Melissa Arnot Reid is a legendary American mountaineer, adventure guide, and author who has summited Mount Everest six times—more than any other American woman. She was the first American woman to climb and descend Everest without supplemental oxygen, pushing the limits of human endurance. Through extreme challenges and high-risk climbs, Melissa has found strength, resilience, and purpose in the mountains.
Melissa Arnot Reid is a legendary American mountaineer, adventure guide, and author who has summited Mount Everest six times—more than any other American woman. She was the first American woman to climb and descend Everest without supplemental oxygen, pushing the limits of human endurance. Through extreme challenges and high-risk climbs, Melissa has found strength, resilience, and purpose in the mountains.
Connect with Melissa:
Thank you to our sponsors:
Melissa Arnot Reid:
I had long thought I'll summit Everest without supplemental oxygen and I will return to a different world and I will be a different person in that world. And the truth was far less satisfying, which was that I actually had to go on a pretty deep and intense journey of self-reflection and starting to heal and starting to really get down to the nitty-gritty of like, why was I continuously recreating these terrible experiences for myself? Why was I so insistent on telling myself that I deserved for things to be hard? Climbing Everest without oxygen became this internal personal metaphor for just being able to exist with ease in the world.
Shelby Stanger:
Melissa Arnot Reid is a well-known mountaineer, adventure guide, and author, she's summited Mount Everest six times, that's more than any other American woman in history. Melissa was also the first American woman to successfully climb and descend the mountain without supplemental oxygen. If you're unfamiliar, 98% of climbers use oxygen once they get above a certain elevation where the air is thinner and it's harder to breathe. Summoning Everest without extra oxygen takes longer and is far more dangerous. In order to complete these remarkable accomplishments, Melissa's had to push through her share of uncomfortable experiences and risky situations. Still, the mountains have always been a place where she's felt capable, strong, and resilient.
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. Melissa recently published a book titled Enough: Climbing Towards a True Self on Mount Everest, the book documents her mountaineering career, but it also details the serious challenges she faced during her childhood, including emotional abuse, rooming and time in foster care. Melissa has processed much of the trauma from her youth by spending time in the mountains as an adult. Melissa Arnot Reid, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living, you wrote one of the bravest books about Everest that I've ever read, so kudos to you, I'm really excited for it to be out in the world.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Thank you so much for having me, Shelby, I'm excited to chat with you.
Shelby Stanger:
I think we need to start at the beginning. I know that part of your story was you grew up in tribal land, which I thought was very interesting, can you talk a little bit about that?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Yeah. I think a lot of people, especially because my Everest career started when I was 24 years old, I think a lot of people just assumed like, this very privileged American girl must have grown up climbing since she was two or something and that absolutely was not my story. I grew up living on the boundary of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in Southern Colorado, my dad initially just worked construction in a nearby town, but then ultimately worked for the tribe. And we grew up with really modest economic means, we had enough, we had what we needed, but it was an extremely interesting way to grow up for me personally.
Going to school on the Southern Ute Reservation, primarily native population. But like us all, I think we only know what we know until you know something else, and so when I was in high school, we moved to Montana and we moved to Whitefish, which is an affluent resort town compared to the Southern Ute Reservation where I'd grown up. And I was suddenly very indoctrinated into some perspective on the difference in the two places that I was living. And I grew up really economically modest, so my parents couldn't buy me a mountain bike, we weren't going skiing because that was quite expensive. But the outdoors were an important part of my life, just not in a traditional way, and my parents are very authentic hippie parents, my dad, he always said, I hope you and your sister just live out of the back of your truck and don't ever go work for the man.
Shelby Stanger:
So interesting, most of our parents were like, go get a job, your parents were the opposite.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Mm-hmm. My dad used to say it was a really lovely thing that I remember from when I was a kid, he's like a subversive character in the world and when somebody would say, what do you do for work? He would just scoff and say, what makes you happy? Tell me that, that's a place we can start a conversation from. And I inherited that and I absorbed that and intuited that, I now as an adult can say, I absorbed this notion that happiness was the most important thing, it was far more important than the college I would go to, the job I would ultimately hold, the accolades that I would put in front of my name would be like, do I feel contentment? Do I have happiness? That is what riches are, that is what arriving is.
