My Life As an Adventure Filmmaker and Photographer (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live

Mike Libecki: This guy has completely changed my life. I met Mike in 2012. We did an expedition to Greenland. This is a picture of Mike after a trip we did when we went to China, Kyrgyzstan border. We did a big rock climb, and we lived, you know, when you live out for a month out in the backcountry, you start to stink; all your stuff smells, right? You can't wait for the hotel. You can't wait to just pack all that stuff up and put it away and be like, "I will deal with you when I get home." Like, I need like two days of rest. I want to get clean.

Mike, he's so driven! So we get to our first hotel, and we're all like so excited. I go just stuff ignored, and I remember taking a shower. I walk over into Mike's room when he's sharing a room with this other guy, Ethan. I come in their room, and it smells like Basecamp. I'm like, "Michael, what's going on?"

I'm either that all of his wet stuff is out drying. He's already taking inventory of everything he has. He's so motivated! It's almost like he's leaving for another expedition like right after this, which he probably was. He's done like 60 expeditions; he's amazing. I look over, and my friend Ethan, he's doing that thing where you got your shirt over your nose, but he's like reading. Could I come in? He's like, "Hey!" It wasn't even like he said anything; it was just like, hit accept that it is fine. But Mike is that guy; he's so motivated.

So I did this trip with him in Greenland, and after the trip he said to me, "Man, I'm planning on going to Antarctica this, you know, in November and I think National Geographic's on board. Do you want to come? You can be the filmmaker. I'm talking to Cory Richards; he's going to be the photographer and Freddie Wilkinson; he's going to be my climbing partner." So I knew all these guys, right? And I was like, that sounds like an incredible trip!

It's like, "Okay, well, I'm planning on it being two months; you're going to need to take two months off if it happens." And I said, "I'll make—if this comes through, like, I'll make it work." So sure enough, National Geographic, they're into this story and off we went down to Antarctica for one of the coolest adventures of my life.

An incredible expedition! Getting to Antarctica is not simple; it's not like you just call up like United and you just like fly down. It's like a series of slices and so we're in South Africa here. This plane here, this is like an old military plane run by this group called Alse. It's a Russian outfit, and basically we show up, you board this flight, and you get on. It's a six-hour flight from the tip of South Africa to Antarctica, and it's a crazy flight.

It's not like you get on and there's like flight attendants. It's just a bunch of like scientists and like military people that work on this base. The porta-potties are like bolted down to the bats of toilet situation, and then your gear—you think this is like cargo nets? I'm like, what about if there's turbulence? I don't think they care; you can just get bucked around.

So anyway, we get on the flight; we're like this is kind of crazy. Well, the flight only has enough gas to make it across the ocean, right? When you get to the halfway point, it's called the point of no return. So when they go, they really make sure there's a good weather window, right? So we waited in Cape Town for it was a week or more waiting for that weather window to happen.

And then when it happened—when we got it, boom! You go down and you land in this like completely new place, right? It's summer in South Africa in November, and then you arrive down here where it's, you know, minus 20. Like, right off the plane, you get dressed like an hour before you—oh, they said this! Send up this little signal; I could put your clothes on, and you just like fully get dressed.

And then when you get off, you start hauling your bags, and there's guys waiting there with sleds; they take you to your little home, these little Conex containers. So day one, really nice weather window. We got in Bay 2. We wake up, and it's crazy outside; it's like the winds picked up, freezing cold. This lasted for about five days, right?

And they're just—the people there, they're used to it; they're just like plow and stuff, keeping the flight paths clean. We're just festering in our rooms for like this is awful; just kind of purgatory waiting. And what you do every day is you go in, you check the weather as the weather changed; you know, it hasn't—what you ask anyway.

So on the fifth day, this guy here is like the Russian meteorologist; he's kind of explaining like, "Hey, looks like you guys are going to have a window. You can have like a 10-hour window; it's going to be really short." So we took all the gear—it's like 1,800 pounds of gear, like duffel bags, everything else—load it in the plane, and the pilot explained to us like, "Look, I can get you in, but you guys got to get your gear real quick. I got to get back."

