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Voice of the Mountains: What the Mountains Teach with Rick Ridgeway
5k Plays12 days ago
Rick Ridgeway, renowned mountaineer, environmentalist, and storyteller, joins host Steve House on Voice of the Mountains to share insights from a life lived boldly and with purpose. Known as the "real Indiana Jones," Ridgeway recounts transformative adventures, from summiting K2 to walking across Kenya’s wild bushlands. He delves into the profound lessons learned from nature, loss, and resilience, emphasizing the power of purpose-driven living. Along the way, he reflects on his relationships, including partnerships that shaped his climbing career and personal evolution. This episode is a testament to the enduring impact of values, exploration, and living a life bigger than oneself.
If you'd like to see the companion essay and more information on Voice of the Mountains, please visit: https://uphillathlete.com/voiceofthemountains/
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Transcript
Introduction of Rick Ridgway and Theme of Self-Discovery
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Voice of the Mountains, where we seek not only to run and climb better, but to understand who we are and who we wish to become along the way. Today's guest is someone I've admired since I was a boy.
Ridgway's Multifaceted Life and Leadership
00:00:19
Speaker
Someone who has spent a lifetime exploring not only what lies beyond the horizon, but also what lies in the depths within.
00:00:29
Speaker
He has mastered many roles, mountaineer, environmentalist, adventurer, storyteller, but above all, leader. For Rick Ridgway, each of these pursuits is bound by a single thread, a relentless commitment to purpose.
Purpose Driven Adventures and Values
00:00:46
Speaker
And Rick has taken more steps in pursuit of that purpose than most of us can imagine. He's walked across the wildest places on Earth.
00:00:56
Speaker
from the rainforest of Borneo to a journey that began at the summit of Kilimanjaro and ended only at the Indian Ocean, to standing atop K2. But even more impressively, along the way, or perhaps in between, these adventures, he built legacies in conservation and business alike. Yet, through all these challenges, one truth stands out for him. Values drive purpose, and purpose drives him forward.
00:01:26
Speaker
Whether in the mountains, in business, or in life, staying connected to our values is what gives us the courage to take that next right action, that next right step, especially when the waves steep.
00:01:40
Speaker
I've dug in into purpose-driven leadership on this podcast before, and today, Rick shares his truths that have shaped his extraordinary life, his singular path, and his immense legacy, and why he believes that our values are something that we always carry with us even when we walk alone.
00:02:01
Speaker
So join me as I sit down with the man that many call the Indiana Jones of our time, because his journey is a testament to the power of consistency, the strength of values, and the enduring impact of a life lived with purpose.
00:02:20
Speaker
Welcome to Voice of the
Exploration and Environmental Initiatives
00:02:21
Speaker
Mountains. My name is Steve House. Today we have the privilege of speaking with one of the most accomplished adventurers of our time. A mountaineer who perhaps most famously was part of the first American team to successfully climb K2 in 1978. A mountain so formidable that many consider it to be the most dangerous in the world.
00:02:40
Speaker
But his mountaineering is rivaled only by his exploratory exploits, which have taken him to some of the most extreme and challenging places on Earth, from the most remote corners of the Amazon to crossing Borneo on foot to unexplored peaks in Antarctica. But our guest's storytelling has been just as impactful as his adventures.
00:03:01
Speaker
As a filmmaker and author, he has brought the world of adventure to life for television and film audiences. His award-winning films like The Last Wild Mountain and The Sacred Balance and his books including The Last Step and Below Another Sky have captured the essence of exploration, the beauty of untouched landscapes, and the divinity that many of us experience in the wildness.
00:03:27
Speaker
He is also a successful entrepreneur who, besides being probably one of the first contracted climbers in North America with Kelty Equipment, built a company called Adventure Photo and Film, which became the world's largest stock photo and film agency agencies specializing in nature and adventure imagery.
00:03:45
Speaker
After selling that company, he went to work at Patagonia, where he turned his passion for wilderness into action on conservation and environmental responsibility in the corporate world. As a vice president at Patagonia, he engaged the public on the topic of the company's commitments to sustainable ethical practices, and transparency. While under his leadership, Patagonia helped spearhead the 1% for the planet initiative. And I have to say, I think this is a huge deal. Rick convinced Walmart to co-found with Patagonia the Sustainable Apparel Coalition in 2010.
00:04:20
Speaker
Another classic out-of-the-box move for Patagonia demonstrating that companies with seemingly different business models can collaborate for greater environmental stewardship and set a meaningful standard for corporate responsibility across industries that continues to this day. Rolling Stone Magazine called today's guests the real Indiana Jones. I'm very excited to sit down with a friend who has had an outsized impact on my life.
Personal Reflections and Influence at Patagonia
00:04:45
Speaker
Welcome Rick Ridgway. Thank you, Steve. Great to be here with you, buddy.
00:04:50
Speaker
It's really good to see you. I know we were just chatting about this, but I really miss seeing you at Patagonia and Ventura and that whole crew that was around that company you know during that time. We were both there in the in the ninety s and late 90s, 2000s, and 2010s.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, what a great family it was, and it still is. And I miss it too. I really miss that. I want to ah remind you of a conversation that that we had that took place in the cafeteria at Patagonia. And yeah I was sitting there eating lunch by myself, and you pulled up a chair and and sat down across from me. And I was pretty intimidated talking to you. You had, you know,
00:05:37
Speaker
had a big influence on my life, especially through your book, K2, The Last Step. And you had always sort of epitomized the kind of climber I wanted to be in the sense that you didn't really talk about your accomplishments in the mountain. is It was this ethos of of doing first. and and maybe telling a story later, but the doing was always the important thing, and I really identified with that. And I was at an age where I had a lot of ego going on, and I knew I had sort of, let's say, faults with my person or personality.
00:06:14
Speaker
And I'd read your stories and I i sort of felt a kinship there. like i Maybe I'm projecting, but I always felt like this this man has been through some of these same things that I struggle with. And that was something that made it really difficult for me to open up to you because I felt like I saw something of myself reflected in the writing of yours and your life's work.
00:06:43
Speaker
And what did we talk about at lunch? Well, it was you asking me if I'd ever considered writing down any of my stories. And I happened to have a outline of a book that I'd been kind of working on Fanon-On, which became Beyond the Mountain. And that day, you actually took me upstairs to the creative department and introduced me to Carla Olson, who was running the then fledgling Patagonia Books. And I think that Beyond the Mountain was the second book that Patagonia Books published after the Bendabaja book. Great. So it had a good ending.
