Baiyansi: A Story of Big Wall Climbing in China (2026)
Well, a story I have wanted to tell for a long time is finally here! The story behind one of China's best, up-and-coming big wall destinations, Baiyansi （白岩寺）, was one I wanted to share for years.
What started as a small passion project morphed into a much bigger story of wild adventures, scary moments, and the creation of something new!
Dane and I set off into the unknown back in 2018 with a mission. We loved the adventurous style of multipitch and big wall climbing and had lived in China's Yunnan province for years. We had always been surprised by how little of those routes we could find around us, often needing to travel hundreds–or even thousands–of miles to find the terrain and routes we so eagerly wanted to climb. And we were not alone. Friends and fellow climbers would always ask where they could go to have a big day out. So one day, we decided: "What if we found a wall and created those routes ourselves?"
This is the story of how we pulled off that improbable project, one that has fortunately outlasted our time living in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It was a labor of love that we and a tight-knit group of climbers and developers put forth to create something that the next generation could take and carry forward to new places. Ultimately, it is a story about community and the things we do for each other. This project was cathartic for me. I needed to recall my time living in Yunnan, a period in my life that was so formative to who I became as a climber, yet an era of life I feared was slowly fading into the fog of increasingly distant memory. This short film was an attempt to crystallize those memories for me and hopefully share in some of the adventurous times with all of you.
In 2025, I collaborated with Mick Pearson, the founder of Kaf Adventures, a mountain guiding company based in Seattle, Washington, to produce an online learning experience for people new to mountaineering. The course is meant to be a foundation skill set development program covering everything from training for the mountains, gear selection, to hard skills like glacier rope team travel.
I was involved in everything from writing the scripts to set building, cinematography, and editing! It was an expansive project that covered 11 months, as we functioned as a lean crew to be able to produce such a big course on a modest budget. But ultimately the project turned into one that Mick and Kaf are proud of!
Excerpt I from Kaf Adventure’s Intro to Mountaineering Course (2025)
This clip, taken from the collaborative effort producing the Intro to Mountaineering Course with Kaf Adventures, comes from the course’s end, a shoot during which I strapped a full camera rig to my chest and climbed in the Central Cascades with Kaf’s founder, Mick Pearson, and his alpine climbing mentorship group.
Excerpt II from Kaf Adventure’s Intro to Mountaineering (2025)
This clip, taken from the collaborative effort producing the Intro to Mountaineering Course with Kaf Adventures, comes from the course’s early stages.
Filmed as a parody of 90s-style training videos, the clip introduces students to the training for mountaineering they need to undertake before their first outing up a glaciated volcano in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range. This video was meant to be an entertaining introduction for the educational content Mick and the course’s designer to deliver learning modules students could use to prepare a training routine for their first mountaineering trip.
Trailer, Liming Climbing Documentary (2024)
A trailer for the upcoming documentary I am developing, Liming: China’s Trad Climbing Revolution.
Wild Weset China, Episode 1: the Long Journey to the Chinese West (2015)
This is one of my older projects back from when I spent 6 years living in China. Our group received support from Black Diamond, Goal Zero, and Dali Bar to explore some of the wild, interior of the Chinese west, on a trip that stretched from Yunnan through Sichuan and Qinghai, and even the furthest reaches of the Altai Mountains.
This chapter comes from the teams’s first stop, Liming, China’s sandstone trad and sport climbing mecca.
Wild West China, Episode 2, Lightning on the Rabbit Ears (2015)
This video is another one of my older projects, taking up where episode 1 left off when the Wild West China team left Yunnan for the high mountains of western Sichuan Province, where we discovered near-endless opportunities to develop rock climbing throughout the western half of the province.
Wild West China Presents: Liming Sandstone (2015)
One of my older projects that profiles some of the goings-on in Liming, Yunnan Province, China’s now mecca for sandstone trad and sport climbing. Back in 2015, the area was still only coming up in its popularity, and the group committed to developing climbing was small, akin to more of a large family rather than an entire community. Take a look into some of the early days of what it took to turn Liming into a climbing destination.