In May of 2022, a group of 11 climbers became the first all-Black expedition to summit Mount Everest. The team was called Full Circle Everest, and their climb was written about by journalists all over the world. Full Circle was made up of outdoor experts, climbers, teachers, skiers, and snowboarders. There was also one US Army veteran on the expedition, Demond Mullins.
In May of 2022, a group of 11 climbers became the first all-Black expedition to summit Mount Everest. The team was called Full Circle Everest, and their climb was written about by journalists all over the world. Full Circle was made up of outdoor experts, climbers, teachers, skiers, and snowboarders. There was also one US Army veteran on the expedition, Demond Mullins.
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Shelby Stanger:
In May of 2022, a group of 11 climbers became the first all-Black expedition to summit Mount Everest. The team was called Full Circle Everest, and their climb was written about by journalists all over the world. Full Circle was made up of outdoor experts, climbers, teachers, skiers, and snowboarders. There was also one US Army veteran on the expedition, Demond Mullins.
Dom Mullins:
In 2004, we didn't understand what the war was, and so it was basically anything goes at any moment. And so I had to learn how to cope with that, the stress of that every day, the unpredictability of it, the sleeplessness, the pain. And so in a situation like that, what you try to do is try to control the variables that you can. That's your body, that's your health, that's your gear, that's your buddies. Everything else is out of your control. So I feel like the Everest expedition, I approached it in a similar way.
Shelby Stanger:
Demond Mullins, who goes by Dom, isn't just a former soldier. He's also a sociology professor, a dancer, and an avid outdoorsman who summited Denali and Mount Kilimanjaro. When Dom isn't on trail runs, lifting weights and pushing his body to new limits, he's immersed in the world of academia. Dom has a PhD in sociology. In 2015, he conducted an ethnographic study of a group of combat veterans during their summit bid of Denali. Much of Dom's research over the years has focused on veterans and how nature can help them heal from PTSD, something Dom experienced when he came back from a tour in Iraq.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, and REI Co-op Studios production. Dom Mullins, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Dom Mullins:
Thank you for having me, Shelby.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so you're a dancer, you're a climber, you're a sociologist, you're a professor, you're a speaker, you're now an author. You told me you were a veteran and that's how you got into the outdoors.
Dom Mullins:
Oh yeah. I mean, the outdoors... I grew up in Brooklyn, and it was Brooklyn in the eighties and nineties. It was rough Brooklyn. There wasn't a place to go outside and play so I didn't know anything about the outdoors as a kid. I didn't discover the outdoors-
Shelby Stanger:
It wasn't hipster, coffee shop Brooklyn.
Dom Mullins:
No, absolutely not. It was the antithesis of that. You could not imagine that hipster coffee shop Brooklyn would ever exist. So that's where I grew up in. There wasn't any outdoor space. I didn't get outside much, and I joined the military. And the military was the first time that I experienced the outdoors. It was incredible, really. There's a story that I like to tell when I was doing PT, physical training, early in the morning in basic training, I'm in a cavalry unit and they're rolling us in the mud, literally in the mud at 4:00 AM and we're doing sit-ups. And it was the first time that I saw a shooting star. I was like, "Whoa, that was incredible." I looked around to see if anybody else noticed, but nobody else even cared. But I was from Brooklyn. I'd never seen anything like that before.
That was because my basic training was in Kentucky, and I could tell you, that would've been in the year 2001 that I was in basic training, earlier than September 11th, and I wouldn't understand the idea of let's say light pollution from 2001 until let's say 2011. I wouldn't understand it for another 10 years. And that's by the time I'm 30 years old, I just didn't have people around me who understood things like that, because they also grew up in the city and they weren't exposed to the outdoors or nature and so we didn't even know what we were missing.
Shelby Stanger:
So I'm really curious how you got to serving our country.
Dom Mullins:
In 1999, I graduated high school. I went to college right away for a semester. I did very well in college, but then I couldn't afford it, so I dropped out and I worked for a while. And while I was working, I found that I really needed to get back in school and the only way that it seemed like it was possible while earning a living as well, was the military. So I actually joined the National Guard at first, but when I was in basic training, September 11th happened. And so the story took a turn and I wound up in the active duty.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, so active duty took you first to New York, I'm guessing?
Dom Mullins:
Well, so first, after September 11th, my unit was the first to be activated in order to respond to the terrorist attack, but I was still in basic training. About a month later, I would come back to New York City and then I would be part of my National Guard unit policing the city. So I did that for a while. And then in 2004, I got deployed, taken out of the National Guard and put in active duty unit attached to the first cavalry, and then we went to deploy to Iraq.