00:07:25
Speaker
had had a good It had an amazing ending. like You basically, you know in just a matter of a few hours, I i basically i had what became of a book contract and a publishing deal. and And then I was off to the races. You also told me something that day. You said, you got to get the contract before you write the book, because if you don't get it, you'll never finish it.
00:07:55
Speaker
But I did that, and I've done that on all my books since, and that has proven out to be very true, because as you know, books are and these incredible labors of love, but they also get very difficult at the end to get those last five or ten percent done.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Well, that makes me recall one of my mentors, Doug Tompkins, the founder of the North Face and later Esprit, the Women's Wear Clothing Company, who you know well, Steve. And I remember when I first started climbing with Doug, I went up to San Francisco to visit him to plan a climb and I went into his office and he had a sign above his desk that said commit and then figure it out. So signing a contract is a commitment that then you've got to figure out how you're going to deliver it. Perhaps I was just passing on a learning from my own mentor when I suggested that to you. I mean, that's what we all do, right? I mean, we're all just vessels for the moments of inspiration that people share.
00:08:59
Speaker
You know, that I wanted to bring up that today's guide for this discussion is this idea that I wrote down once, and I think it applies very much to you in your life, and that is I've reflected and I've learned one simple truth, that values drive purpose, and purpose is what drives people.
00:09:20
Speaker
And I think that, you know, this didn't come from my time at Patagonia. This came from my own time. and This was something I wrote in a journal when I was on an expedition, because what I wanted to do on the expedition wasn't climb a mountain, but to demonstrate that something could be done primarily to myself. And that was a value. That was a value that wasn't ah a goal, as they would say. It was like, no, I want to find out if this is possible or not.
00:09:50
Speaker
Do you relate to that in, you know, kind of your career?
Finding Purpose Beyond Achievements
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's go back to that idea of purpose because if there's anything I've come to learn these seven and a half decades I've been on this planet Earth of ours,
00:10:07
Speaker
is how important it is that we all have a purpose in our lives. And I've learned over those decades, Steve, that that purpose needs to be more than just about ourselves. But it it needs to be how we can be more than ourselves. That how we can be a person who gives more than he or she takes. that In our life, this purpose has to be how we at the end of our lives can look back and say, yeah, I did make a difference. I did contribute. I did leave something that
00:10:49
Speaker
maybe will even live after me and influence those who come after me to think about their own lives in perhaps a little bit of a different way. And if any of us can have any claim to immortality, I think it's that, that that our purpose has by being more than just about advancing ourselves allowed others to advance themselves in some way that maybe they wouldn't have thought about had we not had our own little short passage here on the planet. So that's what purpose needs to be. And when any of us can find that purpose, and and it's a lifelong job,
00:11:39
Speaker
I think that can lead to the some of the deepest senses of fulfillment and joy and happiness that any of us can hope to own. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. When you have built your life around journeys, I'm going to put them in those terms. so Some would call them adventures, some of them are climbs, some of them are boating trips, some of them are, you know, all kinds of of things. And you've been a very multidisciplinary adventure, journey taker of the journey.
00:12:10
Speaker
And in one of your books you wrote that the best journeys answer questions that at the outset we would have never thought to ask. What constitutes a good journey? across all If you look back at all the different types of journeys that you have made and you look think about the good journeys that evoked ah questions that you had not thought to ask, so what were some of the commonalities?
00:12:36
Speaker
Well, that observation you just quoted, that came from a trip I made in the mid 1990s with a adventure buddy, Ian Allen, who is a safari guide in East Africa. And I had been on a trip there with him once climbing Mount Kenya. And after the climb, we went down to the Stavo Parks, the bushland above the coastline in Kenya to do a little walking safari to warm up after our climb. And it was under the shadow of Kilimanjaro, and looking up at the mountain, he said,
00:13:17
Speaker
I've always had this dream wreck of how cool would it be to climb up Kilimanjaro and traverse the peak one side or the other, but from the summit, that's where the trip would really start. The adventure would begin because from there, we would follow the watercourses off the mountain all the way to the Indian Ocean, across these wild bushlands of the Twin Sabo National Parks. and And I said, let's do it. So I arranged to...
00:13:44
Speaker
write a book and make a television show about the trip to finance it. That's how I did things. And I went back to Africa and we got a few of his friends from the Kenya Wildlife Service ah Park Wardens to come with us and and that's what we did.
00:14:01
Speaker
So I start off on this trip thinking we're going to climb up Kilimanjaro one side and then you know walk 500 kilometers from the summit all the way to the Indian Ocean. It's going to take us a month, and it sounds like a really great adventure. But then along the way, things happened that I had not anticipated, that I hadn't even thought about in advance. ah One of them was The relationship I started to feel with animals around me every day that I was on foot looking at eye to eye that put me a few rungs down the food chain. And we were armed. that We were an official patrol of the Kenya Wildlife Service. And if um we were charged by a hippo or a crocodile tried to get us, in
00:14:56
Speaker
One of the rangers I was with may have succeeded in shooting it, but then they also said, if it's an elephant and it charges us, all we're going to do it the most, and only if we really have to, is shoot over its head. And if it's a rhino, we're not even going to do that. It's up to you. You've got to be on your own, and you've got to figure out how to survive. And it left in me every day an awareness that I had never experienced before, where I started to tune in to sights and sounds and smells and details around me, where I was intensely listening and watching for movement in the shadows. Like I was an animal among other animals and I had never had that experience. And that began a
00:15:54
Speaker
introspection about my relationship with other wild animals. It led me back to insights about the way all of us lived our lives when we were animals among animals, and it became a long meditation on this long relationship of where we've come and through that where we might be going.
Human Interaction with Nature and Its Lessons
00:16:19
Speaker
and and Then another thing happened on that trip because once we got out of the Savo Parks, we entered an area where there were still native peoples living in villages along the rivers that were getting wider and wider as we approached the Indian Ocean. and Two of the guys on our trip's father had been the founding warden of those national parks back in the 1940s.
