Erik Weihenmayer made history in 2001 as the first blind person to summit Mount Everest. By 2008, he had completed the Seven Summits, the tallest mountains on each continent. Since then, Erik has embraced a wide range of adventure sports from paragliding in the Rocky Mountains and ice climbing in Nepal to kayaking the length of the Grand Canyon.
Erik Weihenmayer made history in 2001 as the first blind person to summit Mount Everest. By 2008, he had completed the Seven Summits, the tallest mountains on each continent. Since then, Erik has embraced a wide range of adventure sports from paragliding in the Rocky Mountains and ice climbing in Nepal to kayaking the length of the Grand Canyon.
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Erik Weihenmayer:
I was a hair's breadth away from losing the adventure in my life. And so when you know how close you were to this life on the sidelines where you're just listening to life go by, I think it's motivation to keep going and saying, "How can I keep pushing myself not to prove that blind people can do this or that, but more like, how do I celebrate what's possible and just do things that have never been done before?"
Shelby Stanger:
In 2001, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to summit Mount Everest and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Seven years later, he made history again when he completed the Seven Summits, which are the tallest mountains on each continent. Besides climbing some of the biggest peaks in the world, Erik has tried almost every adventure sport under the Sun, he's paraglided in the Rocky Mountains, ice climbed in Nepal, and he even kayaked the length of the Grand Canyon in 2014. Going after these wild ideas has transformed and empowered Erik, and now he works to support other people with disabilities and challenges on their own adventures. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Erik Weihenmayer, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I am really honored to speak with you today.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Sweet. Hi, Shelby.
Shelby Stanger:
Where are you right now?
Erik Weihenmayer:
I'm in Golden, my home office. It's right in the foothills of the Rockies and it's a pretty cool place. I don't want to spread it around too much because I don't want people moving here, but yeah, great mountain biking and trail running and hiking. And the funny thing is when you go to a party in Boulder or Golden and you've climbed Everest, 17 other people have also climbed Everest at the same party. It's like nothing.
Shelby Stanger:
Dude, I think your story is pretty epic though. You're like, "I did it and I'm visually impaired, and I also did the Seven Summits, so take that."
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah. Hey, and let me tell you this because I know it's always changing in terms of what you call somebody who can't see. I'm blind, blind, blind, blind.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. I can say you're blind. Okay.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah. So visually impaired, it's a great word, but kind of all encompassing, but I can't see a thing. I have prosthetic eyes, so I'm blind and happy with that label.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so let's go back to the beginning. How did you become so adventurous? Were you always adventurous as a kid?
Erik Weihenmayer:
I was always adventurous. I used to love taking my mountain bike and racing it down my driveway, and I had built these ramps at the bottom of my driveway, wooden ramps, and I'd fly off one and I'd fly through the air and I'd land on a big plyboard landing ramp. And I had this cheesy little sign that I painted, "Devil's Derby." I thought I was Evel Knievel, and I could barely see out of one eye because I was born legally blind. I could always see a little bit out of my right eye, but my left eye was pretty much blind, so I never could see well.
But I could see well enough to ride my bike and run through the woods chasing my friends. I was usually the one bouncing off of trees and falling into ditches and tripping over rocks. But I was desperately trying to keep up with the world, and I got this letter in Braille and it was a group taking blind kids on recreational activities. And so you would embark once a month. My dad would drive me from Connecticut all the way up to Boston, three hours, and then we'd go horseback riding or sailing, canoeing, even fishing, tandem bike riding. And one weekend they took us rock climbing and I was this wiry little kid.
Shelby Stanger:
How old were you?
Erik Weihenmayer:
I was 16. I was about 120 pounds, and I felt my way up that granite face, finding these patterns that were embedded in the rock that I couldn't use my eyes to find. I would find them with my hands and my feet. I felt like I was unlocking a puzzle. It was this connect the dots puzzle where you're trying to get your body from point A to point B to point C and putting your body in these crazy cool positions to be able to leverage your body up a little bit higher and higher up the face.
