The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  But when we got to our hotel outside the park entrance that evening, she was still with us. We all piled out of the van and walked out into the road for our first good look at Mount Kinabalu, which had appeared out of the clouds. The mountain was more of a massif than a single peak, comprised of two rocky plateaus connected by a ridge of toothlike summits. Jungle-covered foothills rose to a point where the vegetation abruptly stopped. The upper reaches of the mountain, nearly 10,000 feet above us, appeared bare and weathered. In the middle of the crenelated summit ridge was a distinct U-shaped notch that I recognized as Commando Cauldron, the entrance of Low’s Gully.

  Paul came out of the front office and threw a pile of keys onto a picnic table. The six of us, plus the woman, whom we had nicknamed Hello Kitty, stood there looking at the keys. Conrad grabbed one, gripped the shoulder of Kevin Thaw, an old friend and frequent partner we had invited to round out the team, and disappeared into one of the rooms. Jimmy and Renan did the same. There were two keys left. I grabbed one and headed up a staircase leading to the second floor, looking back to see if Alex was following me. He wasn’t. By a simple process of elimination, he had been left to share the last room with our new friend. When I emerged twenty minutes later, after taking a shower, the rest of the guys were sitting at some tables under an awning out front. Alex and Hello Kitty were nowhere to be seen. The door to their room was closed, curtains drawn.

  The next morning we met early for breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the hotel. “Where’s Kitty?” I asked Alex, who was staring back at me from across the table, his face expressionless.

  “Still in bed, I guess,” he replied.

  She walked in a few minutes later with her long black hair tousled. Barefoot, she wore nothing but a pair of panties and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She was a well-built woman, and it was obvious she was not wearing anything under her shirt. As she reached over the breakfast buffet to fill her plate, everyone could see. Alex just sat there eating a bowl of cereal and made no comment.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE PARK ENTRANCE, several rangers eyed us suspiciously as we unloaded dozens of duffel bags from our bus. We had about 1,200 pounds of food and equipment. We each planned to carry a fifty-pound load, which meant we’d need to hire about twenty porters to carry the rest.

  “Who’s the leader of this group?” said an officious-looking man wearing an army-green uniform with a red-and-blue patch on the breast.

  “Uhhh, that would be me,” I replied.

  “Come with me,” he said grimly, as if he had just discovered that one of the duffels was full of drugs.

  He brought me to an office on the second floor of the park headquarters, where a short man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair sat behind a big desk. He didn’t stand as I approached, and when I reached across the desk to shake his hand, he crossed his arms and scowled. Since the park service had known for months what I wanted to do, I gave it to him straight. We were a six-man team sponsored by the North Face, on assignment for Men’s Journal magazine. We had come to Borneo to climb a first ascent on one of the big walls rising from the depths of Low’s Gully. The man, whom I assumed to be the superintendent, stared back at me saying nothing, so I kept blabbing.

  “It is forbidden to enter Low’s Gully,” he finally said.

  “But?”

  “It’s strictly out of the question.”

  “But?”

  “I said no,” he barked, with a finality that caused my chest to tighten with fear.

  I slumped into my seat, feeling sick. I would have to go outside and break the news to Conrad. The guy who had given me my big break as a climber was happily sorting loads in a parking lot a few yards away—for an expedition on which I had already spent more than 10,000 dollars of someone else’s money. An expedition that wasn’t happening. That’s it, I thought. My career is over.

  The superintendent was glaring at me, as if contemplating whether he could have me arrested. I felt a tap on my shoulder. My heart jumped as I spun in my seat, expecting to see a park official with a billy club and a set of handcuffs. But it was Jimmy, who had slipped in quietly.

  “Hey,” he whispered, leaning in close, “let me take over here.” I motioned to the other chair, but Jimmy shook his head. “No, you should go. I’ve got this.”