00:16:42
Speaker
And he had come to know these people who were elephant poachers at the time that he established the park, and they were actually hunting elephants with bows and arrows. Can you imagine that? With poison arrows. And so I learned all about this history from these two guys. And then these people had disappeared, the bow hunters. Nobody knew what had happened to them. Nobody had... Nobody had had seen or heard of them for 30 or 40 years. And so we got into this little village and we asked after these guys and they said, yeah, there's still four people from that tribe who are still alive. And we went and visited these old men who used to be
00:17:21
Speaker
elephant bow hunters. And they were from a tribe that had hunted elephants with bows and arrows for millennia and millennia going back into deep time. And then all of a sudden with the formation of the national parks, they had been converted from subsistence hunters to poachers. They were relabeled. They were arrested and put in jail. Their culture fell apart and they disappeared.
00:17:46
Speaker
And what happened? Well, the elephant population started to explode. The human beings, we human beings, we primitive hunters and gatherers, had actually become an animal among other animals that was part of an ecosystem balance. And then a drought hit, and the overpopulation of elephants were crashed, and there were dead elephants everywhere, and people so came into the ecosystem and started picking up their ivory, this deadfall ivory, and all of a sudden they were getting rich. And then when all the dead elephants had been, they'd picked up all the ivory from the dead elephants, then they came back with automatic weapons and started shooting more elephants because they'd gotten the taste for ivory. And then the whole population crashed. So here I was at this trip learning
00:18:39
Speaker
about the relationship of our human species as hunters going back into deep time and learning about what happens when we take ourselves out of a landscape like that where we're a natural part of it and it goes into disarray and then how we use our technology to come back in and create an even worse imbalance than there has ever been in the history of our species on on Earth. So I go into a deeper meditation about our relationship with animals when we have the technology to to hunt them out. And I come to this conclusion that I'd never thought about before I left on this trip, that whenever we human beings are given the opportunity and the technology, we take out the species around us.
00:19:26
Speaker
We've done that through our entire history on this planet, and that includes indigenous peoples. I started to realize that, that a lot of the stories indigenous people tell them about tell about themselves now aren't necessarily his held up under the under the lens of history. And what's that mean?
00:19:44
Speaker
Well, it means that all of us have to use our higher intelligence, our intellect, to overcome these basal instincts that we have. That we have to learn how to moderate those instincts so that in this modern world where we have these technologies, where we live these human-made lives that are creating all these imbalances in the world,
00:20:09
Speaker
that we also have the capacity to moderate those instincts and learn how to regain the balance in our planet. Now, I've riffed on a long time here about that one trip and what I took out of it. But you asked the question, you know, you quoted me as saying that some trips answer questions at the outset you never thought to ask. And here is one trip that led to this lifelong examination of my own relationship as a human being to the planet. And that trip was the most important one in my life.
00:20:44
Speaker
to change the direction as an adventure from just going on trips where it was about me where the purpose was, in this case, to get up Kilimanjaro and walk all the way to the Indian Ocean because that wasn't a purpose at all. That was about me. It was not about how I could be more than myself, about how I could take these lessons I was learning on this trip and write a book where I hoped others might pause and think and learn some of the same lessons I had learned and allow me to have that purpose of living a life more than just about myself, more than just about being a mountaineer going to the top of a mountain where umpteen thousand people a year go up there anyway. Which doesn't mean squat, does it?
00:21:32
Speaker
It certainly doesn't. And that's so much what we struggle with as as mountaineers and I think as humans is what is the point? Like what is the, you know, this sort of, rabbi I don't want to go down that rabbit hole any further than that. But I think there's two interesting things that I want to pull out of this that one is this journey that you made, this one journey that you made is not an isolation, right? Like all of the other journeys were also part of the Rick that showed up to do that trip. And they maybe sorted you out and made you open to something that you wouldn't have been open to if that had been the first trip you'd ever done when you were 18 or whenever you started, right? The other piece of this is something that you said, and I don't remember his last name, but Ian, you know, the and this is a thread I want to pull on.
00:22:21
Speaker
for our larger conversation is the relationships with the people that we we go on and the relationships with ourselves. You said something that I want to come back to, and I have written some notes about it, about the moving from the idea of talking about yourself to talking about telling from autobiography to biography as a storyteller. You spent much of your life as an autobiographical storyteller in books and in TV and and movies. And then you made this big switch. All these things are interesting. So let's go back. I actually want to to go back in time. And I think there's a thread here with your climbing partners. I think climbing partners for a lot of us
00:23:11
Speaker
sort of hold this sacred place in our hearts.
Early Inspirations and Mountaineering Challenges
00:23:14
Speaker
And one of your very first and very close partnerships was with a ah friend, Chris Chandler. And you and Chris climbed a number of peaks in First Assents in the Peruvian Andes. You went to the Himalaya together. Tell me about Chris and how you first came to meet him and how you first came to climb together. Yeah, let's see what you know, this is one like, where do you where do you begin this story? Because I keep thinking I could go back to high school years when I first got interested in climbing when I in the early 60s saw
00:23:48
Speaker
ah National Geographic article on the first American ascent of Mount Everest. And there was that picture of Jim Whittaker standing on the summit holding his ice sacks with the wind blowing the flags in the United States in the National Geographic Society. and And I saw that, and I just said, that's who I want to be. That's where it started for me. And who would have guessed that 10 years later, a little more than that, 12 years perhaps, in the late 70s, there I would be on the expedition that made the first American ascent of K2, and Jim Whitaker was was the leader of the expedition.
00:24:27
Speaker
But then those intervening 10 plus years were, of course, what we're talking about right now, because back then there were no schools to go to where I could learn climbing. And there was nobody in my high school in Southern California who was interested in it. And I.
00:24:45
Speaker
went out to a local store and bought an ice axe and some crampons and some boots. And I bought a book called Freedom of the Hills. It was the only thing that was close to a tutorial that I could find. and And there I was in the mountains above the Los Angeles basin in the winter with my new gear, trying to teach myself how to use it from a ah book. And my mother's Michelle Radar started buzzing. And for a high school graduation, she sent me to the first outward bound school and in Washington, I mean in Oregon.
00:25:15
Speaker
in your old stamping grounds. And that's where I started to learn the fundamentals of climbing. And that led to a an idea to...