And the patterns of hot and cold as my hands and feet touched the rock, the sun on my face and the sound of space below me. I was up high on this rock face and I listened out into the valley and I think there was a chainsaw, maybe somebody was building something and that was creating this echo, and I could hear the whole valley below me. And I could hear the leaves, it was fall and the leaves were blowing across the valley rustling. It was just so spectacular. I just loved it and I said, "This is so fun. I got to keep doing it. I got to find a way to do this again."
Shelby Stanger:
From that moment on, Erik made it a priority to keep climbing. In high school and college, he trained as much as he could. After graduation, Erik decided to take climbing more seriously. It was the early '90s, and he was working as a middle school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona when a coworker encouraged him to lean even further into adventure sports.
Erik Weihenmayer:
I had a substitute teacher, this guy Sam, who became a good friend, and we started rock climbing together, and he knew I was into rock climbing and I wanted to get better. And together we joined the Arizona Mountaineering Club. You would think that I would show up as a blind guy and they'd be like, "You can't do this." No, they didn't do that at all. They welcomed me with open arms, taught me the ropes. Sorry for that pun.
Shelby Stanger:
I got it. I liked it.
Erik Weihenmayer:
They taught me anchors. They even taught me how to lead climb, how to lead with my fingers in the cracks. And these mentors, they took me under their wing and just said, "Hey man, here's how you do it." And so Sam and I were learning, and Sam had attention deficit disorder. He'd always struggled in school. He said that trying to be in class and listening to the teacher, it's like listening to a hundred radios all playing at the same time, and his mind didn't know how to focus in on one thing. And he said, rock climbing, when he was hanging by his fingertips like a hundred feet off the ground, he could fully concentrate. So this sport was therapeutic to Sam and it was incredibly therapeutic to me. So we were a great match. And so one day, Sam... that ADD is a really, it's another weird gift because his mind doesn't work in linear fashion.
He just could make these amazing leaps. And he said, "Erik, we should try something bigger." And I went like, "What? A 200-foot rock face in the desert?" He said, "No. How about Denali?" I'm like, "Sam, I haven't camped since Boy Scouts." And I got carried away with this idea. I was like, "Well, what does that entail?" So Sam and I went out on this kind of year long 15 month journey, learning as much about mountaineering as we could. We went to the tallest peak in Arizona, Mount Humphreys, and we got on Mount Hood. We went to Rainier in April. We didn't summit anything. Sam and I had it out a few times too because I lost my glove on Mount Humphreys one weekend, and Sam just read me the riot act. He said, "Dude, you know what? I don't care if you're blind or not, you lose your glove on Denali, you're going to lose your hand and I'm not going to be responsible for that."
Excuse my language, "You got to get your shit together." And that was good. It was good to hear stuff like that because I had to learn to organize. I was on Mount Rainier and we were setting up our tent on this kind of flat snow field, and I had learned to set up tents, so I was pretty prepared. But in this storm that we were in on Rainier, it was like these really hard pellets of ice. And so I took my gloves off to try to set up the tent because I couldn't orient the corners and stuff with my big gloves on. Every time I took my gloves off, these shards of ice would hit my hands and they would immediately go numb. And eventually Sam and my other teammate came over and set the tent up for me. And I was so humiliated.
I was so embarrassed because I didn't want to be the blind guy that gets dragged to the top of the mountain and spiked on top like a football. I wanted to do this as a team with dignity and contributing to the team. And so I went back to Arizona and I would go out to the field near the school and I'd literally, be a hundred degrees out, and be in a tank top and these big mountaineering gloves on. And I'd be setting up the tent, breaking it down and setting it up, breaking it down. Cars would stop on the side of the road like, "Who is this maniac?" And by the time I got to Denali, I could set up a tent in any conditions. So there's a very fine line between the things you have to let go and the things you say like, "I'm going to figure this out."
Shelby Stanger:
After 15 months of training for the expedition, Erik and Sam started their climb up Denali in Alaska. 19 days later, they crossed the summit ridge and made it to the top.