So the thing goes like 200 miles, and there's Mike, perpetually excited. He's like unflappable, this guy—I've seen him break his hand, and he's like, "Ah, you know, I'm not—I'm not kidding!" And he's the only guy that got frostbite on the trip; then he was no problem until anyway.

You land, you unpack, and then watching the plane go away—that's a very surreal feeling, right? That is the last bit of heat and comfort, and I forget we were there fifty days or some crazy, right? And you really—it's things in quick, you know. As you're pulling all the equipment off, you're just like, "Man, this is on places is happening."

And then the first thing you do is there's no time to waste because we know how quickly the weather changes down there. The first thing you do is we built base camp, and what we did was we're out in the middle of the ice cap here. So we just like cut out ice blocks, and this is all under Mike's guidance—he'd been to Antarctica six times, even on a solo trip, which to this day I don't know how he did it—and we, you know, we built this perimeter, and this is really more for wind, and we set up base camp. Life was pretty good; we were psyched.

I remember waking up the next morning, and it was already—the walls were already bent and like collapsing, and Freddie's out there like just shoveling and doing maintenance, and I'm like, "Wow, this is going to be a full-time job just keeping this thing together!" But the plan was to not stay here; the plan was we were going to do a big circumnavigation around the entire mountain range, looking for the perfect climbing line and doing a little exploration.

So what we did is we pat on day three because we knew the weather was like okay; we packed up our sleds and about 90 pounds each with tents and food, and the plan was to kite ski. So this is Mike Libecki here attempting to kite ski. It was crazy watching him take off; it was the fifth element at a slingshot. They're like, "And so we knew that wasn't going to work," and I was relieved because I don't even know how to ski. I screw up snowboarding; I go snowboarding, and so anyway, day one we just—we—it was probably 10 hours of this, and we show up at the end.

At the end of the day, we're like, "Okay, we have to set up base camp." While the winds were hideously howling, we found this little tiny boulder here, and that was the only little shelter we had to kind of get behind. It's probably like 1:00 in the morning at this point; you know the sun's always up in the summertime down there, it's like a midnight sun.

And so I remember this day being the worst day of the whole trip, and thank God it was like days 3 or 4. But I just like—I had no frame of reference; I'm like, "This is going to be hard. I don't know what I'm going to do here because just setting this camp up was awfully weak." I remember Cory and I getting in our tent, and you're soaking wet from all because you're overheating because you're working, and then the snow is going all down you, and you're just wet, you know?

I'm like, "I can't do 45 days, man!" That bike and Freddy are in there just like laughing and guys, "It's fun, right?" And I'm like, "Yeah, super fun." And so for five days, we circumnavigated this mountain range, and it was a surreal experience. I've never done anything like it. You know, it was either snow and skis, or on the right here, there were times where it would be just miles and miles of just blue sapphire blue ice, and it was never just flat; it was very three-dimensional, and you'd put crampons on, and you would just walk.

And there were times where we would be staggered by like maybe even a mile apart; so you would be pretty alone. At one point, I left a tripod; I stopped, and I shot some pictures or video, and as we stopped at our next little rough spot like two miles up, I went to grab my tripod, and I left it, and I had to go back. Cory waited for me, and Mike and Freddy were like, "We need to find a base camp."

So I went back, and I remembered during that little two-mile walk back, it was like a beautiful scary feeling, you know? It was like you don't want anything bad to happen because that would be terrible; you're in a bad situation to get injured, but it was also surreal and kind of interesting to be like, "Wow, this is the farthest away I've ever been from people in my entire life and probably ever will be," and that you can experience that in Antarctica.

So the plan is, you know, you set up these little satellite camps, and we would run into the mountains, and we would use binoculars trying to find the perfect climb. And on the final day, we actually did get to this kite ski. And again, I've never skied before—we wish I had this on film. I remember everyone's like—we're at our wit's end at this point; it's day five, we're all tired. We're just pining to get back to base camp; we're tired.