00:25:27
Speaker
get myself down to Peru ah and really mix it up with true high altitude mountains. and i I was by myself. I had heard that climbers hung out in the Cordillera Blanca in this town called Juarez, and that there was a little hotel called the Monterey where ah There was a dormitory where you could stay for 50 cents a night and I showed up and here was this wild man climber named Ron fear and he took me under his wing and he became my
00:26:01
Speaker
My mentor, that first year in Peru, knowing nothing, I climbed six peaks, including a ah new route on a peak called Surup that Ron took me up. And it was a steep face. It had a rock band, and you know it was like... 1500 vertical feet of steep climbing. And I was, you know, scared to death. And, and he got me up that thing. And I even led a couple pitches, not even knowing what a pitch was. And after that, back in the States, he introduced me to his main climbing partner, a doctor from Seattle named Chris Chandler. And Chris and I, you know, we hit it off. And we went back to Peru the next year, and we climbed a new route on a peak called King Che.
00:26:49
Speaker
And then later that summer, in a rafting trip, we got mixed up in some rapids that I had fortunately walked around and and Ron didn't, and and he died. He got killed in ah in a raft accident.
00:27:09
Speaker
and That really brought Chris and I even closer together. And we started spending more time climbing. He had lost his main partner, but I think we both recognized without even talking about it that he had gained another one in me. And he was my mentor, but very quickly I caught up with him and we were equals.
00:27:33
Speaker
And i I was still trying to figure out what my path through life was going to be like all of us do, so much so in our 20s. And at that time, I thought I was going to be an academic. i you know I kind of loved school. I loved traveling. I loved native peoples in distant places. I loved anthropology. And and I'd put it all together. And I had managed to get into a PhD program in cultural geography and in Berkeley. and And it was hard to get into. I worked my butt off to pull that one off. And then two weeks before school started, classes were to begin. Chris calls up and said, I got us on an expedition to the Himalayas. And I went, the Himalayas? Like, that was the dream.
00:28:23
Speaker
to somehow, some way, some day, get to the range of the highest mountains on on the planet. And I said, you're kidding, what's the peak? And he paused, which I later learned was probably for a effect, before he said Everest. And I said, Everest? And rest but he said he had been to the annual meeting of the American Alpine Club, and he'd been standing in line to get lunch. When he struck up a conversation with two guys who were businessmen, lawyers, one who worked in the State Department, and through his connections in the Embassy of Kathmandu, he got a permit to climb Everest after the French had dropped out. And in those years, in the 70s, China was closed. And Nepal only allowed one expedition per season, per year, on Everest, two per year.
00:29:19
Speaker
and the waiting line was 12 years to get a permit. This guy had suddenly got a permit for the fall of 1976. They chatted up with Chris and they all hit it off and they had invited him to come on the expedition and he said, okay, but I got to bring my climbing partner. They said, no problem, we need some climbers. What was I going to do? Is that how Chris was? Was he just one of those guys that would, you know, beat someone in the coffee shop and the next thing you know, they're... Yeah. They're off. And then he brought me along. Like he told them he was only going to come if he could bring his climbing partner. That was pretty cool. And that was you. Except I was starting school in two weeks on a program I worked so hard to get into.
00:30:08
Speaker
I probably don't need to tell you what decision I made. yeah And we all have these forks in the road, don't we? that It's fun to look back on and try to imagine the trajectory of your life had you taken the other choice, the other road. But no, I went to Everest and left academia behind. And that was back when You kind of put the root in, you're not even kind of, we put the root in ourselves. We had Sherpas to help us carry our loads. ah And that was an enormous help on a trip like that. But it was an old school expedition back in the days when you put the root up yourself. And that meant through the icefall. And that's what Chris and I did. We did most of the leading through the icefall. And we did a really good job. And we got the ladder set up and we had some Sherpas working with us. and
00:31:03
Speaker
got what you know is always an unsafe, but the most safe line we could find through it. And then we helped push the route you know up the low safe face. I did most of the leading on that with Chris. But then right at the time when it came to choose the summit teams, I had been up high and Chris had been down resting for a couple of days ah at our camp too. And the guy made the decision to divide Chris and me up and put Chris on the first team and me on the second thinking, well, he needs two strong teams too. And then I was partnered with another, with Gary Roach, who was super, super physically strong climber. But I was separated from Chris and he and his partner got to the top and and we were two days behind coming up.
00:31:58
Speaker
And the wind was really filling in. It was hurricane winds. But the worst thing was I was having a congestion in my lungs. And I had that fear inside of me that it was pulmonary edema. And so I didn't have any choice but to go down. And it turned out to be a pleurisy that I got some kind of a lung infection.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I was still pretty weak for a couple of weeks, but I missed the summit and Chris had made it. And and that was a division in our climbing partnership that was more mine than his. And I realized over many years that that division that I felt between us, because he had made the summit of Everest on what was only the second American ascent and I didn't was because of my jealousy and my ego. And it was because I had the wrong goals and I had the wrong purpose. When I wrote my memoir just three or four years ago here, Steve, the one called Life Lived Wild, I had the tough decision of trying to figure out where to start it. Cause I had all these cool stories from the early years of my life and my twenties. Some of them that I've just told you now, it eventually had to,
00:33:19
Speaker
leave those on the editing floors that were and I started the book with the story I just told you about about Everest but it was about this realization that I was there for the wrong reasons because thats that's where I realized That's where my life as a ah mountaineer really started with that wrestling match. and And I wanted to start the book there because the book needed to be more about than just getting to the tops of mountains. It had to be the why, not just the how. But did you have that realization while you were that when you were 26 years, what were you, 26, 27 years old? When did that understanding mature in your mind? And when did you start to understand that? Was it immediately? Was it years later?
00:34:05
Speaker
It was coming off the mountain. Yeah. Really? It was. I remember a much wiser man than than I Rick. That would have taken me a decade. I remember. Just outside of Namsay Bazaar. Some little scene we had a film crew there filming us for the television special. And I can remember so clearly. Them setting up this interview with Chris.
00:34:33
Speaker
And I was standing off to the side, and I was feeling sorry for myself, standing there you know in in the crowd watching Chris getting interviewed. And I remember thinking, why are you feeling sorry for yourself? What what is this about? Are you are you really sinking down to that depth that you're standing here feeling sorry for yourself watching?
00:34:59
Speaker
one of your closest friends in the world, you know, in his moment that he earned so hard that he did. And and I started, yeah, castizing myself. And then I couldn't help myself. So it was it was a wrestling match that started right away and it and it's and it lasted for a while. So then nevertheless,
00:35:19
Speaker
you know, the television show came out and it was a CBS special primetime thing and millions of people watched it. and And I was still portrayed for the role that I had, which was with Chris being kind of the lead climbers for a big part of the ascent. And so a year and a half later, um Chris gets invited on by Jim Whitaker on another ah American attempt on K2.
