Big thanks to Russell and Ben for featuring me on their MTNmeister podcast this week.  They had the ingenious (and devilish) idea of turning some of the questions I asked in Women Who Dare back on me.

One of the coolest things about being a photographer is when a client picks the best image and uses it in a compelling way.  This spring I had the privilege of working with Steph Davis, one of the most talented climbers I know, and someone who is committed to excelling in her career as a professional athlete. Steph knew of a stunning Steve Hong route called “Glad to Be a Trad” located near Canyonlands National Park she thought would make great imagery.  She and her husband, world class B.A.S.E. jumper, Mario Richard, and I spent a morning rigging and working the route, but realized the sun was approaching too quickly to get the shot we really wanted.  So we came back at dawn the next day and nailed the image.  I’m delighted to see Evolv make such great use of our efforts.  They’re also producing a poster of the shot, so if you’re planning on attending the summer Outdoor Retailer show, stop by their booth, and pick one up.  If you’re lucky Steph will be there to sign it.

Please enjoy this video slide presentation made up of favorite images from four years and “four seasons” (courtesy of Vivaldi) of Isis product in action.

Riddle: What has beautiful women, hot springs and hot fashion, a remote mountain cabin, and 25 below zero temperatures?

If you guessed the winter shoot I produced for Isis last February in Bozeman Montana you’d be right.

Founded by women for women, Isis makes products so well designed they even make we males a bit jealous. You can check out their line at: http://www.isisforwomen.com

I’ve been a fan of Isis since their inception and started shooting photography for the company four years ago, on locations ranging from the Uinta Mountains to the White Rim Trail, from the Colorado River to north of the Himalaya in the kingdom of Mustang.  It’s been a great journey and a pleasure watching the company evolve into the beautiful and technically sophisticated line it is today.

As photographers and their clients know, going on location is always a bit of a crap shoot—a heady mix of planning, hope, and just plain dumb luck.  It’s the luck part that keeps one up at night, especially since no matter how careful the planning…shit does happen.  As the military puts it, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”  And they ought to know.

In this case, things started going a bit sideways the night before the production when I checked the weather and discovered Bozeman was forecasted to be the coldest place in the nation the next few days!

Twenty five below zero is cold.  That’s the kind of temperature when machines, fingers, and brains stop working the way they’re supposed to, and the second night of the project we were scheduled to spend the night in a backcountry cabin.  I’ve spent a large proportion of my career shooting in cold places including McKinley and Everest, so I knew that with the right gear winter camping can be fun—but for some reason the rest of the crew didn’t share my enthusiasm. It seems no one else had spent a night out in conditions so far south of freezing.  So I crossed my fingers (behind my back) and assured everyone there was a wood stove in the cabin, and that once we had that sucker cranking, it would be warm as Bikram Yoga.

To make sure I could keep the camera’s functioning properly, I snuck off and bought REI’s entire supply of chemical heating packs.  It might be freakin’ freezin’ outside, but it was going to be warm and toasty inside my Lowepro camera pack.

The next day, by the time we prepped the clothes, purchased supplies, loaded all the gear onto sleds, and skied several miles into the cabin— the afternoon was already waning.  It was fast approaching “magic hour,” that time of day when the light makes everything enchanted. This is a photographer’s worst nightmare, to watch the best light of the day evaporate before you can get the models dressed, smiling, and in focus.  So the second we reached the cabin I told the crew I would begin shooting while everyone else moved the gear inside, got the next change-of-clothes prepped, and a fire blazing.

Turns out, there was only one big fat shiny problem with that plan.  A thick combination lock was gleaming in the afternoon light illuminating the cabin door. In all the communication between Isis and the Forest Service, authorizing our use of the cabin, no one had mentioned the cabin would be locked, let alone provided a combination!

At times like this there is always a long moment of stunned silence. First time stands still, then it begins running at triple speed.

When time resumed, I sprinted around the cabin looking for another way in.  Nada. Unless we were willing to break a window there was no way to force an entry.  Already deep in the mountains, our cell phones didn’t have a signal, and besides the Forest Service office would close at any minute.  I knew I wasn’t going to convince anyone to spend a 25 below zero night outside without fire or shelter.  In my mind the only way to salvage the situation, was to shoot as much as possible around the cabin while the light remained, then high tail it back to town, find a six pack and a cheap motel, and start working on Plan B, whatever that might be.

That’s when Kate Harvey, one of my favorite Isis models said, “You know, my family has a cabin at Alta with a lock like this, and we get tired of always having to remember the combination, so we just leave the dial one number off.”

Then she grabbed the lock and turned it one click…

Nothing.  Of course I thought, what are the chances…?

Then she turned it again… and with satisfying “thuuunk” the lock fell open.

Hallelujah! Saved by an angel!

Fortunately, opening the lock was the last of the “speed bumps” on that particular project.  After that it was smooth sailing. It even got incrementally warmer over the next few days, or perhaps we just got used to being cold.