  As I was exiting the room, I looked back over my shoulder and saw Jimmy stepping around behind the superintendent’s desk. He had his iPhone out and was holding it horizontally in front of the superintendent. Jimmy put his arm on the guy’s shoulder, then said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I skied Mount Everest?”

  Twenty minutes later, Jimmy walked out with our permit in his hand.

  * * *

  —

  JIMMY CHIN AND I FIRST crossed paths in Yosemite in the late nineties. Like a lot of us, he was living out of a beater Subaru, hiding from the Tool, and cutting his teeth up on El Capitan. He had no sponsors and almost no money. Not long after, I remember running into him at the North Face booth at the Outdoor Retailer trade show, where he was trying to score, unsuccessfully as I recall, a free jacket.

  A few months earlier, Jimmy had picked up a camera for the first time. While sitting in a portaledge on the side of El Capitan, Jimmy’s friend Brady Robinson taught him how to operate his Nikon FM camera. While bivouacked on the summit after completing the climb, Jimmy awoke to a dazzling sunrise. To the east, the craggy, snow-covered peaks of the High Sierra framed the silhouette of Half Dome. In the foreground, a few feet away, Robinson, bathed in orange rays of alpenglow, lay in his sleeping bag, still sound asleep. Jimmy grabbed Robinson’s camera and snapped off a few frames, thinking nothing of it. It was beautiful but the kind of scene a climber sees all the time.

  The photo turned out to be a gem: perfectly composed, the exposure and depth of field spot on, the scene as classic as they get. Robinson sent the slide to the clothing and equipment company Mountain Hardwear, which paid him five hundred dollars for it. He gave the money to Jimmy.

  “It was like, wow, I only have to take one photo a month, and I can be a climbing bum for the rest of my life,” says Jimmy. He had told his parents he was going to spend one season in Yosemite and then apply to business or law school—a plan that had been laid out for him since he had learned to walk. But at the end of that season he called home from a pay phone in the parking lot of Camp 4 and told his parents he was going to Pakistan to climb big-wall first ascents. He wouldn’t speak to them again for more than a year.

  But Jimmy didn’t know the first thing about launching an international expedition, so he showed up one Monday morning at Mountain Light, the office and gallery of the award-winning adventure photographer Galen Rowell. Jimmy didn’t have an appointment and Rowell was a busy man, so he was offered a seat in the waiting room. Apparently, Rowell was very busy, because Jimmy spent the entire week hanging out in the waiting room until finally, on Friday afternoon, Rowell walked up and introduced himself. “I gotta give you credit for your perseverance,” he said. Rowell took Jimmy into his office and gave him a personal slideshow about his recent expedition to a fairy-tale land of unclimbed rock towers in Pakistan called the Charakusa Valley. As Jimmy was leaving, Rowell reached into the carousel and handed him a transparency of the valley’s most striking unclimbed spire. “Make sure you take a camera,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I WALKED INTO OUTDOOR RETAILER in the summer of 2000, Jimmy’s photos from that expedition to the Karakoram were everywhere. And it seemed as though everyone was talking about this kid from Minnesota who could climb hard and shoot magazine-quality photos on the fly. The images he created, more than just being beautiful, had a gritty authenticity that set Jimmy apart from other photographers.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE LATE 1940S, Jimmy’s parents were teenagers caught up in China’s Communist Revolution. W
hen Mao Zedong declared victory and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, their families joined millions of Nationalist Party sympathizers who fled to Taiwan. In 1962, they immigrated to the United States, where they met in the library studies program at Vanderbilt University. The Chins eventually settled in Mankato, Minnesota, as librarians at Minnesota State University. Jimmy’s sister, Grace, was born in 1967, and then “Xiao Pung” (Chinese for “Chubbs”) arrived in 1973.

  Xiao Pung was a precocious child. By age three he was playing classical violin, practicing martial arts, and speaking English and Mandarin. By five he was competing in swimming and tae kwon do, winning nearly every race or match he entered.