And I think it's important to touch on the fact that I had a really challenging childhood as well. I talked about having economic modesty, but I also had a really challenging relationship with my mother who had some mental health challenges. And as an 11-year-old child, I ended up in a predatory relationship with an adult who was a police officer and groomed me and coerced me into having my parents arrested, which put me in a foster home, split up my family, and ultimately our family came back together and we moved and that's where I referenced, we left Southern Colorado when we moved to Montana, that was why.
And I was a young adult at that point feeling incredibly exiled from my core family unit and feeling that that was of my doing. And so I think as most teenage people feel a deep sense of not belonging because you're just changing in the world and you're shape-shifting and you're trying to figure out what does belonging even feel like anymore? And I didn't know where I could belong, and for me, I got into the outdoors really for my first time seriously when I was 19. And I had always been a very athletic person, but never very competitive, the competition of sport really repelled me, I didn't like that aspect. So I hadn't had an outlet for using my athleticism or pushing my body and challenging myself intrinsically, which I felt really drawn to.
And I went on a hike with a friend and it was like a true summit and a little bit more than just a hike on a peak called the Great Northern, and it was just a really steep hike. And on the summit, I could see the entirety of Glacier National Park and looking the other way, the Bob Marshall wilderness extended out in front of me. And it was the first time that I felt this sense of complete personal accomplishment that was my own and only my own, and it opened up the world to me in a way that I didn't even know it existed.
Shelby Stanger:
The hike to the peak of Great Northern in Montana marked Melissa's first true summit, climbing those 8,500 feet proved she was capable of doing hard things. From that moment on, she decided to immerse herself in the mountains, she knew that if she worked hard and learned as much as she could, there was a possibility of making a living by guiding. She started climbing more and became certified as a wilderness first responder, an EMT, eventually, Melissa became a guide on Mount Rainier leading clients over technical terrain to reach the summit.
I've never been to Mount Rainier, but it sounds pretty gnarly and it sounds technical, and I know you've done Everest six times, to you it's not such a big deal, but to someone like me who I have only summited to the top of the chairlift, run at a mountain and taken it down, what's Mount Rainier like?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Mount Rainier is this incredibly stoic, highly challenging, beautiful mountain, and I have honestly had just as challenging of days on Mount Rainier as I have had on Mount Everest. Obviously altitude is a very objectively different thing, but the glaciers are just as big, the challenges are just as immense, it's an enormous endurance challenge. If you can climb vertical water ice on Glacier, on Mount Rainier, you can also walk up on a relatively easy to access 30 degree slope, but any way you go, it's going to challenge you.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious what it was like to be a guide there, you're really young and you had other people, this is a mountain where if you mess up, people could die. I've been a surf instructor and people really die surfing that often, it takes a lot.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Mm-hmm. The stakes are real and people die on Mount Rainier every year, and I can only really speak to what my experience was of being a guide. I was so deeply hungry for power, if I'm very honest, I wanted to brute force my way into being respected, and I knew that the guides were more respected than the clients in general in that era of time for sure, and so I knew that I had to be on the side of power. So for me, I showed up as a 21-year-old, 5'3" young small girl, and I was confronted with that when I showed up to guide tryouts myself of looking around and asking myself, is there a possible job that I can do where people will quite literally question my capability of doing the job just on my general container that I am in, because that's the place I'm going to go to try to find belonging.
And so I started out working and it was a really amazing program and it had some huge flaws to it as well. But I started out working for Rainier Mountaineering Incorporated, which was the only guide service that could commercially guide on Rainier in that era. And there was about 80 guides, there was about five or six women total that worked there and you would have guides that had summited Everest multiple times, you would have guides that had climbed Rainier 300 times, which I was always like, that's unthinkable.
Shelby Stanger:
Between guiding on Mount Rainier and her extensive medical training, Melissa gained a lot of wilderness skills in a short amount of time. Mount Rainier is the most glaciated peak in the US outside of Alaska, which makes it a perfect training ground for any mountaineer pursuing Everest. The trips Melissa led lasted between one and five days, depending on which route she used to take clients up the mountain. With each trek to the summit, she grew more as an athlete and as a leader. After only two years guiding, Melissa began to lead expeditions on some of the most notable mountains in the world.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
I dabbled with this idea of like, could I guide international trips? And then I made that happen a little bit by brute force and with some pretty unsavory behavior honestly to get myself to work in international mountaineering locations. So I started working in South America, in Ecuador and Argentina, and that bolstered my resume and made it more possible that maybe someday I would get to the Himalayas.
