Jimmy Chin's Photographs of Koch Snowboarding Everest

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Behind the Fall Line (cont.)


	(Jimmy Chin)

Here, ice spires seemingly spring from the till at the foot of Everest's glacier. In reality they are the lowest fingers of the glacier petering out into the valley. Stephen Koch is being belayed by base camp manager Eric Henderson. "It was killer because it was like climbing little ice towers. It was like being in the Needles of South Dakota," Chin says.

Chin used a polarizer to get more detail and contrast out of the clouds and give the spires an eerie glacial-blue tint. "It's not like I thought, 'I'm going to use my special technique.' It was more like, 'I thought I read somewhere that you're supposed to use a polarizer when it's cloudy.'"


	(Jimmy Chin)

Eric Henderson follows Stephen Koch on a recon tour to the base of Everest. The climbers needed to get a feel for the terrain, see how long it would take to get to the route, and scout for any unseen crevasses. Though on a photo-assignment, Chin always puts the grunt work first. "I'm there climbing. The photography thing is totally separate. You have to climb and do all of the training and the technical stuff. That can never be compromised. You have to do all of that, then you can think about photography. If I can't hike or ski or climb, then I can't be there to shoot."


	(Jimmy Chin)

A zebra-striped gully dwarfs Stephen Koch on an acclimatization tour near base camp. "It was a huge maze-Lord of the Rings style. We were constantly getting lost, looking for a route to the peak we were trying to climb. It was pretty entertaining really."

In order to get the shot, Chin had to get out ahead of the expedition, something he has to do often. Despite the apparent irony of shooting explorers following the track he has just cut, Chin maintains that his job is to document. "Some people don't want to share their story. But if there's a story they want to tell, the photographer's job is to bring back the story."

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