no right answers, but there are wrong answers.
You know there isn't like a prize if you get it right and-
but there are forfeits if you get it wrong.
One of my best friends died in a-- in a wingsuit flying accident,
in a B.A.S.E. jumping accident.
You know this was the guy who most of the hardcore adventures I've done,
certainly in the last eight years, were with him-- with Stanley.
He was just about to become a dad for the first time.
I'd just become a dad for the first time.
We were all on the parallel trajectories and-- and he screwed it up really badly.
And to see the mess that leaves behind, certainly, I didn't think about that before.
You don't really think about anybody else.
You certainly don't think about parents and lovers, or partners.
You just think about yourself basically.
I had a very near miss myself, where I came as close to dying as I ever have done
and it was in the most mundane fashion.
A last-minute change in my travel itinerary meant that I didn't take a flight
and, you know, it was literally one click of a mouse.
I could have said yes instead I said no.
One week later that plane was shot down by Russian separatists over Ukraine.
It was the Kuala Lumpur-Amsterdam flight.
The MH17, Malaysian Airways.
Two hundred and eighty-eight people died and I literally had a seat on that plane,
and one click of the mouse was all that stopped me from-- from taking it.
You know, this was three months after my friend died doing something extremely dangerous.
I still had a little baby girl who wasn't even one yet.
And-- and that shook me almost as hard as-- as my-- as my friend's death,
but in a more positive way, you know, you can't hide from risk.
It's inherent in life that we are all gonna die.
You know, you shouldn't-- you shouldn't be afraid of life.
You shouldn't live in fear
because before you know it, you'll be old and you'll die anyway,
but it's definitely good to try and be old before you die.
[Steph] And so, in some ways I almost feel weird
because I think most people don't live without awareness
and I think a lot of people think it's because I do high-risk activities,
but that's not why. It's just because I lived through that moment
where I was standing next to Mario and then I never saw him again.
When you have those moments in life, you realize how precious life is.
You don't take it for granted. You want to make the most.
You want to live in the moment every day and you want to treat every moment with
meaning and purpose.
In the 90s my main climbing partner was Alex Lowe and starting in '93 through '99
we did a whole bunch of expeditions together and
we're very well suited to each other.
Similar motivation, similar, "Let's drink coffee and go climbing now."
So, we did a variety of expeditions and we were together on an expedition
in October of 1999 to Tibet, Shishapangma.
And an ice avalanche came and took the lives of David Bridges
who was with us on the trip and uh, Alex.
And my world changed at that moment. It was just
in a flash this avalanche came down and took their two lives and by some miracle I survived.
I didn't know why. I will never know why, it's not me to question and ask that.
It's not fate. It just was.
[David] Conrad and I, we first met in 2015
and we figured that we would be quite a good team together
and wanted to go to the Himalayas, so we did that in fall 2015
and we decided to go to a mountain that I had heard of from a friend of mine.
We basically went there the first year and the conditions weren't perfect
and in the end we-- we had to turn around only four hundred meters short of the summit.
In 2016 when we came back we had a better understanding of the mountain,
knew what we were getting ourselves into, knew most of the route already,
and we felt that our chances to climb to the summit were pretty good.
We acclimatized well and the conditions were good on the mountain
and the weather looked promising.
So, we decided we would start climbing and after five hundred meters of climbing,
Conrad felt pain in his-- in his chest and he didn't really know what was going on.
He-- he said he had some pain in his lungs, or in his heart
and I immediately said that we gotta go down
because if there is some problem with his heart, then-
well, you can't do anything up on the mountain. So, we repelled down
and at advanced base camp he didn't get any better and
I immediately called the helicopter.
And they took him to Kathmandu to the hospital and had some surgery done.
I guess this happens to you once in-- in a life maybe
that someone suffers a heart attack at almost six thousand meters.
When it comes to suffering, you-- you learn where your limits are
and I guess that's important for a mountaineer.
If you would have asked me, ten-twelve years ago, if I was gonna climb mountains
like this one right now, I would have said no.
Life often, well, makes turns that you don't expect.
When I was twenty-one years old,
I went on my first big international climbing expedition
to Kyrgyzstan and we got kidnapped by a group of rebels from the Islamic movement
of Uzbekistan and held captive for six days in the high mountains.