Shelby Stanger:
And then how long did you serve in Iraq and in the Middle East? Because I know you were also in Kuwait.
Dom Mullins:
Yeah, so I was in Kuwait for maybe four months, and I was in Iraq for 12 months.
Shelby Stanger:
After the war, a lot of people experienced PTSD. Did you experience it?
Dom Mullins:
Yeah, I totally did. And the interesting thing about it, PTSD or any sort of emotional disturbance like that is that you could read about it, someone could tell you about it, but when you experience it, it's very difficult for you to even identify what that is because it is existential. It's not something that you can identify so easily, like a cut. This injury is literally the whole of your person. At times, you just don't feel right and it's difficult for you to cope with that. It's difficult for you to understand that and so you have to learn about yourself a lot and you have to be introspective a lot in order to deal with it.
And at first, I wasn't. I didn't really understand a lot of the reasons why I felt uncomfortable in spaces, reasons why I didn't want to be in crowds, reasons why I would get out of the train station and I would literally run back to my apartment because I felt too vulnerable walking slowly. It's actually kind of crazy, because as soon as I got back from Iraq, that was like October 2005, I got an apartment literally right across the street from the college that I was attending right after I left high school. And as soon as school started again in January, I jumped in and I wasn't ready for it, just in terms of even sort of the situation that it put me in, so much stimuli, all those people around, people talking and different things, loud sound, screeches, doors banging, it was a lot. So I went through things like that for a while until I sort of self-awareness versioned about me. And then I was able to understand that all right, these things are common. I'm dealing with these stressors in this particular way. There are other ways that I could deal with them.
Shelby Stanger:
What sort of tools did you turn to that helped?
Dom Mullins:
So, I can say this and I feel like I need to say this because it's the most honest thing, but I also feel like a hypocrite about it. And I think it's important to just lay that on the line. And that is one of the most important things, or the most important step that you could take, is a step toward community. Talking to people who have gone through the same thing, talking to people who are dealing with it, talking to people who can understand, talking to people who want to listen, even if they don't necessarily understand. All of those things are really essential.
You find that social isolation is one of the greatest ills. It sort of multiplies the force of a lot of the other symptoms. And so I say I feel almost like a hypocrite saying that, because I enjoyed my moments of solitude. I enjoy my space and my privacy. And so it was very difficult for me to even look for help when I needed it. And I just happened to find it first through a professor, and that professor introduced me to Iraq Veterans Against the War, and I became very active in the organization and one of their national spokesman at a time.
Shelby Stanger:
As Dom got more involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War, he surrounded himself with like-minded people and organizations. It was in this work that he met our friend and former guest, Stacy Bare, founder of Adventure Not War. Stacy and Dom became close and Dom's tenure as an outdoor athlete came to life. So how did you meet Stacy Bare?
Dom Mullins:
I was really a lucky guy. We were both working for a veteran's organization in Colorado, this was around like 2009, and Stacy invited me climbing. I'm from New York City and aside from the military, I hadn't had any outdoor experience, but I was in the calvary in the military, so I spent a lot of time outside and I realized that I liked it, but I missed it as a civilian. And when I went hiking with Stacy, we went up a fourteener in Colorado, and I never had an experience like that in the civilian world, and it blew my mind. And from there, I continued to go hiking and climbing, learn how to ice climb, rock climb, mountaineer. So I came into climbing really haphazardly like that and I just found through my military connections and also my military service that there were lots of things that I enjoyed about climbing and that I in fact already knew how to do.
Shelby Stanger:
He just takes you to a fourteener. He could have taken you on five-mile hike, and he's like, "No, we're going to go hike a fourteener."
Dom Mullins:
Dude, he took me to a fourteener and I'm from New York City, I don't even have hiking boots. I'm asking him what to bring. When he showed up in the morning, I was wearing jeans, denim jeans and Timberland boots. That was all I had. So he had to give me some other gear, man. He was like, "Dude, you going to be hurting if you try to go up there like this."
Shelby Stanger:
That's so funny. So you made it?
Dom Mullins:
I made it. I made it, and I loved it.
Shelby Stanger:
What did you love about it?
Dom Mullins:
I loved how wild it was, man. It blew my mind. And one of the first things... I wonder if Stacy remembers, but the first thing that I asked him when we were up there, there's this picture of us we're just trashed at the top, like, "Wow, this is incredible. We're tired." And I'm like, "Dude, there's no railing up here. You could just fall off." I didn't get it. It was that wild to me. But that was the thing that I loved about it. It was untamed, it was just so imminent.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so after that, you were hooked. What did you do next?
