NEW YORK, NY.- David Breashears, a mountain climber and cinematographer who reached the 29,032-foot summit of Mount Everest five times, including for a 1998 film that became the highest-grossing IMAX documentary ever, died March 14 at his home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was 68.
A representative of his family confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.
Among the tightly knit global community of high-altitude mountaineers, Breashears was known for his willingness to take enormous risks, balanced by an exacting attention to detail that made such adventures possible.
After years building his reputation as a climber in the American West, he began traveling to Nepal and the Himalayas in the early 1980s. After several aborted attempts, he reached the summit of Everest in 1983.
By then he had developed a second career as a cinematographer, working with alpine-related feature films and documentaries, and on this expedition he broadcast the first live footage from the top of the world’s highest mountain.
His most famous ascent came in 1996. Sponsored in part by the Museum of Science in Boston, he and his team lugged a specially built IMAX camera, plus rolls and rolls of film, up the mountain.
Joining him was Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who trekked up the mountain with Edmund Hillary in 1953, when they became the first people to reach the top of Mount Everest. It was the son’s first time to the summit, and his story became the spine of the film.
Breashears’ group was among other expeditions trying to reach the summit at the time — more than 30 people in all, including a team led by a New Zealand climber named Rob Hall — and May 10, amid bottlenecks and delays, disaster struck in the form of an unexpected blizzard.
Dozens of climbers struggled to descend back to camp, but many remained stuck. Breashears immediately offered spare oxygen tanks, batteries and food to the rescuers trying to locate the stranded men, even though he needed those supplies to complete his film project.
Eight people, including Hall, died in the blizzard. Jon Krakauer, a journalist who had joined one of the expeditions on assignment for Outside magazine, wrote about the incident in his bestselling book “Into Thin Air” (1997).
“He said take it all; he risked the whole film,” Krakauer, who first met Breashears in the 1970s, said in a phone interview. “This was the most important thing in his life, and he said it was no big deal.”
A few days later, Breashears and a few members of his team, including Norgay, reached the peak, where Norgay left photos of his father and the Dalai Lama as well as Buddhist prayer flags.
The resulting 45-minute film, “Everest,” was narrated by Liam Neeson and released in March 1998. It grossed over $128 million worldwide.
“Climbing Everest says that you have done something extraordinary, that you have stepped outside the routines of ordinary life, endured hardship and accepted a great challenge,” Breashears said in an interview with PBS in 2008. “There is only one highest place on Earth.”
David Finlay Breashears was born Dec. 20, 1955, in Fort Benning, Georgia. His father, William Breashears, was an Army officer whose career kept the family moving throughout David’s early childhood.
His father was controlling and at times violent. To teach his son to swim, he would toss David in the deep end of a pool and make him struggle back to the edge. When Breashears was 10, his father left the family, leaving his mother, Ruth (Finlay) Breashears, an advertising executive, to raise David and his three siblings alone.
They settled in the Denver area. David Breashears, a self-described “runt of the litter” who eschewed the sorts of team sports popular among his classmates, took to rock climbing after reading an article about Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
“Other boys imagined they were Namath or Seaver; I dreamed I was Norgay,” he wrote in his autobiography, “High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places” (1999).
Breashears never considered college. After graduating from high school in 1973, he moved to Eldorado Springs, a community northwest of Denver that was fast becoming a gathering point for climbers.
He led an ascetic life, spending most of his waking hours on rock faces. He earned renown for his minimalist approach to the sport, refusing all but the most basic gear and rejecting shortcuts, even when they offered a safer way up.
“Climbing was all-consuming,” he wrote. “It wasn’t a lifestyle for me — it was a way of life.”
To make money, he worked as an assistant on film projects around the Denver area. He never studied film, but he took to the discipline readily; that skill, combined with his ability to shoot from hard-to-reach places, ensured that he was in regular demand for film shoots.
He said he worked on more than 40 film projects over his career. He operated a camera and coordinated stunts for the 1993 thriller “Cliffhanger,” starring Sylvester Stallone. For the 1997 drama “Seven Years in Tibet,” starring Brad Pitt, he smuggled a camera into Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, running the risk of arrest by Chinese authorities.
He married Veronique Choa in 1986. They divorced in 1990. He is survived by his son from a different relationship, Finn Clark; his sister, Lisa Breashears; and his brother, Steve Breashears.
In 2007, David Breashears founded a nonprofit, GlacierWorks, focused on the effects of climate change on the world’s glacial masses.
He made a number of other climbing-related films, including “Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa” (2002) and, for PBS’ “Frontline” series, “Storm Over Everest” (2008), in which he painstakingly re-created the events of the 1996 disaster on Everest at a ski resort in Utah, hauling in an airplane engine to generate blizzardlike winds.
“He is one of the most intense people I have ever known,” Krakauer said, adding that he was still in shock over Breashears’ sudden death. “He’s one of those guys who seemed invincible.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