As I’ve told several professional photography audiences since then, “it takes a village folks.” In this business you’re only as good as your team.  No matter how brilliant and creative you may be, you can’t think of everything, and everyone you work with is an invaluable source of fresh perspectives and inspiring ideas— if you’re willing to listen.

The alchemical challenges of transforming “real life” into memorable imagery are many and varied, and the wise photographer realizes that he or she is just part of a grand, infinitely mysterious, and ultimately uncontrollable, process.  The only thing you can do to hedge your bets is surround yourself with the best and brightest people possible, listen to what they have to say, and then make sure you’re ready to capture the magic when it appears!

Good luck out there!

Anyone who’s been to Barnes and Noble knows there’s no lack of fancy coffee table books looking for a home.  As a photographer I have my own fair share gathering dust in stacks around the house.

But occasionally a book appears that makes one not only want to own it, but if necessary, buy a new coffee table on which to display it; a book so well done it seems destined to become the definitive work on the subject.

If you love mountains like I do, if you’ve spent as much time thinking and wandering around in them as I have, then Mountain, conceived and edited by Sandy Hill, and published this fall by Rizzoli, is that kind of book.

As I leaf through Mountain’s pages, I have the sense I’m visiting old and very dear friends.  Partly, this is because I’ve spent so many days, weeks, and months in many of the places documented here— the Alaska Range, Chamonix, the Khumbu, the Pamirs, the Colorado Plateau— and partly it’s because Hill has astutely combined well-known images from Bradford Washburn, Ansel Adams, Vittorio Sella, and Galen Rowell—with a wonderful infusion of fresh contemporary talent.

Wisely (and rightly to my thinking) the emphasis here is not on personalities, but on the peaks themselves.  In our age of celebritism this is as refreshing as a glacial wind.  Within these pages the sheer physical presence of the great ranges comes alive. As I browse, the book falls open to Washburn’s iconic image of the West Face of Mount McKinley, one of those rare photographs that manages to succeed both scientifically and artistically—providing the essential physical details of the West Buttress (the most popular route up the mountain) while simultaneously inspiring the soul to long for height and distance, to shrug aside the pain, suffering, and back-breaking labor required to climb mountains like Denali in order to attain once more the transcendental feeling of life distilled to it’s essence, the exhilaration of a journey far above the clouds and the tawdry world of men.

I admit I’m not impartial. I’ve got some skin in the game. I’m privileged to have two of my own photographs included in Mountain.  The first is an aerial of the immense south face of Annapurna III.  Viewed with the eyes of experience, the photograph carries for me equal measures of longing and dread.  Longing for the adventure of exploring those vertical rock walls, dangling ice runnels, and snowy ramps— and dread knowing how dangerous and demanding such exploration can be.  This is the heady brew mountains offer.  To be at once intoxicated by their siren beauty while simultaneously sobered by their attendant risks.

The second photograph is one of my career favorites. In it Lynn Hill performs her unique vertical mastery near the summit of a mountain called The Bird in the Ak-Su Region of the Pamir Atlai.  For me the image brings back potent memories: the pepper smell of granite mixed with the sourness of my own sweat; the pressure of the harness on my waist as I hang in space; the struggle to control my breathing in the thin air; to reign in the adrenaline as I realize the remarkable nature of what I’m witnessing, the privilege of being in such a place, photographing such a superlative athlete.

At it’s core, this is the true thrill of being a photographer, to watch all the elements of a memorable image coalesce before you— and then, with a hope and prayer, to press the shutter.  And of course, it’s a double blessing when such images eventually find a good home as these have in the pages of Mountain.

But perhaps best of all, Mountain reminds me why I wanted to learn to climb in the first place.  Not for fame or glory, not to write stories or take pictures, but to simply explore a magic enchanted realm.  Like Alice, to make one’s self small, then scramble up into the crystal chandelier of a frozen waterfall.  To experience humility and awe, emotions all too rare in our modern world.  To move with grace and ease through a primal world of ice, rock, and snow— a world that was here before us, and will be here long after we are gone.   Mountain is a tribute and reminder of all these things.

You can buy  MOUNTAIN at:

http://shop.americanalpineclub.org/collections/frontpage/products/sandy-hill-mountain-book

A video preview by Sandy Hill is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXaQbpfzPbY

Twenty thousand years ago near the Ardeche River in the South of France, a limestone cliff collapsed, burying a cave.  At the time, it’s unlikely the event attracted attention. One can image the thunderous roar quickly fading as a cloud of white and yellow dust settled over the surrounding forest.

Time resumed its inexorable passage. Vines and foliage grew over the rubble. Just as in a fairy tale—years…then centuries… then millennia passed.  Humans discovered agriculture; domesticated animals; invented the wheel and the alphabet. All the kingdoms of Europe; the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, along with the wars, horrors, and plagues of civilization flickered past like something out of a dream.

Then in 1994, three spelunkers searching for a new cave system to explore detected the gentlest breath of moist air escaping from a crack in a limestone wall.  The men worked at the crack until it was wide enough to squeeze through.

