Mike Hoover

Mike Hoover is an American mountaineer, rock climber and cinematographer. He first became known for an Academy Award nominated documentary short, Solo, of him climbing El Capitan as a lone climber. His first major involvement in commercial film was in The Eiger Sanction (1975) in which he taught Clint Eastwood how to climb in the Yosemite valley before the film was shot in Grindelwald, Switzerland in 1974. He has since been a cinematographer for the documentaries To the Ends of the Earth (1983), To the Limit (1989), The Endless Summer 2 (1994) and Zion Canyon: Treasure of the Gods. In the late 1980s, he made 18 trips to Afghanistan to shoot footage of the bloody war in the country. The footage was later featured in a program named The Battle for Afghanistan (1987). Hoover, who has been in charge of various film teams, has filmed all across the world, particularly physically and politically difficult filming locations, from the precarious rock faces of the Eiger, to filming Everest and K2, to canoeing in the Venezuelan jungle.