00:35:46
Speaker
And Chris says the same thing. Well, yeah, I want to come, but I want to bring my climbing partner with me. So I get invited to go to K2. That's how that happened. Yeah, and I'm going to say it's different. The expeditions for for those of our listeners that are younger, at that time were different. yeah They weren't easy to, I don't know that anyone had really done a true lightweight self-funded expedition to the Himalaya in the 70s. I mean, that really didn't start until til but to the early 80s with guys like, you know, the Polish climbers and, you know, eventually, you know, Messner and some of these other other Himalayan climbers. but At that time, it was you know ah sort of a national, still this era of national expeditions. And Jim, having been the first American to have climbed Everest, was a was a massive hero and had great connections. And K-2 had not been climbed by Americans, though
00:36:48
Speaker
famously Fritz Wiesner had climbed very, very high on it. Gosh, I want to say it wasn't like 800 feet below the summit and night before the war started like 1939, you know, born in Germany, but as an American climber with an American team and just a little bit of context. I think that's important for people to understand that history because, you know, to get so high and such an important mountain, you know, that where, you know,
00:37:18
Speaker
8,000-meter peak wasn't climbed until 1950, and this was 1939, and it was so close, and there was so much, you know, that that's that story of that expedition, and of course, the 1952 K2 expedition.
00:37:33
Speaker
with Pete Schooning, and there was a lot a lot of baggage, I would say. And I mean that in the in the good sense and in the in the in the bad sense or the difficult sense of what that what climbing K2 meant for American mountaineers and in the 70s and late 70s. It was feeling overdue, and I'm sure there was a ton of pressure on you guys to pull that off.
00:37:56
Speaker
But what a what a team. You were the sixth American attempt on K2. Six, okay. And back then, the mountain had only been climbed twice by anybody. Okay. Italians have made the first. Italians? And then the Japanese have made the seven the second ascent the year before us. And they they had a team with 80 climbers. Wow. And they had 2,000 porters to get to base camp. That's right. That's right. I remember that now, yeah.
00:38:25
Speaker
And the lead the the Japanese leader, you know, fashioned himself some sort of a Duke duke of a Brucie character. and and And the story was he even had he had a ah tent bigger than anybody else's and it had a ah carpet in it that some poor porters had hauled up to the base of K2. And our team was huge. um We had a dozen climbers, but we had you know, like over 300 porters to get us all our stuff to base camp. And then I remember setting out from the road head where we, you know, we had back then we had to walk 120 miles, no, 110 miles each way just to get to base camp from road head to the foot of the mountain.
00:39:11
Speaker
and And we had these 380 porters to carry all of our food and supplies. and And we were at that point intending to try to use oxygen. So we had oxygen bottles and they weighed a ton. But then we realized that ah since at least half the route was unoccupied, we needed more porters to carry the food for the porters carrying our stuff. So we hired 80 more guys just to carry food.
00:39:36
Speaker
for the porters, not us. Porter food. And then we realized we needed 15 more guys to carry food for the 80 guys carrying food for the 380 guys. It ended up with you know well over 400 people.
00:39:48
Speaker
and That's what expeditions were like back then. You know, they were these national affairs, as you have said, ah in the style of a military campaign, ah requiring the same sort of ah logistical organization you would have as if you were an army, because in a sense, you were a small army. But even in 1999, which was I went to gash room for with my first year as a Patagonia ambassador, by the way, and that was very, very exciting for me. I had one jacket, one pair of pants.
00:40:22
Speaker
And we were four climbers climbing in Alpine style, and we had 99 porters. And every day we sent back four porters, because that's how much food and fuel we consumed. And that was when we left from Ascoli, which you know was probably five days of walking for you in 1978 just to get to Ascoli. The road was obviously had been pushed much closer to the mountains then.
00:40:46
Speaker
So, it's still the Karakoram, I think, much more than, like, especially, like, the kumbu and stuff. It still has this very expeditionary feel. It's still very remote. It's still very hard to, take because it's on, it you're on a glacier. I brought up Chris because I wanted to actually talk about that relationship and how that changed during that that expedition and over the course of of that climb and the years years after.
00:41:13
Speaker
Chris had a complex life. He was divorced with a couple of kids that he really wasn't supporting the way he should have. And ah he had ignored his child support responsibilities and he was in trouble with the courts.
00:41:39
Speaker
And he had a girlfriend that was a wonderful young woman that I just adored. And he left her behind. And in the middle of our exhibition, he took up with the wife of another one of the climbers who were both on the team. And as you might expect, it divided everything. And then it also was a schism for me because I accused him of just being almost irrationally irresponsible and threatening the success of the climb for these amorous affair with this other climber. And I confronted him with that. And then I felt obligated to do
00:42:29
Speaker
what I could to try to repair the schism that was shaping. so As Chris' his best friend on the climb, I went to the husband, the cuckolded husband, and offered to try to do whatever I could to mitigate whatever damage had been created. and He told me to mind my own business. and I realized that there were relationships going on here that were so complex that I would be a fool to try to dig into them any deeper. but But they couldn't be this left alone. Or if they were, I couldn't imagine how they weren't going to still affect the potential success of our team and not split it. And and some of the others felt the same. and And that's what happened. And it split Chris and I apart. And I very purposefully sought out another climber on the team, John Roskelli.
00:43:24
Speaker
and partnered with him. And we hit it off. and And we made a really strong pair. And then Chris went and paired with his new liaise and her husband. And I was trying to figure out without wanting to get my head into it too much what but that was about. But then that was none of my business, I realized that. But it was so complex. And yet, somehow, we all managed to come together enough to keep the two camps in the team that had been divided around this issue, working together enough that we were able to pull this thing off. and And that was no small feat because we had to endure six storms on that climb. And for the first storms, it made more sense as they went on day after day to bail and come down and
00:44:24
Speaker
waited out at our advanced base camp. Instead of eating the food and burning the fuel, we'd all work so hard without Sherpas to stockpile in those upper camps. And then on the upper part of the mountain, as we got more storms, then it made more sense to try to stay high. But the branch that we were out on got thinner and thinner. And by the time we were positioned to make a real 11th hour attempt at the top,
00:44:53
Speaker
um We were nearly completely out of supplies at the upper camp, and the tempers had grown just brutally thin. Gosh, when I look back on it, it's hard to even imagine how we pulled that off, but we did with four of us getting to the top.