Shelby Stanger:
You said something that maybe we should just clarify, you said you got to lead these international trips for some, I think you said unsavory tactics, maybe just briefly elaborate what you meant.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
For me, my first time getting even the thought that I could guide outside of Mount Rainier, I was dating a really senior guide at the guide service that I worked at, and he was in charge of selecting which guides got to go work on international trips. And I was in a really conflicted position because I disliked him a lot, he treated me terribly, and I would argue that our relationship had abusive qualities to it, and I also chose really willingly to stay in that relationship because of the access to where it would take me professionally. He also held all of the power and the access to the places that I wanted to be, and I could convince myself for just long enough that our relationship was fine if I could have access to these places.
And I don't say that today with any casual regard of like, I did that, I was constantly questioning like, because I am leveraging this relationship to get to this place, how do I know if my skillset is actually enough? And so while I was giving myself access to these places, I was also corroding my confidence of whether or not I deserve to be there by the way that I was getting there. It feels very shameful to me, it's one of my internal cringey things that can wake me up at night sometimes and say, why did you do that, be better.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, I want you to know as a reader, I read that and I was like, I feel like she just did the best she could do with the tools she had at the time.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Yeah, thank you.
Shelby Stanger:
And I didn't see it as shameful.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
I think the reason why I think I'm hard on myself about it now is because I knew it then, I knew I was doing something that I would consider a low character choice, and then now I can reflect and say, it also corroded my belief in whether or not I deserve to be there to such a level that it almost robbed the whole experience for me. But then once I was there, I was not just a mountain guide who worked on Mount Rainier, I was a mountain guide who guided international trips, and that was what was laying the groundwork for me to be able to say yes to guiding on Everest my first time.
Shelby Stanger:
Mountaineer Melissa Arnot Reed was just 23 years old when she attempted to climb Mount Everest for the first time. She'd been guiding on Mount Rainier in Washington for two years when a client hired her for an expedition to climb the world's tallest mountain. The client had seen Melissa's medical skillset and action and was impressed with her climbing experience. For someone who has always wanted to be validated for her competence, it was a dream opportunity, Melissa had led international trips before, but hadn't yet been to Everest.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
My first time on Everest, I decided to enter this experience with extreme curiosity, which was to not do what might be considered due diligence of reading every book about Everest and researching every topo map of the route. I just decided to go in empty and say, I'm going to show up and experience it and take it all in and it was so incredible. There were so many moments of arriving on an international flight that was like 24 hours to Nepal, and this place that I was just ... you may as well have just told me that I was going to Never Neverland because it was such a theoretical place, it wasn't a place that I would ever get to go. And to be immediately swaddled in the colors, the closeness of personal space and the culture and just something that I had never experienced before, and I didn't want to close my eyes because I didn't want to miss anything, I wanted to absorb it all.
Shelby Stanger:
And what does it look like when you actually get to Mount Everest, to base camp?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Like most places that I've traveled where there's this incredible contrast between the urban areas that surround the mountains and then the mountains themselves, you fly into a runway at 9,000 feet, and that's the last motorized transport that exists. And so it's about a 10-day walk to the 17,800-foot base camp on dusty trails that are about two yaks wide. And everything that moves up and down that valley is moved primarily on humans using porters, some using yaks, now using helicopter transport and even mules and horses.
And I remember, I'll never forget, landing at the airport, getting out of the plane and looking up and not being able to see the top of this peak because it was so big and so close to me, and grabbing my co-guide, I'm like, "what's that peak?" And he's like, "what peak?" And I'm like, "that one," and he's like, "that doesn't have a name, that's just a hill in front of us." And I'm like, "that's a hill? That's like the biggest mountain I've ever seen in my life, and that is a hill?" And then you walk around the corner and it's like bam, you're hit in the face by these sparkling, beautiful adorned glacier peaks that are kissing the sky. It is so overwhelmingly beautiful and calm in a way that you're like, I think after Kathmandu deeply craving.