And so Mike's helping me set my kite up, right? And you know, as I've never skied, I can cross-country ski pretty good at this point, and I understand edging just from, you know, using my ideas from snowboarding, but it's different. Whiskey's and so Mike's helping me out, and he's got my kite; he's going to launch it for me, right? Let it get filled with wind, and he says to me the last thing—he's like, "Remember, keep your french fries! Whatever you ski, you know what that means if you've done it. Basically means to slow down—pizza to go fast—french fries!"

Right? I'm like, "Oh man!" But so off I go when they probably got about, I would say, a mile, maybe a little more, and I'm gripped, right? But I'm making it work. It is totally like flight or fight or flight. And he looked nervous letting me go because you could break your leg, man! I got 90 pounds of stuff, like tents and crampons and stuff, and it can't—you know, you've got these poles, so it's sort of separated from you, but it's not great.

And everyone's left, right? We've got walkie-talkies, but we're all very spread out at this point. And so I go taking off, and these guys all had like a little harness so they could kind of clip their handle onto so, you know, it's good; you don't have to grip onto this thing and use all your strength; you just have to kind of navigate it. I didn't have a harness, and I'm just holding it, right?

And so about a mile into the thing, and you're screaming fast! I'm like, "I cannot hold this thing anymore!" You know, I'm pumped out of my mind! And Mike said, "Okay, when you want to drop the kite, you move the bar this way, it'll move the strings, the window will fall, the kite will fall down."

So I'm just like trying to pizza, french fries my crazy, thinking of like hold the thing and the kite won't fall, right? I'm just like, "This is terrible!" So finally, I get to the point where I can't hold it anymore. Nice let me go, where it's like, "I watch to just sail away like I have to go get it, man!"

So bad! And I fell to my knees, and I did the only thing I could do was— I knew I had to like get this rage out. So it's all my knees—very tired—but I remember I just like pounded mostly like a child. I just like powder my system to snow and like scream some curse word. And then I was like, "Okay, that's all you can, man! You gotta go get it!"

So I put my skins on, which is a total process, right? And I—and then when I try to get out, well, the worst part is I'd get like ten feet from the kite—and the wind would just hit the ground out, and the wind would just be like, "Oh, man!" If I get it with like your pole, and it was just—it did that for like a mile, right?

And I almost left it, but I just was like, "This is my trash! I need to back it up!" So I got it, and I stuffed it into my thing; I was like, "I'll never use this again!" I didn't like fold it up nicely at all anyway that I need to move on.

Okay, so we get back to base camp, right? And this is what we came back to. Five days was enough to just utterly ravage our camp, right? And poor Freddy, he was the writer, so the writer should always have the worst experience. So I have like maybe he needs something to talk about, so his tent was totally destroyed, right?

But we knew like we cannot stay here, but on our trip we found out where we wanted to climb, right? Reflected in Mike's Colossus here, the tower on the right—that was the line, so that was good! We had accomplished something, but we knew we have to move all this gear, and we cannot stay out in this ice cap. So we moved into the callus field over here.

The towers just slightly out of frame on the left, but all 1,800 pounds of gear had to go to—it took two days, right? Of just like load after load—you'd ski it in, and then you'd have to like to hike it up. But we found this really great spot, kind of mostly out of the wind, and it was close enough to the tower, and we nestled in, and it was great!

There was—the wind was a lot less; the snow was the real problem because the wind just pushes snow on you all the time when we were out of that. But the one thing we know—the only bet, the only non-benefit of the snow is we had to find little snow patches of snow that had collected, and that's where we would have to like, you know, fill up big duffle bags, and that's for how we drink our water.

So this little white stuff you're seeing in the snow there—that's like bird poop! That's like a thousand years old, man! Because there are birds that are down there, but nothing decomposes, right? So you dig down like three feet, and everything is full of white stuff.

Then we realize that pretty quick, and it's crazy on expeditions how you just stop caring about certain things—the cleanliness of your bowl, you know. Everything just becomes like one like amalgam of spice where there's like coffee and my curry just like eating, and you're like, "Mmm, I guess!" You just stop caring, and the bird poop was just all part of the amalgam, right?