Erik Weihenmayer:
We summited on Helen Keller's birthday. I found that out later. We didn't try to do that, and that was really special to be there with my team. But the amount of suffering on that mountain was catastrophic. I remember there's this one day on Denali when everybody had been stepping in the same spots and I couldn't see them, of course. So I kept slipping and sliding into these deep-frozen boot holes, and then I would fall forward and my shins were bloody and bruised at the end of that day. And I went into my tent and cried. I was like, "I don't think I can wake up and do this again tomorrow." And even when I summited, half of me was thinking, "I am not cut out for this life. I am not tough enough. I'm not strong enough. I'm not resilient enough. This is way over my head." And then the other half of you is like, "I'm going to do this forever. This is freaking awesome."
Shelby Stanger:
When Erik returned from Denali, he received a lot of publicity. He went on the Today Show, and he even taught Regis Philbin, co-host of Regis and Kelly, how to rock climb on live TV. Erik's trek up Denali captured the public's attention, and many people wondered the same thing. How exactly does a blind person navigate these extreme environments?
How do you climb as someone who's blind? How is it different? I can think of the ways it's different, but are you using echolocation?
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah, I use a bit of echolocation, making sure I can hear the drop-offs and hear the solid faces and so forth.
Shelby Stanger:
What does that look like? The echolocation? Are you talking or hearing? I'm clueless, I'm sorry.
Erik Weihenmayer:
No, you don't have to talk. There's enough ambient noise that you could always hear what's happening or if you want to be proactive about it, there's this blind guy that's an amazing talent at echolocation. He actually kind of trademarked this idea called flash sonar, and he clicks with his tongue like a bat. Humans, we can do it pretty good if we focus, although I will say I was using echolocation trying to use my Jedi skills in the forest, and I banged my forehead right into this skinny little tree. So it doesn't always work perfectly like eyeballs.
But also my friend walks in front of me with a bell and they jingle a bell from their trekking pole. So I hear a little ambient noise in front of me, and I'm using trekking poles or sometimes a trekking pole and an ice axe, and I'm feeling my way every step of the way, and I'm listening for that bell. And my friends, they know how to help me. They know what I need and what I don't need. So they tell me, "stop here at the edge of this crevasse," they jump across, they bang where they want me to land. "Okay, you got to land this. You got to stick this right here. You got to land here." So yeah, they learned how to give me information.
Shelby Stanger:
You have to rely on your team so much more than the average person. Talk to me about that.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah. One of the weird hidden gifts of blindness is that you have to trust people to get things done. I'll tell you straight up, blind people, as far as I know, do not climb mountains. Do not climb Everest or kayak the Grand Canyon alone. Maybe I'll be proven wrong someday, but to get big things done, you need this wonderful team. And better than independence is interdependence. And I love that. I love that interdependence of a team. You're putting your life in each other's hands. It feels so powerful and so connecting.
And in terms of the way I bring my leadership to the table, I know that I'm not going to be the fastest climber, the smartest climber, the climber with the best eyesight, but I can contribute to the team. I can set up a tent when somebody is tired or lay out their sleeping bag, or hey, take a candy bar out of my pack and hand it to someone when they're hungry. And then maybe it was my last candy bar. Or I know this sounds cheesy, but hey, when somebody's just super scared, you give them a hug. I can contribute and I can lead, but it's a different kind of leadership. So I just dig that kind of interaction.
Shelby Stanger:
Erik's ability to communicate and collaborate with his team was also essential for his next wild idea: Climbing the Seven Summits.
Erik Weihenmayer is a blind adventurer and mountaineer. In 1995, Erik summited his first mountain, Denali in Alaska. That expedition was transformative and it inspired him to keep climbing mountains.
Erik Weihenmayer:
My dad, who is such an important person in my life, he actually, when we climbed Denali, we had timed it so that when we were near the summit, my dad and my brothers and my ex-wife, they were circling above us in a plane watching us take our last steps onto the summit. And it's really cool, actually I said tp my friend, "Sam, do you think they're going to know that I made it? Cus we have these red suits on, they're not going to know that I'm here." And he said, "Oh yeah, Erik, they're going to know you're the only one waving your ski pole in the wrong direction." So my dad was up there, and I knew he wanted to be a part of this adventure. So I said, "Dad, how about we climb Kilimanjaro?" And so that next summer we climbed Kilimanjaro together, and then I just kept working my way around the world.
