BURSTKnown for his achievements in high-altitude climbing, expedition skiing, and award-winning filmmaking, Jimmy Chin has spent his life documenting climbers and skiers in some of the harshest environments on Earth. Along the way, he completed major expeditions and first ascents around the world, always driven by a mindset shaped by a lesson a mentor once told him: “There are two great risks in life: risking too much and risking too little.”
That philosophy has followed Chin through some of the defining moments of modern adventure. In 2006, alongside Kit and Rob DesLauriers, he completed the first successful American ski descent from the summit of Mount Everest. In 2011, Chin, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk achieved the first ascent of the Shark’s Fin on India’s Meru Peak after surviving an earlier failed attempt years before. The experience later became the documentary Meru.
Preparation became central to everything Chin pursued. “Preparation is how you turn fear into focus,” he has said, a belief reflected in every expedition, and every decision made in the mountains. Before the summit photos and cinematic moments came years of training and studying conditions where mistakes could carry enormous consequences.
Chin later brought that same perspective to filmmaking, co-directing Free Solo, the Academy Award-winning documentary following Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of El Capitan, and The Rescue, which chronicled the dramatic Thai cave rescue mission alongside filmmaking partner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
“In the mountains, there are these moments where everything kind of narrows down and your world becomes very small,” Chin explains. “It’s just three feet in front of you and you have to make a decision.” In those moments, experience matters, but certainty disappears. “There’s always a point where the data runs out and instinct takes over.”
That mindset is part of what makes Chin’s new partnership with Coros such a natural fit. Coros announced Tuesday that Chin has joined the company as a new athlete, a partnership that will focus on how athletes use performance data and preparation tools in extreme mountain environments. “At the highest level,” Chin says, “what Coros and I are exploring is really the same question: What does it mean to push beyond barriers that once felt impossible?” For Chin, the answer has never been limited to mountains alone, it’s about testing the boundaries of human potential.
People often ask Chin what his favorite photograph is, after decades spent capturing some of the world’s most iconic climbing and expedition images. His answer is always the same: “The next one.” It’s a mindset rooted in the belief that exploration never really ends.
Jimmy Chin Talks Mountains
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