Shelby Stanger:
It sounds amazing. So what was it like? What did you learn from that first attempt, and then what made you want to go back again?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
I think that because I went in with such an empty mind about what I was going to experience, I learned so much. I had been told that it was just only about as hard as a hard summit day on Rainier, and so that was really the only information I had about the physicality of what I was getting into and that was wrong, that was incorrect, I don't agree with that. Rainier can be hard for sure, but Everest just presents a whole set of obstacles and challenges to you that are so unique to that space, so I quickly started trying to learn all of those skills.
And then I also very quickly got indoctrinated into this huge international community that is the Everest climbing season. The season lasts for about two months traditionally, and you're living on a glacier in an impermanent camp, and you're starting to make all these new friends and you have one thing in common with everybody there, you're all there to climb Everest. And I loved it, I loved getting exposed to cultures that I didn't even know existed and learning from different people and feeling like both, my gosh, I'm so out of my league, and then that quiet reminder of, but you're here, you're making this your league.
And I started to get really curious when I was there about women working on Everest specifically because there was some female climbers, it made up anywhere from one to 5% of the total climbing population was women. And I asked, why don't women guide here regularly? And I was told generally, women are smarter than that. And I laughed obligatorily, but then I also recognized like, so that joke is how you keep me out and I'm here to show you that I am in fact not smarter than that and I will be returning, I really was committed to coming back.
Shelby Stanger:
After that first trip up Everest, Melissa knew that she would be summoning again at least once. She continued guiding on Mount Rainier in the summer and returned to Nepal in the spring to work on Everest. In the back of her mind, another wild idea started to percolate, it was inspired by an encounter she had back in 2008, the first time she went to Nepal. You had this idea to summit one time at least without oxygen, what sparked that idea?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
On that first climb, my small team descended down below base camp to rest before our summit push, so we went down to a lower village where there was grass and food and tea house beds instead of our tents to sleep in. And while we were there, a helicopter came and landed in the field and out of the helicopter climbed Gerlinde Kalterbrunner, and she is an Austrian woman who became the first woman to climb all 14, 8,000 meter peaks without oxygen. And she was so kind and so generous, and she asked us like, what are you guys doing? And we said, we're climbing on Everest. And she just treated us like we were her peers and we saw clearly she was doing the elite thing.
And one of my answers about what sparked wanting to climb without oxygen is, I just had an intense deep personal curiosity of where my limits were. And also, I felt like I didn't belong there, I felt like even after I had summited Everest, I still was not enough, and I needed to do this in a way that was inarguably better because I saw it as a hierarchy at that time, like if you can climb Everest, you're amazing. But lots of people climbed Everest, I just summited with 200 people, so my client is summiting Everest, so is that enough? No, that's not enough, I need to do it in this way that's nearly impossible.
And I at that time did not know that no American woman had successfully climbed and descended without oxygen, but I just decided very audaciously that I was going to climb without oxygen and with incredible naivete about what that would take. I just thought I had a pretty good summit day, it was hard and how much harder could it be?
Shelby Stanger:
What does that mean? For people who've never done mountaineering expeditions, what does climbing without supplemental oxygen look like, feel like?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Tangibly, it's really hard for me to explain that actual difference of climbing without oxygen or climbing with oxygen, but-
Shelby Stanger:
And what are the risks?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
... Fundamentally, some really important things that happen when you're climbing above really like 23,000 feet. So outside in the Himalayas, those very high peaks, once you start to get to those altitudes, your blood oxygen level is in a naturally decreased state for a prolonged period of time. That opens you up to huge risks like getting pulmonary edema, which is fluid filling your lungs because your cardiovascular system is malfunctioning with pressure and your pulmonary arteries, you're getting swelling in your brain, and then you're just having a decreased blood oxygen level, which means there's less oxygen going to all of your vital tissues, specifically your brain, and it's keeping all of your vital tissues like your peripheral tissues like your toes and your fingers and your nose less warm.
And so those are the risks, you're risking frostbite, you're risking cerebral edema, pulmonary edema, and you're not making good cognitive decisions because you're depriving your vital organ, your brain of the fuel it needs to make good decisions. Tangibly, what that looks like is, I say like 26,000 feet, getting ready to start climbing, putting on your down suit, putting on your boots, getting out of the tent, putting on your crampons, putting on your pack and your harness, that whole costuming affair can take about 45 minutes with oxygen on. To do that without oxygen can take about three hours, and so that is, to me, what's tangible, like every single movement is such an exertion that you have to recover from. And I always say I'm pretty sure that there are far more fun ways to feel that terrible.