And so anyway, the objective was—we had—the real objective was to climb this 2,200-foot, you know, spire—a beautiful piece of rock. The little guy on the corner down there, that's Cory. We just now start moving in our equipment to get to the base of the climb and then start it.

And so over the next like 40 days, Mike and Freddie just threw themselves at this tower, inching their way up, and every now and then you'd get a storm that would blow in, and it would last for one to five days, and you just kind of bunker down and hang out. And then these guys would get right back on the wall and circle and up again, and slowly they inch their way closer and closer to the top until we were completely victorious.

And it was an incredible adventure! And I'll show you the three-minute short film you can also watch it online, but this is a stream in a film that was made from it as well as the television show. This is one of the most challenging environments for a climber you can visit anywhere on planet Earth. A big part of the game is approaching these unclimbed, unexplored mountains and looking for the coolest way to get to the top. That for us as climbers is the path.

We spent a week ski touring around, looking, you know, with binoculars at every mountain within striking distance of us, and this is without a doubt the proudest line we found. The environment is so hostile you die up here in a matter of hours without the right gear and the right expertise. Like the SWAT team—Special Weapons and Tactics—this is aid climbing, or free climbing, or speed climbing; this is just like whatever it takes!

It'll be spicy, for sure! Every day we wake up, and we don't know what we're going to be able to do safely. You definitely have to work for everything in Antarctica; nothing is a given. You have to earn it; unpredictability, it's about, you know, the unknown—hundreds of mountains that are unclimbed. It's like being an astronaut going up there, going into outer space; you need to have a survival suit on; you need to be prepared for everything.

As a counterbalance to that extreme consequence and severity is just these moments of surreal, otherworldly beauty.

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Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. You know, it's pretty incredible looking back at that magazine—the National Geographic story, "Storming the Tower" all those years ago, you know—and then flashing forward to 2012 and really going and doing my own version of "Storming the Tower," having an adventure for people going out, you know, for close friends, and in two months having our own sort of trials and tribulations.

And Bill Hatcher is the photographer that shot the story, and I've since become friends with Bill, and it's so fun exchanging stories and catching up and talking about the different adventures and things we've been on. And it's really National Geographic that inspired me down this entire road to this like very platform I'm standing on today, and that's so rare.

I didn't even realize it until earlier in the week when I pulled this photo to talk about it as I was putting it into the presentation—this sort of full circle situation that I'd kind of found myself—and it's just really—it's really quite cool!

So this is us at the end—successful, all like barely worse for wear after such a fun adventure! Oh, I try to put in my Vila Becky bonus material.

Okay, so the very odd about those—okay, so two years ago, Mike calls me up, and then he says he's got another tower project in mind for—but this time it's very different; it's in the—it's in the small country called a POW. It's down in like the South Pacific, right? I'd never heard of it before, and he sent me some photos, and I'm like, "Wow, this is crazy!"

And so I'm like, "Oh man!" He calls me, and my friend Andy, man, and our friend Angie Pain, and she's like, "This is the team of four, and we're all in!" Right? And it was this beautiful tower right here. This is it; the tower's called Put Maka, and Mike said something I've never heard him say before when we were on the phone talking about planning and logistics, you know, we're all excited, and he said, "There'll be moments on the trip where you wish you didn't come, guys."

Like a Texas—I’ve never heard him say something like that of like what do you mean? You know, anyway, I quickly learned what he meant. You know, this is like day ten we're in Antarctica, you know, it's cold, but you can put clothing on; you can sort of figure out a way to kind of deal with the cold—then slip yourself down here—it's just mud and heat and wet, you know?

And even if you're wet and high, you still—it's so what? You have to protect yourself from like bugs and bushes and everything else! And you just—it was a completely different suffer fest, something like I've never had this level of suffer fest in my life! But it was still so much fun!

So I'm going to show you the film; this is actually going to be screening at—hope I get the name right—it’s the International Conservation Film Festival, I think that's right, and in the next couple of weeks, if you want to see the film, it'll be here in D.C. very soon! Real on May apparently! It’s mayhem at a ship here—but once it's like here, we'll figure it out!