You know we were in a full-on war scene seeing people get shot right in front of us and-
and having to run from the Kyrgyz military under gunpoint for six days.
It was-- it was a different kind of fear.
I was used to dealing with bad weather, and the fear of,
you know, fear of heights and things like that.
All of a sudden, we knew that our lives were not up to us anymore,
like, somebody could take our lives at a moment's notice.
We didn't have any food and very little water for six days.
And we were in the high mountains without much clothing either.
So, like, teeth chattering, shivering.
We got into a place high on a mountain where we were left with just one remaining captor
and it became really obvious that this was the-- this was the way to go.
I'm kinda pushing him off a cliff and we ran for, I think, eight miles
down to the nearest military outpost and that's how we ended up escaping.
I felt this flood of energy at some point.
And you know, in the most stressful, uncomfortable situation imaginable,
all of a sudden I felt coming-- it felt like I came to life
and I think that ever since then I've been curious about, like, about
just the human's capacity to survive in those kind of situations
and it's made me wonder about the limits of human endurance
and so a lot of my climbing is sort of an effort to explore that.
[Xavier] I think my biggest close call was this avalanche in 2008.
Like always, things can change quite quickly and that's what happened to me
and I went down in an avalanche for two and a half kilometers.
And yeah, basically, it's a huge miracle that I made it and that I survived that.
And, yeah, it's normally an avalanche where you get crunched,
crushed by the all the weight of the snow and that-- yeah, even if they find you at the bottom,
you're normally-- normally dead.
I was in the hospital room, and I was like telling myself,
"Oh, never again. That's it. I'm done.
Stop playing."
But then, I remember clearly looking out the window
and looking all those mountains and--
and I couldn't help myself but just reading lines everywhere.
Without the lows, you don't have the highs
and you are where you are, and you are who you are because of
the acts, decisions, and processes that happened to you to get to this stage.
I don't think that life is mapped out for you.
I think being a fatalist is-- it makes you lazy.
You've got to get off your ass and make things happen. Nothing comes to you in life for free.
You have to-- you have to chase it.
[Lynn] I think that we have to make good choices every day.
We have to reaffirm and question things.
Mostly questioning ourselves, whether you believe in fate, or not.
This was what I told myself.
This is my journey. This is my destiny.
I need to do this because I can, I'm in this position.
That gave me energy beyond myself.
It was a bigger thing than just me.
[Maureen] As I get older, it's easier to care less about what people think of you,
and climbing is a hard sport like that because there are grades.
You get graded and there's benchmarks and difficulties and it's-
so it's hard to not think, "Oh, I'm a worse climber than that person is
because they climb harder."
Um... And as I got older, it's easier to say,
"I don't care anymore, I just want to climb. And
I don't care if my partner climbs harder or worse than me.
We're all climbing."
[Steph] Even as a mountaineer,
and you think, "Okay. Well, we're being told that to be the best you have to do
the newest mountain, or I did it the fastest of this group." And
does that mean that you're the best?
I'm kind of having to really re-examine these deeply held assumptions
that you get as a climber that you don't really question in the beginning.
You know we've been talking about wingsuit B.A.S.E. jumping
and in the last five years,
as the sport is kind of finding its legs, and trying to figure out what it is,
and what it means to be good at it because it's so new.
I was just watching the jumpers go down this-- to me kind of dead-end road
of doing stuff that's more and more and more dangerous,
and that means you're the best one.
And I just looked at that and said, "That's so unsustainable.
That's-- that's not progression when the next step is dying for-- for the people
that are trying to make their mark and say that they are the best one
because they did the most dangerous thing. And
you know that ends when you hit the ground. That's-- that's not limitless.
That has a very powerful limit.
And so
I started to think that's just this paradigm
that these guys are making and I don't-- I reject that paradigm.
I see it as the opposite of what they're seeing it as.
My paradigm is sustainability
and longevity and that causes me to jump very differently.
Lynn Hill kind of set the bar really high at the very beginning.
And so, women have had-- we've had a lot of mentors, and a lot of, like,
really strong female presence in climbing and I think that that's kind of insulated us
a little bit from that kind of macho
vibe that you get in a lot of outdoor sports.
[Maureen] She was one of the very first females that were climbing on par with the men.
