‘Drawn’ to create new lines

How an artist and climber created an epic journey for himself and monumental tribute to a friend and mentor

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What would you do, if you were a 30-something parent with a career and a mortgage, and still felt the call of the wilderness, not just for weekend camping trips and days at the local crag sport climbing, but to venture into the unknown, to climb lines to summits no one had completed before, to chase myths and legends into the far reaches of jungles, to peer down on a world from a vantage no human had ever taken?

Jeremy Collins heard just that call, and he went to his friend and climbing mentor Jonny Copp — who wasn’t just a dreamer, but a planner, and Copp’s response was to ask when they got started. Copp, founder of Boulder’s Adventure Film Festival, subscribed to a practice of living life as a daily adventure and preached a game of tricking yourself into risky undertakings until the fear became habituated as part of the fun. He seemed the best guide for the journey. Then, tragically, Copp, along with Micah Dash and Wade Johnson, were killed in an avalanche while climbing in China in 2009.

Collins wanted to undertake the project anyway, to climb for the sake of his own life, and in the memory of Copp’s, and began on a journey to take Copp’s ashes to summits in the four cardinal directions — west to Yosemite, south to Venezuela, north to Canada and east to China.

“It was just an inspired idea, just like a piece of art. Maybe sometimes I have a reason for making a piece of art, sometimes I don’t, it was just something that came to me intuitively,” Collins says. “It wasn’t a simple, orchestrated plot. Each trip came organically through friendships and ideas that I would collaborate with my climbing partners on. They kind of revealed themselves expedition-by-expedition as we went.”

In contemplating his northern route, he sat down with repeat climbing partner Pat Goodman.

“I told him I really wanted to do a spectacular north trip and I wanted to go to Baffin Island, and I had this great peak that I knew was unclimbed,” Collins says. “And he looked at the picture and said, ‘That’s pretty cool, but have you heard of the Phoenix?’ And he proceeded to tell me about the last unclimbed big wall in North America.”

In 2012, on Goodman’s fifth trip to the Vampire Spires, they estabished “The Phreenix,” VI 5.11, an 18-pitch route up an 800-meter wall.

Over the course of the four years it took him to make these various trips, coming home for births and birthdays of his children, he also painted a schoolhouse in Venezuela and built a staircase in the Yukon to pay off the bill for a helicopter ride deep into northwestern Canada. He climbed in China with Tommy Caldwell, who recently completed the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite. In Venezuela, he and Goodman teamed up with a local climber who had approached Collins at a festival screening of his film Border Country to climb the Tepuis — the so-called “houses of the gods.” 

 His journey is documented in the 40-minute film “Drawn,” which screens in Boulder as part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour’s stop in town on Feb. 24 and 25. A companion book for the film will be published in May by Mountaineers Books. 

Collins, who is known as a climbing artist and has contributed illustrative art and maps to every issue of Rock and Ice and Alpinist for the last 15 years as well as forming ThreeHouse studio and designing graphics for Meridian Line clothing, filled five sketchbooks with artwork from the journey. Those illustrations come to life in the film, illuminating moments when no camera was running or a camera lens couldn’t have captured.

He was working on the route that became the west cardinal route, the one in Yosemite, when Copp, Dash and Johnson were killed in China.

“Because of that, there was an impetus to finish the route, to celebrate their lives,” Collins says. “It was a lot of pressure, and I struggled with wondering if it was the right kind of approach to finishing the climb, if that was the right kind of motivation to bring up this 2,000-foot wall, and of course I want to finish it and I want to finish it in good style, and that [gave] maybe a little more gravity to the effort that we were putting into the climb.”

Whatever the motivation, the attempt to complete a previously unclimbed route requires a certain amount of risk — and, like so many climbing undertakings, mandates a level of personal discomfort that only looks funny in retrospect (see: black flies, truck break-downs, rainstorms without raincoats).

“There’s a lot of failure involved in all of these adventures,” Collins says.

But he sees the risk as worth the potential gains — and finds parallels as a creator and a climber.

“An innate response for most climbers is that they want to push their limits, and then multiply that by just being someone who kind of revels in a blank canvas and has to do something about it,” he says. “As an artist, it’s just my nature to want to create, so when I’m doing a first ascent, it has that sense of creation.”

The task of creating the film and the book — essentially a graphic noveltype telling of a mountaineering story — also required venturing into some uncharted territory.

“It took me quite a bit of explorations and discussions to figure out, is this project worth it to me? Am I passionate about it? Because it was a lot of work and maybe 50 percent through the project, I started to understand what it was myself,” he says. “I would thoroughly sympathize with someone who said they didn’t get it, because I didn’t get it for the longest time.”

For them, he suggests picking up the book and flipping through a bit.

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