K2 Expedition: Team Dynamics and Perseverance
00:45:14
Speaker
um after By the time we got back down to advanced base camp,
00:45:19
Speaker
We'd been above 18,000 feet for 68 days in a row. And then those of us on the summit team were above 8,000 meters for for five days and nights without oxygen. um and And that's that's hard. you know and then And coming off the mountain, ah back at our high camp in my book, you may recall how I talked how John and I were in the tent, just so wiped out this tiny little tent, and we had the gas canister stoves, and he was changing canisters, and there was a residual amount of gas that he didn't realize in the canister he removed, and it squirted gas out, and it blew up, and our tent burned down, and my half my beard burned off, and my sleeping bag burned, and we had to
00:46:16
Speaker
all cramming together into a tiny little thing called an omnipotent with four people at 8,000 meters. One of the worst nights I've ever had. and Then it took us five days to get off the peak, but we pulled it off. yeah and and we it As you know, at the at the very end, decided to try it without oxygen and we pulled that off. But then I went to write that book, The Last Step.
00:46:42
Speaker
and and I realized that The real story lay in how we did manage despite these differences that we were all having, these arguments and the tensions and the conflicts, we had figured out how to pull it together enough to pull it off. and And that's the story I knew I had to tell. And I also knew it was going to be really hard to tell that story because
00:47:14
Speaker
I'd have to tell a very uncomfortable a story very uncomfortable for Chris, who was my close friend and my climbing partner for so many years. but But I knew I had to do it, and I had this hope that he could recognize that I had to do that, to be honest, and that I was hopeful that honesty could help him reconcile his decisions in his life with himself and through that even between us that I could have my cake and eat it too as a storyteller who felt no choice but to be honest and that didn't work. And Chris never forgave me for that trespass.
00:48:02
Speaker
and nor did his girlfriend on K2, Cherie Beck, who he went on to live a life with until on Kanj and Junga a few years later on an attempted winter ascent at a very high altitude. Chris got cerebral edema and Cherie tried to bring him down, but he died before she could do that. And she lost, I think, just about all of her toes and fingers trying to save him.
Loss, Memory, and Reconciliation
00:48:29
Speaker
So mixed with All the wonderful times we had together as a climbing team and a partnership and our friendship and the adventures we had, like you had, like everybody listening to this who's a climber knows the closeness between men and women sitting on the bivvy ledge, shuddering together, but seeing it through all the things and the adventures and the risks and the experiences and the tragedies, all the things that bond you together.
00:49:03
Speaker
as climbing partners, you know ruptured forever, yeah. I mean, I hear that that wounded you. How did you heal from that? Oh. Or is it possible to heal from that with Chris gone? Yeah, heal is not the right word. um I think that what all of us need to do against tragedy and loss or death, and it was death in Chris's case, not on a trip I was with him, but ah It cut off any possibility of reconciliation forever. And so that was the death of possibility as much as the death of my climbing partner, even if I wasn't witness to it. Reconciliation isn't the right word ah for how to accommodate something like that.
00:49:52
Speaker
I think that this whole idea, as I wrote in my memoir, Steve, this American, especially American idea of closure where all of us by our culture are encouraged to find closure to the loss of a loved one or a close friend or a family member so that we can live our lives is a misguided idea that We should never try to close anybody out of our lives, but to embrace the pain of the loss of their lives and to bring into our lives everything that we can squeeze and learn from that experience of death. So that takes a lifetime. It sure does. That's a job that never quite gets finished. And you keep absorbing the lessons from it.
00:50:51
Speaker
And you keep living, you keep integrating it into you through embrace instead of closure. The time that you and I and our friends get to spend in wild nature um where through mountaineering in this in our cases, we get to go to places where The road signs of our civilization are minimal, and sometimes there aren't any at all, where we have this opportunity to get ourselves into the last remaining wild corners of our of our planet, that in those wild corners where we're really close to nature, and often in potentially dangerous situations, we get into our bones
00:51:46
Speaker
this awareness that death is the prerequisite of life, because that's how life works.
Nature's Cycle: Life, Death, and Resilience
00:51:56
Speaker
And when you're in nature, you observe that directly. And then when you have to accommodate and face the death of a friend or a loved one, and in those cases where you come close to death yourself, then you learn how to put death in that context of recognizing that it is the prerequisite of life. And that gives you a kind of resilience against death, but also against other crises that we face. you know I think I learned a lot from facing death and loss
00:52:44
Speaker
ah in my life to do a better job living through the pandemic, for example, that it is a source of deep, deep resilience. And of course, that's what our forebears learned millennia ago. It's what the Stoics learned to do. and And the Catholics with their idea of momento mori, which in Latin means remembering your own death and that there is a strength through this perspective. And my point is, Steve, that it's a perspective that comes from being in nature, in the natural part of our world where you get into your bones, as I said, this visceral awareness
00:53:32
Speaker
of that connection between life and death. And you also start to understand, I think, that the clock is ticking the moment we're born. One of the deaths that you experienced that you wrote very poignantly about that I want to one two bringing bringing bring into our conversation and without foreshadowing too much, I guess, without giving away too much, you wrote really beautifully about your relationship with Jonathan Wright and about your later journey with his daughter, Asia. How did you meet Jonathan and and who was Jonathan for you?
00:54:10
Speaker
Jonathan was a photographer who who lived in Aspen, Colorado, who was a little younger than me by three years. And um I met initially through common friends, ah not climbing, but, you know, through photography and and filmmaking and initially. And he, at a very early age, had become a National Geographic photographer. He was very talented.
00:54:37
Speaker
And he also, ah through his connections at National Geographic, got a job on the film crew of our Everest expedition in 1976, the second American ascent of Mount Everest, the one where I didn't get to the summit and I ended up feeling sorry for myself. But um Jonathan was on that trip and he and I hit it off. um And we started,
00:55:06
Speaker
to spending every chance we could get together ah during the climb, in the tent, ah in our moments of rest where we could hang out and and talk. And he was already a seasoned um
00:55:27
Speaker
a seasoned traveler in the Himalayas where he had become a ah student of Buddhism. And he had spent time in a monastery in India, quite a bit of time, ah including time and in deep meditation with guides and gurus who had allowed him to see himself in a perspective that just captured my imagination.