  One day when he was six, Jimmy came home from tae kwon do practice after a snowstorm. His father, Frank, was waiting for him at the end of their long driveway, which was covered in a foot of snow. “He didn’t say anything and just handed me the shovel,” says Jimmy. “He trained me by crushing me.”

  Each summer, the Chins would travel to Taiwan, where Jimmy and his sister spent long days hunched over their paintbrushes, working diligently to master the art of calligraphy and the thousands of characters that make up the oldest written language in the world. For ten of the most formative years of his life, Jimmy spent his summers immersed in an ancient culture deeply infused with Confucian and Taoist philosophy.

  According to Grace, the mantra in the Chin household was “Push harder; accomplish more,” to become better than everyone else so you could be a doctor, a lawyer, or a CEO. “Dad’s philosophy was that whatever you did, it wasn’t good enough,” says Grace. “Because obviously you could try harder and do even better.”

  But as can happen when a child is put under too much pressure, Jimmy rebelled. In middle school he started sneaking out in the middle of the night and stealing his parents’ car. Showdowns with his father—and sometimes the local police—escalated until his mother shipped Jimmy off to Shattuck–St. Mary’s, an elite Episcopal boarding school in Faribault, Minnesota.

  For 130 years, Shattuck had been famous for its Crack Squad—one of the oldest, most decorated military drill teams in the country. The Squad was essentially a secret society run entirely by students. Tryouts took place in the Armory each fall. Like Fight Club, the first rule of the Squad was that you didn’t talk about the Squad, and the second rule was that you didn’t talk about the Squad. “The first time I saw their forty-five-minute drill executed without a single command, I was mesmerized,” says Jimmy. “As a kid brought up to be a multidisciplinary perfectionist, the Squad was totally irresistible.” By junior year Jimmy was captain of the Squad, only the second time in the group’s history the honor had been given to a non-senior. “He had this way of gaining your confidence and trust by taking the time to understand you and making you feel a part of what was going on,” says Dan Fleak, a fellow Squaddie, who was a year ahead of Jimmy. “He never demanded respect—rather showed that he deserved it through his actions.”

  Away from the overbearing influence of his father, Jimmy had grown into a leader. He got straight As, dominated on the athletic fields, and was a black belt martial artist. At the beginning of his senior year, he was on track to apply to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, but he still had an anti-authority streak that frequently put him at odds with the school’s administration. “Teachers either loved me or they hated me,” says Jimmy. Then he got caught with a girl in his room. It was the kind of offense that normally warranted a brief suspension, but the headmaster, who was not one of his fans, decided to expel him.

  His parents enrolled him in a more liberal prep school, where he started climbing and smoking pot. On weekends, he went on epic road trips to Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. He’d drive through the night, climb as many pitches as possible, then hightail it back to Minnesota for class on Monday morning. His father eventually found out what Jimmy was up to when he checked the odometer on his Subaru. In one month, Jimmy had driven 10,000 miles.

  At Carleton College, Jimmy majored in international relations. In a comparative religions seminar, he was introduced to the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination texts that form the religious and philosophical basis for Taoism. “These books spoke to me,” says Jimmy, “probably because of the Confucianism I learned as a youth in Taiwan. Taoism taught me to focus on the process, and not to be attached to preconceived ideas of what I thought the outcome should be.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THAT SAME TRADE SHOW, Jimmy came by the North Face booth, where a friend introduced him to Conrad Anker. Anker had recently returned from his traumatic avalanche experience on Shishapangma. His broken ribs had healed, but he still wore scars on his face. He took an instant liking to Jimmy. “My first impression was of a guy with charisma and intelligence, but a complete lack of ego,” says Anker. “He was pretty refreshing compared to some of the people you meet in the climbing world.” Soon the two were teaming up regularly, and under Anker’s tutelage, Jimmy quickly developed into an uncommonly strong climber and, more important, proved himself to be one of those rare individuals who also had the talent and work ethic to document the climbing experience with his camera.