What they discovered that day was not particularly remarkable by caving standards.  There was no immense underground system notable for its depth, length, or technical difficulty. While the formations were beautiful, they were not particularly unique.

What the cavers did discover was a treasure house of the human soul, a monument to human expression as rare and precious as the Pyramids, the Louve, the cathedrals of Europe, or the temples of Angkor.

The Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave, as it is known today, is filled with exquisite cave paintings by the direct ancestors of modern humans—Cro Magnon Man.  Dated at 30 to 32 thousand years ago, it is the oldest cave art yet discovered, rivaling in technique and aesthetiques the paintings found in other famous Paleolithic sites such as Lascaux and Trois Frere.

Most of all, it is a testament to the central role art plays in the human soul.  Here at the very dawn of consciousness, we find artists as adroit, as skilled (and probably far more observant), than any graduate of a modern art school.

The paintings they created are an evocative record of a long vanished world. When these primal artists put down their pigments and walked outside, the last great Ice Age still gripped the Earth. Ice, nine thousand feet deep, encased the Alps.  Animals in numbers and variety unimaginable to modern humans— including mammoths, mastodon, aurochs, bison, ibex and reindeer roamed through ice-free corridors across the northern continents, and everywhere they went, they were pursued by deadly hunters— giant cave bears, panthers, packs of hyena, dire wolf, prides of lions, and man.

The floor of Chauvet is littered with the detritus of that lost Eden. There are cave bear skulls encased in crystal flow-stone like something out of a Tolkein fantasy.  The walls are incised by the bear’s claws.  The floor still holds the shallow depressions where they slept.

Four or five thousand years after the paintings were completed, a lone child left her foot prints in the soft sediment floor alongside the tracks of wolves.  They are the oldest human footprints that can be dated, and there is no indication that anyone else entered the cave until the present day.

Because of evidence found at other nearby sites, we also know that the people who came to Chauvet shared their world with a completely different species of human. Neanderthal man (Homo Neanderthalensis), hunted, loved, and fought for life in these same valleys, eventually losing his battle with extinction (but not before mixing his DNA with that of modern humans).

Of course, it is the art that draws us most. Drawn in darkness, illuminated only by the flickering of smoky torches, the artists drew prides of lions in such intimate detail it’s obvious to modern observers that the males of this extinct European species lacked the manes of their modern African counterparts.

Rhinoceros join in battle, jousting with spear-like double horns.  One panel features a cascade of horses in which shading, gradation, and detail bring to life the personality and vitality of these animals so convincingly one can almost hear them whinny across the vast chasm of 30 thousand years.

This is art in its quintessence— stripped of all its modern associations of money, commerce, celebrity and fame.  It is the pure expression of creativity in service to humanity.  To render as accurately as possible the major concerns of the race— to hunt and eat; to honor the relationship between human, animal, and spirit.  To invoke fertility in all it’s forms.  To take one’s rightful place in a perilous world with courage, humility and respect.

I knew nothing about the Chauvet Cave and its art until I saw the recent film by German film-maker Werner Herzog.  Titled “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” one of the film’s most profound moments comes when a young French archeologist tells the story of a western scientist traveling with an Australian Aborigine through the outback.  The two men take shelter in a cave filled with Aboriginal art.  The paintings are showing the ravages of time.  This makes the Aborigine sad, and (as is his people’s custom), he begins to re-touch the damaged art.  Observing and taking notes, the Westerner asks, “Why do you paint.”

The answer is telling, and defines the chasm that separates we moderns from our own past.  “I do not paint,” the Aborigine answered, “the spirits paint through me.”

Here is a direct view into the primeval world of the Pleistocene that gave birth to modern man.  This is the Earth in the full flower of her incredible vitality. We owe the length of our stride, the angle of our gaze, the very fabric of our minds to that long vanished world.  A place where humans and animals were once united, inseparable, interwoven threads in the vast tapestry of life.

Over the vast abyss of time, the artistic vision of Chauvet moves us, because on some profound level, we are still the same.  In other European caves, archeologists have discovered exquisite flutes carved from the leg bones of vultures.  Without much practice, modern humans can pick up these instruments and learn to play music, because the flutes play the same pentatonic scale that remains the foundation of western music today.

More than thirty thousand years have passed.  Much has changed, yet the human mind and it’s desire for artistic expression remains.

Herzog’s film made me think about the similarities linking the cave painters with landscape and wildlife photographers working today. Strip away commercial concerns, and we can still see the hunter/gatherer mind at work— concentrating mightily on the details of the natural world through which it moves.  Attempting to notice and make use of every detail.  Focused, yet relaxed.  Fluid and open to all the opportunities which present themselves. Reverent and humble before the power of nature.

Then there’s the totemic aspect of the image that is created.  Just as we can surmise that the painters in Chauvet hoped to gain greater connection with the animals they painted, as well as increased power through that association, I believe that on some subconscious level, modern artists still try to do the same—to see more clearly, to understand more fully, to bring back some artifact imbued with a trace of the power and wonder humans have always experienced in the natural world.