Shelby Stanger:
And it's not like you were going and hanging out in oxygen chambers back at home, you were only training by going back to Everest and trying this over and over again.
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Yeah. What I was doing was trying to get as much experience as I could at very high altitude. So Everest season typically was in the springtime, and then I was utilizing the fall or the post monsoon season in Nepal to climb other high peaks, spending a lot of time getting to know my body at altitude, trying to form a pretty intimate relationship with the difference between discomfort and danger, and then bring that back with me to Everest and try again. And between the years of 2009 and 2016, I returned to Everest every single year, and I wasn't always trying to climb without supplemental oxygen, sometimes I was just working as a guide again, just making a living and just putting some experience into my back pocket. And I had a series of climbs where I was attempting, it was my intent to climb without oxygen, and I ultimately ended up using supplemental oxygen and going to the summit. But I was becoming more and more obsessed with this question of like, can I do this?
Shelby Stanger:
Well, you ultimately did it, which is so badass. What changed after you did it? What did it feel like?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
What changed after I did it? I think that what changed was before I did it, if I'm very honest. I went through such a huge journey, I had long thought my 23-year-old, 24-year-old Melissa thought I'll summit Everest without supplemental oxygen, and I will return to a different world, and I will be a different person in that world, I will have endless sense of belonging and respect and nobody will deny that I deserve anything.
The truth was far less satisfying, which was that I actually had to arrive at a place of healedness to be able to even succeed at this big goal. And so ultimately, what I had to do was go on a pretty deep and intense journey of self-reflection, facing some of those really big past traumas that I had experienced and starting to heal and starting to really get down to the nitty-gritty of like, why was I continuously recreating these terrible experiences for myself? Why was I so insistent on telling myself that I deserved for things to be hard? This climbing Everest without oxygen became this internal personal metaphor for just being able to exist with ease in the world.
And through a series of years of really challenging seasons on Everest, I was forced to go to the edge of really what my personal motivations were and who I wanted to be in this world and start to heal some of those past narratives. And as I started to do that, I started to realize that this pursuit of trying to do this nearly impossible thing could be about curiosity, and inside of curiosity, I would accept the outcome. So if the outcome was like, no, you're not capable of doing this, I would accept that and not continuously try to say, yeah, but, and if I don't do this, then I'm not good enough. Then once I did it, I don't want to say it didn't matter if I did it or not, but I just knew that it didn't speak to my worth.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any advice that you could give listeners who want to climb a big mountain like Rainier or something else?
Melissa Arnot Reid:
Therapy is cheaper honestly, no. I think if you want to start climbing and get into mountaineering, which I could completely understand why anybody would, it's such an incredible way to interact with the mountains. There are glaciated peaks in the northwest are a really good place to start, so you have Tahoma Mount Rainier, you have Koma Kulshan, which is Mount Baker, generally speaking, low risk, very high experience glaciated peaks that you can put crampons on your feet, carry an ice ax, rope up over crevasse terrain and see, do I like this? Is this for me?
And then I always invite anybody to ask themselves, why am I drawn towards this? Do I want a sense of achievement, a sense of conquering? That's fine if that's what you're out for. Do I want a sense of community? Do I want a sense of cohesion with nature? Both are available to you, but I think it's always nice to just figure out, what am I seeking? Why do I want to do this? Do I want to prove or show myself what I'm capable of? That's okay to want that, that's our human condition in so many ways. But it's also okay to just go and be curious and see, what does this feel like? What is this like to be in this space of nature?
Shelby Stanger:
There are so many different reasons why we pursue big things outside, but often it's because we're searching for something deeper. Maybe we're testing our physical limits, looking to connect with nature or humanity or discovering our inner strength. Any mountain we climb, whether literal or figurative can be transformative, our greatest capabilities often reveal themselves when we push beyond our comfort zones.
Melissa recently came out with a book about her career in the mountains, her relationship with Everest and her quest to get to the top without oxygen, it's called Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest, I highly recommend it, it's one of the best Everest books I've ever read, you can get it wherever you buy your books. You can follow Melissa's adventures on Instagram @melissaarnot and on her website @melissaarnot.com, that's M-E-L-I-S-S-A-A-R-N-O-T.
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 Pierce Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Palo Motala 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.