First Ascent
In 1979, I became familiar with Lynn Hill via my production work on a televison series named Survival of the Fittest. Lynn was a young Yosemite climber/athlete and she was consistently winning those competitions. I wanted to showcase female climbers and their approach to rock climbing. In this era, there were not a lot of women climbers. The great Colorado climber Beth Bennet joined with Lynn and they teamed up for this film. In this case, I called it First Ascent because it was the first ascent of a Boulder internationally renowned climbing test piece, called The Naked Edge. This film helped in some ways to inspire a new generation of women climbers. Both Greg Lowe and I were co-directors and cinematographers on this film and it was edited by Tim Huntley. Shot on 16mm film.