Or got going, my sweet danke! Seen waves turn way you never do! What to say?

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Jungle mayhem ahead, mystery completely—you know what, Mr. Ibrahim? This is the kind of moment of life where it's good. This is what was holding me.

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Maybe the most miserable things—fun!

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Boom! Ah, thank you! So yes, if you want to see that, that'll be here in two weeks at that Film Festival.

I wanted to end talking about two projects I recently worked on, and they're both climate change based. In 2015, I get a phone call from National Geographic magazine asking me if I would be interested in working on a climate change story on America's national parks.

And I—the outdoors is my life; it means so much to me that the beautiful places in our national park system here—we're so lucky! We have these incredible parks, and so I of course said yes. And I started—you know, National Geographic, they set you up for success, right? There were scientists and biologists and different contacts, like people I could talk to, so you could kind of figure out like what the story is.

And you start learning things in this way, it's remarkable! And so I'm going to just run you through the different photos, right? So this is in Glacier National Park; this is the Grinnell Glacier, right? You can see the three different parts of it, and in like twenty years ago, this was all connected and actually kind of like covering most of the lake.

And thirty to forty years ago it was actually kind of running down the mountain. The glaciers in the park are receding so quickly that they say that by 2030 they'll be gone; all the glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone! The heat index keeps going up, right? It’s getting warmer all the time.

This is in Sequoia National Park; these trees are the oldest living trees in the world. They're also the tallest living trees. Now they get in excess of 300 feet tall, and these big trees, they drink as much as 500 gallons of water a day, right? They require a lot of water, and they're completely unique to the Sierra Mountains, right? They're endemic to this one little spot in California, and if you've ever seen them, you know what I'm talking about—they are incredible!

But you know, with the heat index on the rise and drought, they're already starting to see a lot of signs of stress, these trees, and there's a lot of question marks as to whether or not these—they're national treasures, actually. But you know what the future of these trees is looking like? Things are changing so quickly!

This is smoke from—this is in Glacier National Park, and this is smoke from fires, some as far as Washington State, like all the smoke that had kind of blown in. And fire danger is going up higher and higher every year. There's actually—they're seeing fire in the Arctic, places like far north Alaska; it's crazy! You like places that have never experienced virus before, and it's all based on like the drought and heat factor.

This is an American alligator; this is down in the Everglades National Park. I really fell in love with the Everglades; it's such a special place. And the Everglades is down in the southern tip of the state, and it's surrounded by water on all three sides. And with ocean sea rise, the salinity levels of the water are slowly changing. You know, as the ocean rises a little more, it starts pushing—this is all freshwater in the Everglades.

And because the parks all the way down in the South, as the water keeps kind of—the ocean kind of keeps rising, the salinity levels are changing. Well, American alligators—that's not an endangered species—but the thing with this, this alligator is its real refuge is kind of down in the Everglades, as is a lot of the animals that are down there, especially the freshwater ones. They're slowly going to get pushed further north and eventually out of the park, and then it's mostly just residential.

It's a completely different place, Florida, once you get out of these wild wetlands. And so there’s a lot of animals that are kind of—there's a lot of question marks. This is in Joshua Tree National Park, and they're saying that by the year 2100, there may be no new sprouts from Joshua trees. I think in 30% of the parks there hasn't been any sprout in like two decades or something.

It's already kind of happening, and these are crazy signs. When I got the assignment, I was told like a lot of what you're shooting can look at it like it's time capsule photography, like you're shooting things the way they are now, but they're changing really quickly.

And it would be wild to think about Joshua Tree National Park without Joshua trees, Sequoia National Park without Sequoia trees, or Glacier National Park without glaciers, etc. And the big question is, like, what do you do? And I think the big answer is, you know, we need good legislation—people that are making good decisions that can make the big changes.

And then for us, it's basically making small choices, like using less water when you can and carpooling with other people when you can; smaller decisions. There's 7 billion people on the planet, and it's a really hard situation, but we kind of have to work collectively together to hopefully make things, you know, salvage things as we can.

