High Exposure

While most American teens were reveling in the recklessness of the seventies, David Breashears indulged in a potent mixture of discipline, passion, and drive to pioneer the improbable Perilous Journey in Colorado, ascend Half Dome in Yosemite, and attempt Everest's unclimbed Kangshung Face in Tibet. Along the way, the intense young man apprenticed on film shoots and gradually took to the camera himself, relishing its physical and artistic demands. He was soon consumed with capturing on film the unsurpassed beauty and profound human experience he witnessed as a climber. That he would someday film at the top of the world with a forty-two-pound camera during the Everest IMAX Filming Expedition surprised no one who knew him: He was always looking to the next challenge, his eyes on the highest horizons.