Jimmy Chin Instagram – The shot. Getting the shot. @deanpotter on Concepcion in 2003, soon after he’d established the climb. At the time, it was one of the hardest and certainly most striking cracks in the Utah desert. Dean was a good friend. We shot together a lot over the years. It was always an adventure. He pushed me to the brink more than a few times. He had high expectations of himself and high expectations of the people around him. He can be credited with my obsessive prep on high angle shoots; I was terrified of messing him up or slowing him down on the wall. Shooting with him was good training for life. Dean was also intensely creative and such a visionary that some of the things he pioneered are now their own specialized sports. Complex and sometimes misunderstood, he could be soft spoken one moment and a gladiator the next. He could also be extremely mischievous and loved a good laugh (sometimes at your expense). He always seemed to push the boundaries personally, physically, mentally. It was non stop. There was an urgency to his life that was hard to keep up with. I would listen to him after what would be a casual day for him, knowing it would have been the pinnacle of most climbers’ careers. I looked up to him a lot. I would say live like Dean but none of us would survive a day trying. Photo 2 by @jimhurst