There must be a list somewhere of the professions of New York City residents. Non-farm jobs. There are a lot of them here. Tortilla manufacturer, beauty ambassador. One you probably won’t see, though, is “professional mountaineer.” This isn’t much of a town for Alpinists, except when they come to give their slide shows and raise funds. Still, you can’t quite say that their number here is zero.

Two years ago, Jimmy Chin, a prominent climber and photographer from Jackson, Wyoming, married a New Yorker, a documentary filmmaker named Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. They had a daughter. Now Vasarhelyi lives with the child on Park Avenue, while Chin lives in Jackson, to the extent that he can be said to live anywhere. But he is so often in New York these days, for regular conjugal stints, that he risks developing an opinion of Mayor de Blasio. For a man of the mountains, the city can be claustrophobic—how many times can a guy jog around Central Park?—but such are the wages of love.

Chin, who is forty-one, was born and reared a flatlander, in Mankato, Minnesota, where his parents, Chinese immigrants, worked as librarians. Later, they made the mistake of taking him on a vacation to Glacier National Park. Real peaks: he was smitten. After college, at Carleton, he became a climbing vagabond (his parents had hoped for a lawyer or a doctor), and then discovered photography as a way of making a living at it. Expeditions around the world brought him some renown, and also a mention in People as one of the hottest bachelors of 2003.

Vasarhelyi, who is thirty-six, grew up on the Upper East Side, and went to Brearley and Princeton. Her parents worked in academia. She has made films about Kosovo and Senegal. She and Chin met at an ideas conference near Lake Tahoe, where Chin was giving a talk about his attempts to climb a notorious route in the Garhwal Himalaya, in India—up the sheer granite face of Meru Central, known as the Shark’s Fin. In 2008, he and two companions, Renan Ozturk and Conrad Anker, had been forced to turn back a hundred yards short of the summit. In 2011, they returned, and got it done: a celebrated first ascent. Chin had made a film about the climb, full of mind-bending big-wall footage, and he gave Vasarhelyi a rough cut, hoping for feedback. Three months went by. He took her silence for indifference, or worse.

In fact, she’d gone to Senegal, to shoot a film. (“Incorruptible,” about the 2012 elections there, premièred last month.) When she returned, she watched his movie, and liked it. “I was far more interested in the film than I was in him,” she said recently. She suggested that Chin structure it differently: the human story. They began working together. By the time the film, called “Meru,” screened at Sundance, last winter (it won an audience award, and will be in theatres next month), they were co-directors, and husband and wife.

On a recent summer evening, they left their daughter with a sitter and headed downtown for a night out. Soup dumplings on Mott Street. They got an order in just as the restaurant was closing. Chin, compact and muscular, was in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a flat-brim trucker hat. Vasarhelyi had on jeans, flats, and an Army-green Rick Owens leather jacket. After a while, the owner gestured at the ceiling and said something to Chin in Chinese, and he laughed and stood up to leave. Apparently, nozzles in the ceiling were about to begin spraying roach poison.

Chin and Vasarhelyi walked east, to a restaurant called Sweet Chick, to meet some friends. “If I have a crew in New York, this is the one,” Chin said, as he opened the door. The crew consisted of the members of a creative agency and collective called TheGoodLife!, founded by the photographer Craig Wetherby and Tim Brodhagen, a writer who goes by Timbo Baggins. Every Tuesday night, they set up somewhere on the Lower East Side for what they call Family Dinner and host games of dominoes. Chin goes when he’s in town.

“Chai cleaned up last time,” Chin said. Chin’s table name—everyone gets one—is Jackie Chan, which is what the locals in Mexico call him when he’s there surfing. Vasarhelyi’s is Snow Bunny. “I should be Snow Leopard,” she said.

“Or Snow Ninja. I told Craig I was bringing Snow Bunny, and he was, like, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”

Tattoos, beards, hats. Nineties hip-hop. Watermelon beer. The crew members shuffled the dominoes and the games commenced. The buy-in for each round was twenty bucks. Wetherby (table name: Comeback King) and his girlfriend, Chenoah Rommereim, a jewelry designer, each teamed up with a newb, whose incompetence they bore with aplomb. Jackie Chan and Snow Bunny played as a pair.

“Chinese math class here—look out,” Chin said.

Spinners. Snake eyes. The slam of tiles on the table. Comeback King took a lead and never lost it. Chin stuck around for another couple of games—there were worse ways to lose twenty dollars—and then it was time to head uptown and pay the sitter. ♦