You know, and she freed the nose. That was the ultimate-- just like,
"Just because you think I can't, I'm gonna do this."
And I think that's the attitude I hope to-I hope to have.
[Lynn] I grew up in the 60s and I believed that girls were equal to boys.
I wanted to convey the equality that I felt.
Why be limited by what other people think?
I knew that people just didn't understand how much further we could go in climbing
and I figured, "Well, I am here now. I see this now.
I better do this now because this will wake people up
and show them that it is just a matter of what you think."
And you know, of course, you do have to have the preparation and-- and I did,
and I did what was necessary to get that job done.
My main motivation was that I thought I could do it.
And I wanted to prove that even though there weren't that many women that did first ascents
in Yosemite, there was no reason why I couldn't make that move and do something before the men.
Nowadays, you see so many women that are really,
really, strong, graceful, brilliant climbers.
And that's what I wanted to encourage really-
is that we have all of what you need to be great climbers
and everybody has their own style and there's room for that.
So there's always going to be a difference
in your physical stature and what's going to work for you better,
but the rock doesn't discriminate, you see.
The rock is what it is and it's up to you to adapt yourself to the rock.
[Adam] Some professional climbers when they know that they can't climb on their limit,
or as hard as they were climbing before, they would just quit climbing.
I know that that-- that moment, eventually, will come,
but I'm not afraid about that.
I am pretty sure that climbing will still give me the same satisfaction.
I-- I see myself still climbing forever, but I mean, it's definitely a question mark,
how hard you'll be able to push yourself as you get older.
I would say like, mentally, I'm stronger than I ever have been
and on good days, like, my body's super strong,
but sometimes, you know, you'll get like this crazy pain in your knee and
you're like, "Oh, my God! I can't run today. What the heck?"
You know, it's a question mark of how long you can sustain this and,
you know, not because of blindness, but because, you know,
your body's starting to become a bit of a liability.
[Conrad] We live a very oversubscribed, busy, hectic life
with seven point four billion people
streaming around this planet all wanting to do something unique.
To escape the pressures of society, I get outdoors, I am happy with who I am
and what I've climbed and being able to inspire other people
to discover the mountains and look into their own soul and see what they're-
what-- what life is about.
If they can be inspired by what myself and other climbers have done that's a pretty good thing.
[Jimmy] Doing what I do has given me a particular relationship with death
in a way that's very healthy.
I think that most people avoid looking at death, are afraid of death,
and if you don't have a relationship with it, in a way for me it seems
like it's hard to make decisions with what you do.
But I also in a way, I feel like, if it's your time it's your time.
If it's not your time, it's not your time.
Getting older, it means to cope, means, getting older
not-- not with death immed-immediately,
but this defect to get older.
And I had a few moments, only a few moments in my life,
where I had really the feeling-- now it's gone.
I'm gone. I will die.
And it was easy, before it was not more difficult.
If still there is a small hope little bit of hope to survive,
you do everything to survive and fear is behind, and aggression is coming up.
But if you feel, now, there's no more chance,
at least I had the feeling, I am able to let me fall and death.
It was a liberation,
but I was lucky, so I'm still here
and I am approaching death quite soon and I'm happy about it.
But I will be active, if it's possible with my health, up to the last moment.
[Maureen] You know Reinhold comes from that pure place.
I kind of wish I was around in
his generation where it was just quieter and you didn't have the Facebook, and the Instagram,
and you know, Reinhold didn't have sponsors at first.
He just got out there because he loved it and-
and those are the kind of people, they still exist.
And those are the people I usually enjoy climbing with the most or camping with the most.
The people that maybe they could be sponsored, maybe they could be the one
in front of the camera instead of me but they are just-
they're able to pursue it in such a pure way.
And maybe, if I didn't have as much of a message about, you know, people with disabilities,
I could be like that, too, but I guess, I'd like to get my message out there.
[Xavier] I am, I think like everybody else.
You know, I have a very hectic life.
I'm always hooked to my phone, on my computer,
there's always things to be doing because after all, you know,
you're sucked into it and you become this kind of ball of tension.
You just need to go out there to
put everything aside, and receive perspectives of life.