Shelby Stanger:
Once he had climbed Kilimanjaro and Denali, which are two of the Seven Summits, Erik decided to keep going. He climbed Aconcagua in Argentina and Mount Vinson in Antarctica. In 2001, he set out to make it to the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.
So when did you do Everest?
Erik Weihenmayer:
2001. It's ancient history.
Shelby Stanger:
It's really cool. You did all these climbs at a time where they weren't as crowded as they are, at least now. They were still uncrowded fairly, I'm guessing.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah. I hope I'm not giving anything away, but everyone talks about these massive lines and people hanging off of fixed lines and holding each other up, traffic jams. On our summit day on Everest in 2001, we left for the summit and one other team left for the summit. So we did not have crowds.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. Of all the Seven Summits, do you have one that sticks out as your most favorite?
Erik Weihenmayer:
God, it's like saying which of your children is your favorite? They all have such unique features. Denali was probably the coldest place I've ever been. I mean, maybe Antarctica beat it. Everest has this beautiful kind of exotic nature to it with the Buddhist culture and the Sherpas and those beautiful friendships that you're able to create. By the way, with Everest, we got sponsorship from another blindness organization called the National Federation of the Blind, and the President Dr. Marc Maurer, we sat in front of his desk at their headquarters. He said, "I hate to sound crass," he said, "but when people think about blindness, who do they think about?" And I said, "Well, they think about Helen Keller." He said, "Well, she died in 1968." He goes, "Don't you think blindness needs a facelift?" He goes, "Wouldn't it be cool if when people thought about blindness, they didn't think about somebody from 50 years ago? They thought about a blind person standing on top of the world." And I said, "Yeah, we can do that."
Shelby Stanger:
That's awesome.
Erik Weihenmayer:
So they sponsored that climb for about a quarter of a million dollars. I mean, just amazing. That was blind people doing car washes and bake sales to get us to the summit, because most blind people, about 80% of working age blind people are unemployed. They worked hard to get me to the top, and I have massive gratitude. After we summited, I remember I went to the National Federation of the Blind conference, and several thousand blind people stood up and cheered.
Shelby Stanger:
When he came from Everest, Erik's team leader took him aside and told him something powerful.
Erik Weihenmayer:
He said, "Do me a favor. I don't want you to let Everest be the greatest thing you ever do." And I thought, "Look, I mean, there's only so much you can do physically. When am I going to go find a harder mountain, a more risky mountain?" I was like, "That's a slippery slope, and I don't want to go down that rope, like I gotta do something better."
Shelby Stanger:
That advice inspired Erik to start a nonprofit called No Barriers USA in 2005. The organization aims to help other people with disabilities and challenges pursue a life of purpose. Using the outdoors as the setting and adventure as a vehicle, they teach their participants how to harness adversity. While they're focused on disability, the organization works with folks with a variety of challenges, including trauma and PTSD.
Any stories of anyone who's been through your program that you can share? Maybe just one of them?
Erik Weihenmayer:
Well, the easy story, I think and a powerful story is a friend of mine, Aaron Hale. Aaron was part of our veterans program. He was in the army. He was a cook in the army, and he felt like he wasn't contributing enough. And so he joined this part of the army called the EOD Division. It was the explosive ordnance disposal unit. Like in Afghanistan, when people were running away from those roadside bombs, he and his team were running towards them. And he said that gave him great pride and fulfillment because he wasn't taking lives. His team were saving lives, and that was really important to him. And then one of those bombs blew up in his face, and he was blinded instantly. And then in the subsequent surgeries to repair his skull, meningitis set in, and he went totally deaf.
And we took him on this wonderful program in Peru, and we climbed a peak and we held our No Barriers flag. And the team rallied around Aaron and along the trail, I remember we were talking like, "What does your No Barriers life look like and how do you see yourself moving forward?" And he said, "Erik, before I was an EOD technician, I was a cook, and I love baking for my family. I love Thanksgiving." And he goes, "I was thinking about starting a business." And I said, "Wonderful. What are you going to name it?" And he said, "I want to name it EOD Fudge." And I said, "Aaron, that's a terrible name, explosive ordnance disposal unit fudge. What the hell? That's not going to sell." He said, "No, no, no." He goes, "It's a play on words. It's extraordinary delights."