00:55:55
Speaker
I told you earlier how I was wrestling with my own ego. and And Jonathan was so helpful because he picked right up on that. And he would see me, he could he could sense my struggle. And he would come up to me, especially coming off the climb as we were walking back out. And he would say, Rick, look,
00:56:23
Speaker
Look at how beautiful that mountain is there. Or look at that that pheasant scratching under, I know you like pheasants, you've told me that, they fascinate you. Look how beautiful that is. And he would he would do that on purpose with the intention of guiding me into what really mattered. And I was picking up on that, that he was such a skilled guide. Like he never said,
00:56:51
Speaker
Get over your ego, dude. Pay attention to the beauty. He didn't do it that way. It was this very subtle hand holding. And I came to really value it. And I came to really value his friendship to the point where I felt he and I were gonna be the best friends for the rest of our lives. And we had that feeling about each other. So I was,
00:57:20
Speaker
back in those years, um working in film a little bit like Jonathan was, and doing some photography like he was. But as a storyteller, my focus was on writing. That's what I really wanted to do more than anything, even though I had my hand in these other skills. And so Jonathan knew that, and he proposed that we become a writer, photographer, team for National Geographic. And so um we put together a proposal to do a story on what in the late 70s was the recently created Mount Everest National Park, Sagamartha National Park. And the geographic had approved the proposal and Jonathan had gone out to Nepal to um do the preliminary photographs.
00:58:12
Speaker
And then we were planning a trip together to do the main part of our assignment when I got this invitation through Yvon Chouinard and Kim Schmidt and a couple other guys to join an expedition to China to try to attempt Minyukanka, near 25,000-foot peak on the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, technically in the province of Sichuan, but geographically on the margin of Tibet, and and in a and and and surrounded by Tibetan culture. And no outsiders have been in this area since the early 1930s. It had been closed after the revolution, and this was the first year China was allowing
00:59:01
Speaker
Mountaineers back in or the second year 1980 the second year Mountaineers were allowed into China and I got on the team and Jonathan got on the team the ABC television team making a film of our climb and in fact I had a ah job on the film crew as the field producer and and he was one of the cameramen and I was one of the climbers on on the team and so then we got We had the geographic um make arrangements for us after the climb to be able to journey. Probably we didn't even know how we're going to do it. Hitchhiking buses. We were going to get ourselves from Minyakonka to Lhasa. And from Lhasa we were going to cross the border into Nepal on roads and crossing a border that nobody was crossing at the time. And Lhasa was like
00:59:51
Speaker
you know, no man's land, he couldn't get there. And they had figured out how to get permission for us to do it. So this was like a series of adventures that seemed beyond Aladdin's lamp, beyond our ability to even imagine we would ever be so lucky to have this series of adventures to the edge of the known map right in front of us. And we were like kids that's who had this level of excitement that's hard to describe and it only confirmed how I knew this guy was going to be my partner for the rest of my life and I went out to Aspen to get ready for the climb and we all went to Jackson together to plan it there with the guys who were with the Exum Guide Service and
01:00:42
Speaker
I got to meet Jonathan's new wife, and ah they had a little baby girl who was just 12 months old, exactly a year. And he had named they had named her Asia after his favorite place in the world, and I knew that little girl, and is we were all going to be an extended family. I just knew that. Until on Minyakanka, coming down from our Camp 2 position at about 20,000 feet, roped with Yvonne and Kim,
01:01:12
Speaker
And Jonathan, who was filming the three of us putting in the the high camp, what then was the high camp position, we triggered an avalanche and we were swept down the side of the mountain, about 1500 vertical feet. And I had to guess later how long we were in that avalanching snow and and it had to be close to 60 seconds, maybe even more. And And as time slowed, I just knew I was dead and that that was it.
01:01:48
Speaker
October 13th, 1980, the day that I was going to die. And I could see Yvonne and Kim in front of me in this cascading, avalanching snow. And I got glimpses of what I thought might be Jonathan and the guys were next to me. We were roped together. And then the slopes kept breaking away to our sides. I could see the thing gaining momentum. And we were going into a steeper and steeper slope.
01:02:14
Speaker
And then I saw the tents at our Camp 1 position rocket by. And I remembered that getting up to Camp 2, we had to work our way through this little gully system, going up a cliff. And we went over the cliff.
01:02:33
Speaker
in these tons of thundering snow. And that's when I knew I was dead for sure. And then I got sucked inside the snow and it was just, that's all I could see. And I went into the sal bug airplane crash mode position, trying to create the bubble with my arms. If it stopped and I was buried, I'd have an air pocket to give me whatever hope there might be.
01:03:03
Speaker
when the avalanche started to slow and thinned and then stopped on this slope and we had gone over the cliff and hit another luvial fan and and it had stopped and I was somehow still alive. And I looked around and the other guy seemed to be alive too.
01:03:25
Speaker
but everybody I could tell the others were injured. And I just assumed I must be, but I started checking myself and couldn't detect any broken bones. I had some ripped muscles. That was for sure. I knew that. But I was able to stand up and get out of my harness and go to the others because they were hurt. And Yvonne had a concussion or something that I didn't know that at the time, but Blood was coming down his head and and he didn't know where he was. He was quasi-delirious. And Kim was still partially buried and screaming that his knee was gone and his back was killing him. Well, we would find later that his back was broken. And then Jonathan was laying to the side moaning. And as I went from one guy to the other, I quickly realized Jonathan was
01:04:20
Speaker
the most grievously injured. So I spent most time with him trying to keep him alive. And he lost consciousness. And then after about a half hour, he died while I was still holding him in my arms. And the next day I went back up with some others and we we buried him on a promontory of rock right next to where he had died.
01:04:51
Speaker
I think it was at about 19,000, 18,000 feet on the mountain, maybe. And we went back with no appetite to continue and and we went home. and And I went into a long introspection, not really knowing if I could climb again, that in a way I hadn't had to consider I had to balance the rewards against the risks and just go into that place where everybody in the nearing eventually has to arrive at and work through, where you do pause and think what you've learned from the high mountains and taken back to your life at sea level and and what that's meant to you and how
01:05:47
Speaker
from all those times in the mountains, you've become a person different than you would have been had you never gone there.
