Steph Davis - CHOICES Full Movie

[Music] the scariest thing as a climber is falling and I just there was a part of me that was just like fine let's just go do this scariest possible thing that in my brain equals dying screw it why not let's just see what this is all about [Music] what makes me happy um well I mean climbing makes me happy flying makes me happy being with Ian makes me happy [Music] I think having the ability in life to to kind of follow things at the time they come by is something that really makes me happy and I have kind of prioritized my life to allow for that I'm Stef Davis I'm a climber I'm a BASE jumper I'm a wingsuit flyer I live in Moab Utah and I guess that's about it I think if there was one word to describe her goal in life its freedom it affects everything that she does that's just who she is I can't cage you know can't cage a wild bird as they say you know I was born in Illinois and then we moved to New Jersey and then finally to Maryland our family life was like very controlled and then you know I was really good student I always had scholarships you know that was just the track I was in it's like you go through school until you can't go anymore and then you kind of get a sort of a career on the basis of that [Music] starting to climb was what showed me that well first of all there was like another way to live I just felt like whoa you know I have a passion for this and I and I know it because that's the thing I saw I wasn't having with what I was doing before so I was kind of like difficult to go to law school because I'd so much seeped into this lifestyle of climbing all the time so I just kind of made the break and and continued down that road [Music] I don't know if I can take credit for bringing stuff to Moab but because I was like the only person everybody knew that had a house I might have encouraged her to stay because she lived in her truck in my driveway [Music] you know I made the choice to live in my car to not spend money I never had like cellphones or five TVs or I don't know whatever you spend money on or go out to restaurants or I just don't want to do that I want to go climbing when I bought this place this place was a wreck it was like the cheapest possible place you could buy but I bought it outright because I had been like saving money living in my car you know just spending almost nothing and I was just like slowly saving my money and then just bought this place [Music] I think stuff really likes to have a nest to come home to especially when she was doing more far-flung adventures like Patagonia or somebody valley and she always looked forward to having a really solid base to come home and just like regroup and refuel and nest for a while before the next really big adventure [Music] what was fun about expeditions at that time was the fact that you just like disappeared we didn't have it like now with the internet and the phones and everything and so it was kind of like I'm going on expedition be back in a few months by then your route is gone which is great [Music] Steff is one of the people that i know that will not be told what to do like i have rarely seen someone that wants to be freed like that [Music] at that time there just weren't that many women doing the more adventurous style of climbing I did start to get a little bit of sponsorship money that was huge and that's when I started going on expeditions because suddenly I had like double the amount of money and you know I can have a lot more freedom it's part of the fun of climbing is you know getting an idea or getting inspired by like a place or a particular route and then life becomes really easy because all your focus goes to that thing I summited all the peaks in the fitzroy range did a new route on point snow did the first one day a Centon Tory ager did the first free ice out of the tombstone freed El Cap in a day free sold the diamond I was the first woman to do that and then freed the solid day [Music] living in the limelight of you know not being a kind of a sponsored climber she's experienced some very high positives from that career but she's also had some negatives [Music] it was during like 2008 during that big crash and there was a lot of turmoil and changes in the industry she lost a couple big sponsors because of another story related to her ex-husband he climbed the delicate arch and it got publicized sponsors associated Dean and Steph together because they were married so she lost sponsorship because he did something that was illegal what made this whole situation so hard was that her career has been so severely damaged that you're not sure you can get it back again and it's all you've ever done in your life and so it was making it kind of hard from a practical standpoint you know like when you basically lose your entire income that's big and whereas in the past any time something was hard in my life climbing was my solace climbing was so tied into everything that even climbing hurt and I just didn't know what to do with myself in the moment in life that I was you know I just felt like my whole life just exploded everything's out the window who cares so that's why I needed to do something completely different [Music] I'm not really sure why she decided to do that because as a climber everything that you don't want to do is jump off the cliff you usually don't want to fumble if you like jumping you pretty quickly have great feelings when you jump and so even in the first few jumps I just got totally you know started to fall in love with it and I'm and it was a very healing experience for me because it just went from being super lost and and I'm and sad and and scared and you know not knowing