A shot at the top A shot at the top (May 07, 2004)

Extreme sports photographer makes his adventurous dreams a reality
by Teresa C. Brown

Josh Helling is not moving mountains - he's climbing them. And he is recording his experiences with photographs and words that verge on poetry.

"It was like being on a different planet," he said about his recent trip to Antarctica. "There's ice as far as you can see until the earth curves over. It's just blue and white."

Soft spoken and reflective, the Pleasanton native gave that ethereal description of what it was like to stand at the bottom of the world.

He should know. A violent attack when he was a 12-year-old Pleasanton schoolboy left him struggling to walk or run. Since then, Helling, 33, has literally and figuratively stood at the bottom of the world and climbed up.

A professional photographer and mountain climbing guide, Helling completed an eight-week Antarctic expedition in February, during which he and fellow climber Mike Libecki scaled towering granite cliff faces in the remote snowy mountains of Queen Maud Land.

That expedition is only one of several for him. Wide open wilderness and soaring mountains have long beckoned to Helling, who considers Yosemite National Park his back yard.

A veteran rock climber, who has been guiding for the Yosemite Mountaineering School and Guide Service since 1995, Helling has completed two expeditions in the Northern Arctic, including a 150-mile dogsled run.

His resume is heavy with familiar acronyms: He has worked as technical film rigger for still and motion picture photography, working on documentary projects for PBS, NBC, ESPN and the BBC. He has ascended the steel beams inside sports stadiums to rig aerial cameras for the NBA, NHL and NFL, and he has even taught a few Marines a thing or two about mountain climbing.

Helling is living his dream - combining his love of photography with life in the mountains. But that dream did not come without obstacles. As an adolescent at Harvest Park Middle School, his life abruptly changed in a moment of violence one sunny afternoon.

"It was random," Helling said, recalling the day he was viciously attacked by a vagrant. "I still don't completely understand the situation; it happened so fast."

Helling, 12 at the time, was riding bicycles downtown with his friends when he saw a vagrant who lived near the railroad tracks. His mother, Pleasanton artist Margene Gerton Rivara, had taught him that sometimes people are "down on their luck," and he should help out if he could. "I had 50 cents in my pocket," he said, explaining that he was going to give the transient the change.

Helling rode his bike toward the homeless man, who suddenly ran toward him menacingly. He tried to get away. "I was pedaling as fast as I could," he said. The vagrant grabbed Helling's bike and slung it - and the boy - into a nearby building.

"Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground," Helling said. "It looked like my leg was going to come off." His tibia and fibula were shattered in five places. Two surgeries and six months in a cast left Helling's right leg fragile; it was another seven to eight years before his leg completely regained its strength.

Helling also had to deal with the trauma of testifying in court. "I remember shivering in my boots," he said. "It really brought back a lot of memories and having to stand in front of (the attacker)."

But the experience honed his strength, he said. "It taught me how to deal with hard situations. How to maintain in stressful situations and to make something out of it."

Today, Helling lives in El Portal, close to his beloved Yosemite. But it took him several years before he realized that was where he wanted to live.

As a summer job following his second year in college, Helling took a position at Yosemite. "It was three months during the summer and I fell in love." With autumn came another school year and he left. The following summer Helling returned. "I was thinking I was going to be there only another three months," he recalled. But fate intervened, and the summer job turned into a winter job.

He still planned to return to school, but as winter warmed into spring, he could not bring himself to leave. He told himself that he would leave in the summer, but by the end of summer, Helling realized Yosemite was his home. "This is where I want to be - 13 years later, I'm still here," he said.

Beginning with his first job as a video operator on a Yosemite rock climbing and scenic landscape film, Helling said he has worked on about 75 film-related projects, including as a location scout for a PBS documentary about Ansel Adams.

He's worked on commercials, including a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting promotion filmed in Monument Valley, Ariz. "I trained the Marines to climb the rocks," he said, adding with good-humored jest that because they were used to following orders, they were easy to teach.

Helling is also an accomplished photographer, and for mountainside shoots he uses a device he's dubbed the "contraption." The metal frame platform is akin to a scaffold suspended on the cliff face above or alongside a rock climber. On the scaffold, Helling can get bird's eye photography shots. The metal contraption, as well as Helling and his co-filmmakers, were featured in the January issue of National Geographic's magazine "Adventure."

Some of Helling's photography projects have been adventures of a lifetime. In 1998, he and two other climbers - Libecki and Russel Mitrovich - climbed, hiked, rappelled and trekked across Baffin Island in the Arctic Ocean. Hauling food and equipment, they scaled the 4,200-foot face of Walker Citadel, the largest rock formation in Northern America, living on the cliff for 32 days, he said.

Avalanches threatened the climbers, trapping the three men for six days in their portaledge, suspended under a 5-foot by 10-foot wide rock ceiling.

"With ropes frozen useless, the team was caged under their storm fly like prisoners," recalled Helling in a narrative written in the third person. "Soon the wall could hold no more snow and large avalanches crashed down the massive cliff. The first large avalanche to bombard them ripped their zippered nylon doors down to fill their portaledge with heavy snow. Hearts beating strongly, they endured more than one dozen similar events."

In 2000 the three men, with a two-man camera crew, returned to Baffin Island to explore the Sam Ford Fjord coastline and the Walker Arm and search for more walls to climb. The men hired two native Inuit dogsled guides for the 120-mile trek across frozen waters, 6 feet thick.

Although the men packed in their own food, like dehydrated fruit, salami, cheese and hot cocoa, Helling tried some of the Inuit's diet, freshly killed seal. It's "very rich," he said.

Enduring temperatures ranging from 20 degrees below zero to 20 degrees above, the seven-man crew filmed a documentary for the Outdoor Life channel and NBC.

In his written account of that journey, Helling recalled a frightening moment. "The rock fall violently ripped down the wall, and exploded like a huge bomb at the base. We yelled up the cliff for a response from (Mike and Russel), but there was no answer. Our eyes then searched the base of the cliff 2,000 feet below for bodies."

After 10 tense minutes, Helling was relieved to learn his fellow climbers were safe.

Helling's expeditions are sponsored by the likes of Mountain Hardwear, NASA and Stanford University. His recent trip to the Antarctic included repairing a scientific weather station for Stanford and NASA. In early December, he and Libecki caught up with a Russian cargo aircraft in Cape Town, South Africa, and headed to the Antarctic Logistics Center International Novo runway base.

From there, a Polish biplane flew the pair another 100 miles where they were dropped off atop a glacier. They unloaded their gear in minutes, and after a final exchange of "see you in two months," Helling and Libecki watched the small aircraft ascend the blue skies and disappear.

"We traveled and navigated with a GPS (Global Positioning System)," he said, adding that they pulled their own sleds weighted with supplies. Every few days, they would call the Russian scientists to check in. "They were really concerned we were safe out there. They aren't used to two people going in the Antarctic by themselves."

The trip offered incredible vistas. Helling wrote of the land's mystique: "The frozen moisture in the air was always like glitter and diamond dust glistening as far as the eye could see. Some days the frozen clouds would come in and leave an elegant white coating over everything. Spirits were high with inspirations coming from a different view with each rope length achieved."

After days of climbing and "living on the wall," on Jan. 15 the pair began rappelling down. Eventually Helling made his way back home to Yosemite in early February.

From the top of the world to the bottom, Helling is living a dream, his dream. In spite of adversities, he has succeeded in carving out his life.

"It's all about finding what you love and actually doing something about it, not just dreaming about it," he said. Helling is not moving mountains - he's climbing them.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.