  Two years later, Anker and Jimmy were pulling carts across the Chang Tang Plateau in search of the birthing ground of the Tibetan antelope for National Geographic. The team included the late Galen Rowell (he would die in a plane crash in 2002), who was now Jimmy’s hero and mentor, and alpinist Rick Ridgeway, a member of the team that made the first American ascent of K2. David Breashears, famous for his Everest IMAX movie, had dropped out at the last minute, and Anker had suggested that Jimmy take over as the expedition cinematographer—despite the fact that he had never shot film or video. Jimmy, whose last name means “gold” in Chinese, nailed the assignment, and when Breashears saw the footage, he hired him as a high-angle cameraman for an expedition to Everest in 2004. On that trip, Jimmy filmed and summited alongside Ed Viesturs, America’s preeminent high-altitude mountaineer.

  A year later, Jimmy photographed and filmed five different expeditions, including one to Mali on which he had his own Quokka moment while shooting for a cable channel called Rush HD, which had partnered with the North Face on an adventure-based television series. “The cameramen were awesome guys, but the directors and producers didn’t get it,” recalls Jimmy. “They kept trying to dictate where and how the team would climb. It became the tail wagging the dog.”

  This was also the year that Jimmy and I teamed up for our first expedition together, to Pitcairn Island, the famous hideout of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty. While leafing through the photographic insert in a book titled The Bounty, I found myself spellbound by a picture of a small boat attempting to land in Pitcairn’s Bounty Bay. Majestic rock spires rising directly from the South Pacific dominated the background of the circa 1825 painting. I discovered that forty-seven people, most of them seventh- and eighth-generation descendants of the mutineers, still made a living on Pitcairn Island. The one-and-a-half-square-mile island, which has no airstrip or ferries, is located halfway between Panama and New Zealand and is known as the world’s most remote inhabited place; the nearest landmass, Australia, is 3,000 miles away. The shoreline is completely encircled with cliffs, and along its seven-mile circumference there is not one cove or harbor where a boat can safely anchor. To get there, I convinced the North Face and National Geographic to split the cost of chartering a sixty-six-foot sloop that we would sail from French Polynesia to Pitcairn.

  Unfortunately, the majestic rock spires in the romanticized nineteenth-century painting turned out to be far less impressive in real life. In fact, the rock on Pitcairn Island wasn’t technically rock; it was compressed volcanic ash that crumbled in our hands like sunbaked mud when we tried to climb it. Jimmy ragged me mercilessly about the fact that I had dragged him across the world to climb rock “that wasn’t even rock.” But he always did it with a gleam in his eye. After
all, I had put him in a position to capture some of the most unusual images ever shot by a climbing photographer. One photo, in particular, of me walking across a tide pool with crumbling rock spires in the background, a North Face pack held proudly over my head, would later grace billboards and magazine spreads all over the world.

  But “boondoggle” was the word going around the North Face headquarters when they got Jimmy’s photos, some of which showed Greg Child and me playing badminton on uninhabited coral atolls—with cocktails in our hands. It would be years before they let anyone on the team go on an expedition that involved a boat.

  * * *

  —

  THE TRAIL TO THE SUMMIT of Mount Kinabalu, muddy and narrow, twisted and wound its way below waterfalls and along spiny ridges bordered with wind-stunted trees. Pitcher plants of every possible size and color littered the ground. Birds darted from tree to tree. Colorful butterflies floated in the air all around us. The slopes of Mount Kinabalu host ecosystems of dazzling diversity. Botanists are still finding new species every year within the six unique ecological zones that lie along the mountain’s 10,000 feet of vertical relief, which stretches from jungle plains to the 13,455-foot summit. The latest tally puts the total number of plant species on Kinabalu at approximately 6,000, more than in Europe and North America combined. This number includes eight hundred species of orchids, six hundred species of ferns, and twenty-seven different types of rhododendrons.