Dom Mullins:
So then actually, it was a year from there that Stacy started Veterans Expeditions, and I just made a point to do all the events with Veterans Expeditions that I could. I learned how to ice climb with them and I learned how to rock climb with them and I learned how to mountaineer with them. So one thing that I came to understand intuitively when I started climbing was that I had what you would call social capital.
Social capital is a term that we've used in sociology to basically explain the way in which social relationships that a person has are conducive to a certain activity or certain body of knowledge. Social capital is like, let's say a currency, but in your social relationships, right? Because let's say professional tennis players, it's easier for you to have, let's say a good tennis game. But if you don't have social capital that's conducive to that, then perhaps you may never even learn that you have a gift for playing tennis. And so I had social capital that was conducive to me learning mountaineering through my military connections. It was only because of people that I knew in the military that I even got introduced to this stuff.
Shelby Stanger:
Veterans Expeditions didn't just teach Dom all kinds of outdoor skills, it also connected him to a community of climbers and outdoors people. On a trip to climb Denali with Stacy and famous mountaineer Conrad Anker, Dom was presented with a possibility of climbing Everest with the first all-Black team. When we come back, Dom shares some of the best and scariest moments from Mount Everest and how the Full Circle expedition changed him.
Last spring, Dom Mullen summited Mount Everest. It was something he could never have imagined doing back when he finished his tour in Iraq at 22 years old. For one thing, Dom wasn't even into hiking or climbing until years after he got back from the Middle East. For another, there weren't a lot of Black people who had climbed Mount Everest. Between assembling a team, raising funds and pausing their plans due to COVID, preparing for the climb was a long, daunting task. When the team finally made it to Nepal, it was the result of dedicated planning, training, and hoping.
What was it like to climb Mount Everest? That's something so few people have ever done. Congratulations.
Dom Mullins:
Oh, thank you very much. I mean, it was an incredible opportunity in my life, not even just the summiting of the mountain, the entirety of the experience. So I spent five months in Nepal, almost six months in Nepal, so almost the complete visa. I got to meet so many incredible people, incredible athlete, Nepalese Sherpa people and their families to see their villages and spend time there. I climbed so many other mountains in the Khumbu Valley other than Mount Everest, also to acclimatize. So I spent months there and it was just an incredible adventure and the end, I mean, it was obviously naturally a crescendo.
Shelby Stanger:
How did that time in the military eventually prepare you for this Everest climb?
Dom Mullins:
Yeah, I would say you have to understand what the war was like in that year. In 2004, we didn't understand what the war was. And so it was basically anything goes at any moment, and so the interesting thing about that is that I had to learn how to cope with that, the stress of that every day, the unpredictability of it, the sleeplessness, the pain, the loss. I lost buddies there. And so in a situation like that, what you try to do is try to control the variables that you can. That's your body, that's your health, that's your gear, that's your buddies. Those are the variables in the situation that you can actually influence positively. Everything else is out of your control.
So I feel like the Everest expedition, I approached it in a similar way, like, "Look, the shit hit the fan, and it's like, there's only one way and that's forward, and so let's figure out how to do it." And I tried to break it down into little pieces that were amenable, and I approached them. And some days, even those pieces seemed like they were too large, they were earth shattering. But I kept at it, and I had great support from Philip Henderson, the leader of Full Circle Everest, and I pulled through it. There's certainly things that I would do different. There's certainly a lot of things that I learned, but just like in the war that happens, and hopefully I'm able to adapt those lessons and move forward.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just give us a little bit about the timeline of your climb to Everest? How long it took, and then what it was like to come back down?
Dom Mullins:
Sure. So the thing about Everest is that it would behoove you to do acclimatization runs on adjacent mountains because Everest, the most dangerous part of the climb is the lowest part of the climb across the ice fall. So you don't want to cross the ice fall like eight times, because every time you cross it, something tragic could happen. So you climb an adjacent peak because you can prepare your lungs to breathe at the higher elevations on Everest without putting your body in jeopardy. And so we did that, and then we started to push to the higher camps and you push across the ice fall, which is it's hell every time that you do it. It's a very dangerous area. You want to move as quickly and safely as possible. And then you get to camp one. Camp one is a desolate place, and then you get to camp two. And camp two is the most sort of hospitable camp in those higher elevations. It has a full kitchen and what have you. But then you push up to camp three, and that's the highest that you go before you do your summit push.
