Q&A with Bend Alpinist Graham Zimmerman

Graham Zimmerman is a renowned alpinist whose work has propelled him into conservation advocacy, holding leadership roles in nonprofits such as the American Alpine Club and Protect Our Winters. He’s a world-class mountaineer who has received several awards, including the Piolet d’Or, the highest honor in alpine climbing, in 2020. His debut book, “A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains,” focuses on pursuing alpinism with social responsibility.

Source Publisher Aaron Switzer chatted with Zimmerman on a recent episode of our podcast, Bend Don’t Break.

Source Weekly: You’re a renowned alpinist now and won all these awards. How did you get started here? Where did the passion come from?

Graham Zimmerman: For me, climbing is something that I gravitated towards in a big way, but when I initially went climbing I don’t actually remember enjoying it that much. The first time I went climbing was in high school and I’d been spending a lot of time skiing and snowboarding in the mountains above Seattle, Washington, in the Washington Cascades, and I loved the mountains.

Most of that was in-bounds. I was starting to kind of venture out of bounds and then was invited on a couple of trips to go climb some volcanoes and I’ll tell you what, I remember being tired, I remember being scared and hungry and like really not fit enough to be doing that kind of thing and they aren’t particularly pleasant memories. But, there was something about it that really challenged me and that I really enjoyed.

By the time I was 18 years old, it was pretty much all I wanted to do and I was headed back down to New Zealand where I was born, to cut my teeth in the Southern Alps. Digging into, like, what it was that really attracted me to climbing was actually one of the really enjoyable parts of writing this book.

SW: Can you tell us how you got to the point where you wanted to write your book?

GZ: I had originally pitched something else to the publisher. . . . They came back and they were like, we’d love for you to work on a memoir project. It was really interesting to get that feedback. The opportunity to really look at my climbing career thus far and really have a think about what I have learned and who I have learned those things from and how I can share a story that kind of makes those learnings available to the broader community turned into a project that I got really excited about. I’m really proud of what we put together.

SW: What’s one thing that people point to when they talk about your success?

GZ: The thing that oftentimes comes up is the climb that we won the Piolet d’Or for, and that was the first ascent of a peak of Link Sar in Pakistan. The Piolet d’Or is French for the gold ice axe and it’s the highest honor in in alpine climbing. It was really special to win that award, but I think it’s really crucial for me to share that accolades are awesome and they feel really good, but the best parts of my climbing career have not been winning those awards, they’ve been the experiences out in those mountains with people that I adore.

When I look at that climb on Link Sar, it was nine days en route with three guys who are three of my best friends in the world. We were just in such tight sync on this incredible, technical, massive objective.

SW: In your book, you talk about how there’s costs in these endeavors, both human and environmental. Can you touch a little bit on that?

GZ: Yeah, a big part of this book is loss. I have lost a lot of friends to climbing. We had a period there where the frequency of fatalities in the climbing community, particularly the folks trying big, hard new things in the big mountains of the world, was really high.

We lost a lot of people there. It was very challenging. That’s something that I really did my best not to shy away from in this book. I tried not to write a book that’s just kind of, oh, all my friends are dead. But…it’s a real part of this endeavor. I spent a lot of time kind of exploring those feelings, which was challenging.

SW: So one of the themes [in the book] is alpinism with social responsibility. What does that mean to you?

GZ: It’s turning into more and more of what I do. For me, climbing has been this thing that has been undeniably beneficial and lovely. It has been career-defining, it has been really, really lovely. It’s brought me partnerships and experiences that I don’t think I would have even gotten close to otherwise.

Something I’ve learned as I’ve been climbing is that, not only is that really good for me, but those stories from the big mountains of the world and our experiences there and the clear changes that we’re seeing there in terms of the climate crisis are actually this incredible tool for driving the systemic action that we need. Due to the accolades that I’ve received, I can go get meetings with Congress members or with the White House, and most of that is through work with Protect Our Winters.

The ability to get into those meetings and make really clear asks in ways that represent the needs of our community and of really everybody in this country in terms of how we need to move forward on climate action, how we need for that to be very cognizant of its intersection with social equity and community health. It’s really turned into this component of my work where climbing and my stories from climbing mean a lot more than just my personal experiences or my ability to inspire our little climbing community. Instead, there are these tools that we could leverage to change the world, which is really cool.

This article appears in Source Weekly November 2, 2023.