And I would really recommend people to try
to go out there and take the time to appreciate it and to get into it because,
yeah, nature is beautiful, and it can be the mountains, it can be the sea,
it can be the jungle, it can be anything.
I think it's worth to get out and feel that we're-- we're just animals, and,
yeah, this is our element, and it brings so much to us, it has such a life,
and so much energy to give us.
[Jimmy] I love powerful landscapes and I just think that that's part of
being alive and being human, being animals that like we are connected to this Earth,
and a lot of modern-day life you're not that connected to it.
You're very extracted from it.
I can have a lot going on in the rest of my life, but if I have a few hours
even, up on the trails here, or climbing, it's just something that, you know,
essentially, makes me feel good and kind of allows you to like take on
pretty much anything else that's happening in your life in a lot of ways.
I don't see a therapist, I basically go out, and it does everything that I need it to do.
Today's world of being a professional athlete is pretty interesting
in that we are asked to be these kind of self-promoters
and have our smartphones with us all the time and be
sort of like portraying what we're doing to the greater masses.
And it's new, you know, that's a new thing like we used to go into the mountains and be just,
you know, us and our climbing partner, and the mountains.
We're no longer focused on what we're doing, we're focused on the story
that we're gonna tell as we're doing it.
We have the privilege to inspire in the way that we never could have done in the past.
But I do feel like there's a loss, like, going up there and pulling out your smartphone
all the time and thinking about that story, takes away from the moment.
And so, I try and walk that balance delicately.
Like on the Dawn Wall, specifically, we had great cell phone service.
We had photographers with us, which were our friends,
and we were constantly updating our social media feeds.
And I started to feel like after a while that it was disingenuous and it didn't feel real.
And then at one point I dropped my phone and suddenly it was almost like
going back in time fifteen years.
And suddenly I-- I was noticing all the little details
of this-- of our surroundings.
You know I'd be-- in the quiet moments, I'd be looking down into Yosemite Valley
and watching the ice form on the rivers and break down.
And I all of a sudden could experience that moment so much more vividly.
[Angelika] I feel now with social media there is easily people being envious.
A lot of people they maybe look what you do but they don't like it.
It's a game that puts pressure on people to think about what are they gonna post today
instead of what am I gonna climb today.
When I first started climbing
that would be considered really bad style to boast about yourself.
It was a nicer attitude to just be part of the community and support each other
and not judge each other based on who is doing better or who is maybe scared.
I think the best thing about climbing and I guess any of these sports
is just understanding your place in the natural world
because I do think it's really easy if you live in a city,
and you never leave the city, and you're in a man-made environment
where everything is controlled.
I think it's very easy to think that that represents reality, and I don't think it does.
When you spend time outside, you understand that you are not in control of anything
and you are just one little creature.
As a climber when you see a lizard, you think,
I'm pretty terrible at this compared to that guy.
And so, to then, you know, want to be impressed because you're doing it more or less
than another human that's almost so silly
because we're inherently never very good at it.
And you know, same with air sports, look at the birds.
We're never gonna be that great at it, but so, it's almost silly to be looking
at the person next to you and thinking that says something about you.
You have to do your own path.
[Maureen] I don't want to be an inspiration just because
I climb with one hand, or I live with one hand, you know.
I get lots of people in the gym even that are just saying,
"Oh, good for you for not letting that keep you down."
And I just think, "Why would it keep me down? Like, where else would I be?
Why wouldn't I be out climbing?" And so, for someone to say,
"That's so inspiring just because I got out of bed."
Like that-- it's-- it's-- that I'm less than psyched on.
But you know, when I do something that's hard for me,
or I do something that's hard for anybody,
and someone says, "Okay that's inspiring."
Then I know they're actually giving me credit for something I've done versus just existing.
Oh my God!
[Lynn] Climbing is a lesson in life.
You learn how to take these situations and do your best and turn around.
Oftentimes, if you're trying something really difficult,
you know that you're probably not going to make it successfully your first time.
You've got to solve the problems.
You know, your life depends on it, so you have to.
But that gives you confidence in so many other aspects of life
because if you come up against that in something outside of climbing,
you can take the lesson of "Okay. Well, I didn't get what I wanted right away,
but I'm gonna try a different technique,
or try again, or-- or maybe this means that I need to shift my direction a little bit."