Shelby Stanger:
Any stories from the trip that you want to tell?
Dom Mullins:
Man, so many stories. Everest is incredible. The experience is expansive in every way that you can imagine. I mean, physically, it's expansive, intellectually, mentally, it's expansive. What you learn about yourself, what you learn about the mountains. And just even mountaineering, spiritually, it's expansive. And I believe that a lot of Sherpa and Nepalese people will tell you that I had to... I learned some Tibetan Buddhist chants while I was out there and had a number of Puja ceremonies as well. So the whole experience is just all-encompassing. If you're looking for an all-encompassing adventure, especially one that would be encompassing of your bank account, then you should go to Everest.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, it's not a cheap journey. Any scary moments that you can share?
Dom Mullins:
Oh, there were definitely scary moments. I would say the most scary moment for me particularly was on summit day, just below the summit. So when I got up to the rock traverse where, let's say the Hillary Step would be, my mask started malfunctioning. And the interesting thing is that I was an armor crewman in the military, and I was the type of person that was always very sort of nitpicky about my gear, attention to detail. And if I had a piece of gear, I wanted to make sure that I knew how to work it, that I could deploy it, and I knew how to problem solve it and everything. And the funny thing is that when they first gave us these masks, it was in the latest part of the expedition was the first time that we seen them because you only have to use them up in the death zone.
So I was like, "We are just getting these now. This is a very important piece of gear." And I remember I was the person who asked, "What happens if they malfunction? How would they normally malfunction?" And they walked us through the process of it, and I paid attention and then it happened to me. It happened to me and it was terrible. But the worst part about it was that it took me quite some time longer than it should have taken for me to accept the fact that my mask was malfunctioning. So I couldn't get a full breath of air in through the mask, it was sort of suctioning to my face. And initially, instead of trying to problem-solve right away, I started to just try to push through it like it wasn't happening, but then it started to catch up with me when I couldn't breathe.
Shelby Stanger:
That sounds terrifying. So you're talking about your oxygen mask, which you need because you're so high up at altitude. So what did you do?
Dom Mullins:
So initially, the Sherpa that I was climbing with, I told him about it, and we start to try to figure out what could possibly be the problem while the mask was still on my face, but still we couldn't figure it out, so I had to take it off. So you can imagine while I have the mask off my face, I'm not getting any, or not any oxygen, but very little oxygen that I'm getting. So I'm just trying to calm myself down in my head. And what we find is that possibly it was the intake valve was frozen, and so I would have to blow in it to release the ice that was stuck in it. And so I figured out a way to sort of cheat the problem a little bit, but it was scary at first there. It was definitely a moment. And it's a weird feeling, too, when you start to realize slowly that your energy is being sapped away because you're not getting enough oxygen in your body. It takes a while for it to register in your mind.
Shelby Stanger:
It sounds terrifying, Dom. What memories stand out for you?
Dom Mullins:
Man, there's so many beautiful things. So one thing that stands out for me when I dream about Everest now, I dream about during the summit push is the first time in my life that you're just looking out in the distance at really nothing as you're pushing so high on this mountain. And it was the first time in my life where I was looking at a thunderstorm from a distance, but I was looking down on it. I was looking at the top of a thunderstorm in a different mountain range striking the ground, and it looked like, what are those orbs with electricity in it that you see? It looks something like that. It was just incredible. And I remember at the time, I was feeling in such pain because it was so cold and the line is moving slow and it was excruciating. And I remember I would just look over there and just take my mind off things for a little bit. But that's something that pops in my mind a lot, that visual.
Shelby Stanger:
Being part of the first Black team to climb Mount Everest, how do you think that changed the outdoor industry and people's perception of climbing and what's the response been like amongst the community?
Dom Mullins:
It's been incredible, and just about every reaction that you can think of has happened, but the reactions that I appreciate most are just when people come up to me at different events and they'll tell me that they're hiking or they're getting outside and they're biking or they're bird watching, or they're skiing or they're doing whatever it is that they do outside. Getting outside is the point of it, getting outside, exploring our environment, actually realizing that we are part of our environment so that we care more about our environment and we even take care of it and we possess more responsibility for it. That's a story that all of us can embrace and all of us should embrace. And so I've been seeing so many different ways that people have been embracing this story of getting outside and exercising, getting outside with their families, doing things that they'd never done before. I think it's excellent. So I hear so much of that going on as a result of Full Circle, particularly in communities of color, of people of color, and I think it's brilliant. It's really exciting.