what to do to finding this other great passion of my life it was after that that I met Mario and you know Mario was just really my rock he was so good and so solid and you know I've never really met a person as good as Mario so to meet someone like that and fall in love with somebody like that and have that person as my husband and my partner and I mean I could count on him just with anything forever this is a book of photos of Mario that I am after he died to give to his sisters and his brother and just to keep obviously so I kind of went through his computer and my computer and just tried to find you know just a ton of great photos of Mario be Mario and you know flying planes and flying paragliders and the speed fire isn't Wang si it's a base pair of sheets and that guy had adventures like everywhere you know all over the world yeah this is I'm this is the Dolomites this is a spurdo this was the day before we did that last jump on top this wasn't the same jump because obviously these were obviously his cameras were lost on that jump [Music] so I jumped and flew and opened up and landed and then typically when you jump like that when you land you look around and you see the other person's parachute already cuz they've been flying behind you so I just kind of landed and looked up and I didn't see his parachute and then all of a sudden the French people that we had made friends with the night before came running up to me and they said we saw Mario jump after you and he flew into the notch and we don't see him come out and then of course you know my brain was doing all these things like is there some way he passed him a notch and there's magically some like corridor through the mountain I don't know about where he's out of sight or like like my brain was trying to make some way that that made sense um and then of course I knew that didn't make sense and then we always jump with radios so I pulled out the radio and tried to call him no answer and then you know I just immediately knew like he's not he's not coming down [Music] it was really rough I mean there were times where she was not sure if she could you know continue on without Mario on this planet and part of the way that she had to deal with that was to go into what she called Alpine climbing mode which was like you know putting your head down and kind of suffering like I just have to get up the cell I have to get up the cell just one step forward at a time [Music] um that was a tough one because you know the grief was so strong and it's kind of like you know any pain like when you hurt yourself it's like it doesn't heal right away it was the most painful difficult time in my life I mean I really had to go in and deal with it and then one day I think she really got to a point where she was like okay you know I want to stay Mario would want me to stay and I think I want to start enjoying myself I do think that is part of loss when you experience it and you keep going then one thing that happens is you become very grateful about everything you've become grateful for the time that you had before and you become very grateful for what you have now and and you're just more aware of how good things are when they're good [Music] after Mario died I was just telling people that I didn't want to go by myself and fly and then Ian said oh I'll go you know if you don't want to be by yourself which I didn't take very seriously I was like oh yeah lots of people say they'll go who knows what you know but little did I know Ian was like I told her I would go and I must go no matter what we found look I had already met Ian in the past a couple times you know we'd travel in Europe with Mario all of us together he was a friend but I didn't know him that well and I had never really seen him that way so when we kind of met again I had those feelings and realized I was falling in love with him I thought this is amazing you know why would I not be totally open to this and then it was really special because some friends of us asked us to go up to the canyons in Arizona and she hasn't hadn't done a wingsuit base jump on this sued and so I was there to jump right right behind her and actually it was really neat in that flight it wasn't really planned but I left behind her and then she you told me later that you were a little nervous because Mario had left behind you yeah Miami and then he I never saw him again but then actually in the flight I decided that you know she was flying a certain way I wanted to fly a little bit different so I kind of passed her and went ahead cuz I super nice to see that and yeah I deployed it in front of her so could she she could see my fair shoot they didn't have to worry yeah and then we landed together at the bottom of the canyon I was really good super nice [Music] [Music] I can't wait [Music] [Music] it's a very it's a real powerful moment that decision moment when when you say okay I'm going cuz you leave the edge you can't go back you're in it and you're so aware of that because it's such a dramatic physical metaphor there's no confusing that you know as soon as you step off the edge you're in the air so it's it's really kind of what makes it cool it's that that break between then and now and then once you go and you get off the edge that's that's what you're trying to be is that that space when you're in the air and it's all happening and you're just doing it [Music] [Music] [Music] we should have been I will show it I'm standing on the air to see my choice [Music]

Channel: MAMMUT

Views: 286,732

Keywords: mammut, steph davis, climbing, rockclimbing

Id: mtLegY2QVDk

Length: 20min 30sec (1230 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020