Shelby Stanger:
I like it.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah, I do too. So his tagline is "cooking without looking." And then a couple years ago in his spare time, he went off and did Badwater, which is like this 140 mile race across the desert to near the top of Mount Whitney.
Shelby Stanger:
What a badass.
Erik Weihenmayer:
He's what you call a badass. That's right. Yep. He lives a No Barriers life.
Shelby Stanger:
What's that mean to live a No Barrier's life?
Erik Weihenmayer:
I think it means where you continue to be living a life that's exciting and fulfilling and rewarding. So many people with disabilities, you have such a high chance of getting shoved to the sidelines, and you're listening to life go by. You are a bystander in your own life. And what we teach at No Barriers is that your story can be your power and your purpose and your fuel, and that you can go out and you can live this extraordinary life. It doesn't mean you're climbing Everest or running Badwater. It just means that you're living in the current, not in the eddies.
Shelby Stanger:
At the same time that Erik was building No Barriers, he was still chasing adventures outside. In 2008, Erik became the first blind person to complete the Seven Summits. Between mountain expeditions, he was also learning new skills like paragliding and even ice climbing. In fact, one day he was ice climbing in Nepal when he came up with a new wild idea.
More recently, you decide to kayak the Grand Canyon.
Erik Weihenmayer:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
When and how did this wild idea come to be?
Erik Weihenmayer:
There's a lot of parallel processing going on in life. So I was up in Nepal on the side of this vertical ice face. The wind was hammering down. I was hallucinating I was so cold, and we only had brought a couple little chocolate bars and a little thing of soup. And so it was very unsatisfying. And I said to my friend, Rob, I was like, "This is pretty miserable, isn't it?" and he was like, "Yeah." And I said, "I know you're a kayaker. How's that different?" He's like, "Oh, dude, it's so different." He goes, "The worst day of kayaking is better than the best day of climbing." I'm like, "Really? How?" And he's like, "Well, it's sunny usually, warm water. You can have a raft that follows you with beer and great food, and it's just this really fun adventure." And I said, "Hey, Rob, would you guide me down a river?" And he's like, "Sure." And then it just took off from there.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any highlights or scary moments?
Erik Weihenmayer:
Kayaking is one of those sports that it's way scarier than climbing. I mean, what's the phrase? "Endless boredom combined with moments of abject terror." Kayaking has a lot more moments of abject terror because you're in the water. I can't see what's happening. I'm going into these situations only equipped with what I'm feeling under my boat and what I'm hearing over the radios from my guides behind me. And so you know in the next two minutes, you're going to go through the craziest things and you have to react appropriately, and you have fractions of a second to figure out how to react. A lot of it just has to become intuitive or instinctual. And you know if you react incorrectly it's going to get you into a worse situation, and then your team's going to have to come after you, and then you're going to endanger everyone. So there's a lot of pressure in kayaking. I'm so glad I climbed a lot before I started kayaking because I found it way scarier.
Shelby Stanger:
How is finishing the Grand Canyon different from finishing one of the mountains you climbed?
Erik Weihenmayer:
It wasn't that different. They were the same high of just having this incredible gratitude for being able to flourish in these environments, for having this incredible team around you that were there to give their lives for each other. That's rare in the world, and just this insane sense of connection with your team and the river and the mountains, wherever you are. I know it maybe sounds a little cheesy, but I guess it's the way I think of spirituality. Not in a traditional way, but more this place that you feel connected to the sand and the river, and for a moment, you feel like you're part of it all. It's a beautiful feeling that you want to come back to again and again.
Shelby Stanger:
It took Erik 21 days to paddle 277 miles down the Grand Canyon. It was another extremely rewarding experience and one that he wrote about in his new book titled "No Barriers." You can find that book as well as Erik's podcast, also called No Barriers and so much more on his website erikweihenmayer.com. You can also keep up with him on Instagram @erikweihenmayer. That's E-R-I-K W-E-I-H-E-N-M-A-Y-E-R.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.