The story behind the photo edit

Many of you may have already read the piece in the winter issue on Rob Newsom. He’s an interesting and gregarious individual who seems to have lived four or five different and unique existences, all in one human lifetime.

While working with Rob on the story, we looked through a fairly sparse group of images, but this attached image caught our eye, and it was laid out in the magazine.

When I asked Rob about the image, and getting a high res file, this was his response: “Wow, that’s gonna be hard. This is a photo I took of Pat McNethney doing the first completely free ascent of “The Shaft”, a 3 pitch vertical section on the North Buttress of Mount Hunter. The only files of this slide were on Joe Puryear’s computer, and he died in Nepal last year.”

Over the 10 years we’ve been publishing magazines, there have been all sorts of reasons for last minute image changes in any given issue, most often it’s because of conflict with another magazine, or company. This was the first time that the untimely death of an individual forced a different image to ultimately be used.