The most recent trip I did was down to Antarctica; they kind of talked briefly about the beginning. I went down with Paul Nicklin and Cristina Mittermeier; these are two of my heroes. I mean, Paul's like a photography legend; I've loved his work for so many years. Cristina is, she's just got a heart of gold, and she's a conservationist as is Paul.

And so Paul led an expedition down there of a team of amazing videographers, VR, and then Cristina, Paul, and I worked in the photo side for the magazine. And what I saw down there, both was completely breathtaking and also quite revealing.

So I'm going to walk you through kind of the characters of Antarctica of what we saw. So we mostly concentrated on the northern—or sorry, the southern part of the peninsula, right? Sorry, the northern part of the peninsula. Forgive me! And we went to all these different places and we experienced—we got to see like the beauty of the place. We got to see a lot of the wildlife; there's lots of wildlife down there!

This is a classic example of how pretty it is down there. What you're seeing here is like polished rocks where ice used to be, and it's kind of like moved off now, but it was beautiful, big glaciers floating by; got lucky, got some really nice light. There are big mountains everywhere you go; you're constantly going through fjords and seeing these beautiful mountain ranges that like look like the Tetons but you're down in—you know in Antarctica, you can see where the glaciers have kind of receded.

I mean, they're losing ice very quickly down there. The animals you see down there? You see, of course, penguins; there's five different types of penguins that live down there, and I think that I read there's about 11 million collectively that lived down there. Okay, you have all these great seals—this is a Weddell seal; this is a fur seal; and this is like the legendary—the leopard seal, right?

This is what Paul—a few familiar with Paul Nichol—and in 2006 he did a leopard seal story that was unbelievably iconic. And I was such an honor to get in the water with Paul and have leopard seal interactions. This little like mouthing move right here, this is—it looks like a threat display, but this is just to communicate with like air bubbles and by opening their mouths and seeing how you react, and they're also looking at the reflection in your dome of your camera.

So there, I think to them even, it's sort of this like new and weird kind of cool thing, but they were—they were so incredible to be in the water with! And then as you know, you have the big animals, right? You have the big whales, there's humpback whales and pilot whales and minke whales and all the rest, okay?

So all these animals are connected to one thing—they're connected to krill. Krill is like a little shrimp, right? And all these animals, their main source of food is krill. And the thing is, krill eats bacteria and algae that grows on sea ice. Well, sea ice is kind of receding; we're seeing it go away quite quickly.

And so that's the krill food source, and the foods krill feeds everything. Well, fishing is kind of the big question mark right now because there's fishing companies from all over the world, and they're going in, and they're sucking out hundreds of thousands of tons of krill every season.

And scientists are trying to wrap their heads around like what is the appropriate amount of krill that can be taken out of the water, and there, you know, krill is used for like omega-3 supplements, and some people eat it, and krill oil and different things like that. But we need to be responsible. We need to kind of wrap our heads around what is the appropriate amount of food to take out because we're going to just wipe out all these animals that are completely codependent on this thing.

So the story is based about fishing as much as it is climate change. You can see the ice kind of receding here, and again krill need ice, so all these honor other animals need ice as well as do we! But you know, we need to figure this out; a hundred years ago, these are blue whale bones right here—you see them everywhere! They were really cool to see, but they weren't blue whales, they were just like we're beach, you know? And that kind of came up and naturally died; they were from fishing about a hundred years ago.

The blue whale is the biggest animal that's ever been on the planet Earth, and it was hunted to near extinction about a hundred years ago. We need to learn from our mistakes in the past. One of the scientists on the boat said that man has messed up every fishery in the world, and Antarctica is like our last chance to do it correctly.

So we're hoping for good legislation and good decisions to kind of save this part of the planet. And I know that's an interesting tone to end on after all this adventure stuff I was talking about, but this stuff is so important to me, and I'm hoping that we can, you know, do something that's impactful with the story that people can see this and actually, you know, keep good eyes on people that are making the decisions that can keep these places in checks and balances.

And that's everything I have today. Thank you so much for listening.

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