Along the way, of course, you're going to fail because falling is part of learning,
and it's a necessary part of learning.
[Angelika] After all these years of-- of competitions,
I-- I know how to handle if I fail,
and this is something that actually is going to happen in our lives as well
because we, for sure, can't accomplish everything we-- we try to do.
I'm three times world champion in ice climbing,
and I came two times second at World Championships
which is still a very good accomplishment, but, yeah, I didn't win.
[Erik] You know like when after I did Everest,
one article came out, it was like in Time magazine, it was "Blind to Failure."
And I was like that's-- that's nice, but I easily could have failed, you know.
And like people said, you know, "Oh, you blew them-- world's expectations out of the water
and you've shattered people's perceptions of what's possible."
And what they don't realize is that you're constantly doing that inside your mind.
Like forget the world's expectations and the world's perceptions,
you're shattering your own perceptions, constantly.
So, for me, it's not like is there advantages and disadvantages to being blind,
you make everything an advantage.
[Tommy] But I think there's phases in life, like, you need to spend a part of your life
sort of filling your own fuel tank.
You need to spend a lot-- part of your life being introspective,
and thinking about yourself and your experiences,
but then you also need to spend part of your life trying to serve.
If I had never become a climber, or if I had never learned about the mountains,
I wouldn't be able to understand the power to pay it forward to my family.
And so, I'm incredibly happy that I spent a big part of my life,
essentially, being selfish [chuckling] because it made me into who I was.
You just have to figure out when to make the shift.
[Conrad] There's always this quest for knowledge and that's a unique human trait.
The ability to imagine, to dream, and then to explore
those imaginations and those dreams.
I hope that there never comes a day when I wake up and I don't have any crazy ideas,
or any thing I want to achieve because I feel like that's the end of the dreaming phase
and I don't want that to happen.
[Xavier] To me life is made for living and, you know, I love it, I embrace it, I learn from it,
and I know that, you know, the price of challenge is that you may die along the way.
And I probably didn't choose the safest route
but I love it and I wouldn't change it for anything because it makes me feel so alive.
[Steph] As you get older, you just get better at things
and you have so much more perspective on the world and people
and the things that happen, and it just gets so much richer,
and it's fun to be good at things, and it's fun to kind of have your life together,
and to be smarter, and, you know, more experienced, and it just gets more fun all the time.
So-- so we don't have that long and-
and I'm just really thankful to still be here and get to be doing this.
I am still hungry person for the next horizon. I'm always interested to see
above the next horizon but there is no end of the next horizon.
This is infinite.
I think it's a-- it's a really big lesson in enjoying that process
because, you know, once you get to the top, it's on to the next thing.
And it's easy to go through our life like that, and always thinking about the next thing
that we want to do and never enjoy or appreciate,
you know, the moment that we're-- we're living right now.
And you know, whether, it's climbing in the high-- high mountains of the Himalaya,
or free soloing, or bouldering, or competitions, or whatever it is in life really,
to see someone that's really,
doing what they're, you know, doing something with passion, you can appreciate that.
The more I've lived this life the more I've realized that it is, you know,
the climbing is almost an excuse, a purpose
to go to these incredible corners of the Earth where nobody goes there.
You know they're some of the most spectacular works of Mother Nature.
Watching the Northern Lights from a cliff thousand meters tall, it's been minus ten
for two weeks, and then the weather breaks, and you see an incredible luminescent sky
shining down on you, or there's a cave halfway up this mountain in-- in the Amazon jungle,
uh, tepui, a big table-top,
a big tower of rock that sticks out of the jungle for hundreds of meters.
There's a cave halfway up that's called the Cueva del Autana, the caves of Autana.
And it-- it's made out of quartz.
It's a cathedral sized cavern in a super remote place that no one knows about,
let alone has been there.
We spent nearly a week camping inside that thing, and one day in that week,
we got the glorious sunrise, where, you know, it's just-- it's beyond words.
To see the light and the timing, and-- and all those things coming together.
It's not about adrenaline fixes.
It's not about high-fives in rad places.
It's a very fundamental thing. It--it's-- it's soul nurturing.
It's about inner peace.
It's about living your life and sharing those moments.
Not missing out, making yourself a better person.
It's a beautiful world.
♪♪♪
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