Shelby Stanger:
Full Circle's successful ascent as the first all-Black team has garnered attention from all over the world. The crew has done press interviews and traveled to events around the country, speaking about their experience on Everest. It was pretty incredible to be part of a team that doubled the number of Black climbers to Summit Everest, taking the total from 10 to 21. Now that he's back, Dom is also working on a book and he's taking time to incorporate what he learned from the mountain into his personal life.
So Everest changes people, and I'm really curious how you changed since summiting, coming back down, telling your story. How did it change you?
Dom Mullins:
Man, Shelby, you hit it home. That is the important question. That's the million dollar question there. And for me, I'm going to tell you, it has not been an easy change. It has in some way been excruciating. It has in some way been more excruciating than actually climbing Everest. It was definitely life-changing for me. And I think the main thing I would say, just reiterate that I spent about six months in Nepal altogether, so I did what climbers don't generally do when they go to climb Everest.
So it was a very long and sort of gradual, burgeoning experience for me. And there's so much that I think about. I've also been writing about it in the last few months, and there's so much that I think about often and just the different things that I even come to understand only recently. And so I would say that spending that much time in the mountains, spending that much time in the Khumbu Valley and then seeing so much of it and then going all the way to the summit gave me a lot of time to think about my life, think about the life that I want to live and the life that I've been living, the decisions that I've been making, and the decisions that I would like to make and the decisions that I've been afraid to make.
And there's no one there but you to verify or reject those points. And so I had a lot of honest conversations with myself, and I could say that having those serious conversations, those really difficult conversations, and having the time to do it and not so much distractions. I'm not always in my phone or in my computer or in trying to see this person or plan that sort of thing. I'm in the mountains. And so you have the opportunity to just sit and think about your life. You learn a lot, but what you don't learn is how to set those things in motion in your life when you come back down. You can have the desire, you can have the vision, but it's not an instruction manual for you. And so I wound up having a lot of direction in terms of feelings, emotions about things that I wanted or things that I knew were related to my happiness, but I didn't necessarily know how to deliver on those things. I didn't necessarily know how to rise to the occasion and do those things, but I know now, at least I have the vision, of how I want to change my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you think Everest gave you... I mean, did it give you more courage to go do these things that are scary?
Dom Mullins:
The thing is, I think that Everest, it was an indicator for me of my courage, or it was a symbol of the courage that I had, because I have always in my life sort of faced the things that I was afraid of. But that's the interesting thing about this expedition, is it made me realize the ways that I was doing that with things that were scary in particular aspects of my life at physical adventures, these sort of muscular experiences in life, I was ready for them all the time, throwing myself at them. But the more intimate experiences, experiences that had to do with my emotions and vulnerability, those were things that were terrifying to me. And so I could throw myself at something like Everest because this was the fight that I'm used to, my physical body. It's me against pain. But then what about emotional pain? What about things that hurt your feelings? Those are things that I really shied away from.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you hope people know about you, Dom, and the work that you want to leave in the world?
Dom Mullins:
I think something that's really close to my heart, people can look at something like Everest and it's so spectacular, and they can be like, "Wow, that's amazing that you experienced that, that you did that." It's a bucket list sort of thing. And it's so shiny, but we should understand that every day, so many different people are doing amazing things and they're doing the best that they can. It's difficult, especially when you're a perfectionist like I am, as well. You feel like a day's not a good day unless everything's going your way, a day's not a good day unless the effort that you put in, you're getting something back for all of that. With mountaineering, the interesting thing is a lot of times you feel like that's not the case, and sometimes you feel desolate because you put in so much effort and actually, it's time to turn around because the weather changed on you.
And so there are lots of life lessons in that. And I think one of the life lessons that I would take away and that I would share with everybody from my journey to the summit of Everest and back was that you should keep in mind that the context of people's lives are so different. People have so many different types of experiences and pains and heartaches and issues and mountains to climb in their own lives. And they might not all be as spectacular and shiny and good to hear about as Everest, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. And so many people, even though it doesn't look like it, they're summiting their Everest every day and they're trying the best that they can.
Shelby Stanger:
Dom, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're just a fascinating person and it was an absolute blast talk with you. I wish you the best of luck with your book, and I'm definitely excited to read it when it comes out. To learn more about Full Circle, you can go to their website, fullcircle-expeditions.com. You can also follow Dom on Instagram @Domthesoulifugid. The handle's a little complicated, but it's worth it to see some of the badass pictures he's posted from Everest. That's Domthesoulifugid, D-O-M-T-H-E-S-O-U-L-I-F-U-G-I-D.
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, and our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.