Contemplating Career and Consequences
01:05:55
Speaker
And what it meant to not only lose my friend who was gonna be my companion in life for as far forward as I could see, but also so come so close to losing my own life where for those 60 seconds, I didn't think there was any hope getting out of it.
01:06:17
Speaker
alive. And that took a couple of years. And during that time, I got married, and my wife, Jennifer, and I started a family right away. And and that, of course, made it a a lot harder. But then I also had the vocation part of it to work out, and because that's what I was doing for a living. I was writing and filming and photographing these adventures. And I had to work that out with Jennifer. Do I go off and find another path? Which I could certainly do. That wasn't probably a big lift. But then, who would I be if I left behind this life that I had carved for myself? And did I have any right to do that with this new responsibility to her and and our fledgling family? and And she helped me a lot, you know, by pointing out that
01:07:17
Speaker
this is who I was, and that's who she married. She helped me with that one. Like, I went into this with two eyes wide open, so you need to know that. And I thanked her for that. And then she said something that connects to what you said at the very beginning of our conversation here, Steve, that but maybe at the end of the day, what becomes,
01:07:43
Speaker
even of most value to those of us who live this life of adventure and exploration and climbing and mountaineering is not even the the the places that we get to see, but the people we get to see them with and the friendships that we make and what we can learn from those people with whom we go to the mountains. And she helped to guide me with that. And she said, you know, um that might be the bigger loss, Rick, that if you don't go back you lose this opportunity to meet people who could take you in different directions. And we agreed that
01:08:22
Speaker
If ever an opportunity came along where it felt like the rewards could outweigh the risks, and those were rewards in all kinds of shapes informed and that included this idea of finding new people to take you in different directions, the idea of, yes, this is how I make my living, the idea, yes, this is who I am because this is a path I've been on for this whole first half of my life against the risks,
01:08:51
Speaker
Well, let's keep an open mind of this. Then, a year after I married, that's what happened when I got a call from this guy named Frank Wells, who was the president of Warner Brothers, and he had this zany idea to partner with some guy that he just met who owned the Snowbird Ski Report named Dick Bass, and they both discovered that each of them had this fantasy of Climbing the highest mountain in every continent and nobody had ever done that but they weren't really Very experienced climbers. In fact in Frank's case. All he'd ever done is hike up Kilimanjaro Dick at least it scaled McKinley Or Denali, excuse me, and they needed guides. Yeah and I went to Jennifer and laid out the whole thing and she said
01:09:47
Speaker
You know, Rick, these two guys sound kind of interesting, even if maybe you think they're just having a midlifer, but you're gonna be guiding them, but you know, they might be able to guide you in some new directions. And she said, she encouraged me to go for it. And so I ended up,
01:10:09
Speaker
helping those guys on two of their climbs, guiding them up, Aconcagua and Vincent. But then I also got a job with the film crew recording their attempt on Everest in 1983 and then help following it through until Dick finally did climb Everest two years later in 1985, becoming the the first guy ever to climb the seven summits. And I learned so much from those guys, especially from Frank. He became a close friend. And and he he taught me so much about just tenacity, which I thought I already knew something about having got up K2 after 68 days on the mountain. But yet he took it to a different level. And I learned about
01:11:01
Speaker
even in organizing things and how even in business you comport yourself and how you can achieve goals by getting the right people and how to align them, things that I really hadn't really thought deeply about before that became deep lessons for me to guide me and he became a very important mentor. Yeah, so my wife was right, see.
01:11:27
Speaker
she was, she was wise. And I love this thread of of authenticity and identity and her stepping up and cherishing you for who you are rather than being afraid of what might happen, um you know, in the negative sense. That's that's such a gift.
01:11:51
Speaker
So many things came out of that climb that I had not ever expected. and And kind of one of the ones I had to wrestle with for years was the the book that we wrote afterwards, Seven Summits, and how it kind of became a hit. I mean, not even kind of. i Really haven't added it up, but that all the various editions of that book it sold like two hundred and fifty thousand almost three hundred thousand copies That's pretty good for a book. That's amazing youre so But what it did is we both know and as most of your listeners know it engendered this whole era of guided climbs on Everest which to me is just so anathema and I had a direct hand in
01:12:34
Speaker
creating that whole industry. And it's embarrassing because it's the opposite of why I've went to the mountains, why the opposite of what I've tried to encourage others to think about.
01:12:47
Speaker
the reasons for their own attraction to mountaineering. and and and why you know what We've gone back to our conversation about purpose. It is the opposite of the purpose. Any of us should be going to the mountains, but there it is, and there you have it. I had a hand in making that happen unwittingly. Well, I think you should give yourself a little slack there, Rick, because you mentioned earlier about a human and there sort of are more base impulses.
01:13:17
Speaker
And not to take anything away from people that want to climb the seven summits, but I think that a lot of, you know, it's exactly what you mentioned. People take all the technology they have and they do everything they can with it. That's a fundamental part of of human nature, I would argue. And, you know, if it hadn't That would have happened irregardless. I don't want to step on your ego, but I don't think that, you know, while you were certainly there and part of the first group, if it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. And the same thing would have happened. So there's no cause and if I would argue that there's no cause and effect there. But Reinhold, after he did the 14, he might have realized that, oh, he could do the seven. You know, I remember Steve, an anecdote that you'll enjoy and your listeners might
01:14:09
Speaker
have fun with this one too was in planning those trips with Frank. I was in my little rental house with Jennifer and our baby girl. And I can remember so clearly I had a office set up in the corner of the kid's bedroom. And I was sitting at this window looking out over the backyard and Frank calls.
01:14:36
Speaker
And he called me just about every day. And he would never say, hi, Rick, it's Frank. He would, I would answer the phone, you know, an old landline way before there was any indication of who was calling. You'd pick, you'd hear the phone ring, you'd pick it up. You always expected somebody to say, hi, is this Rick? Yes. You know, is this so, you know, that was right the protocol for phone calls. Well, I pick up the phone. He just started launching it. He'd never say, Rick, this is Frank. He'd just start talking.
01:15:05
Speaker
And you had to scramble for a notebook and start taking notes as fast as you could. Except every conversation, you would get a telegram, like an old-fashioned telegram, ah the same day you'd have a conversation. And it would be a ah memorialization of everything you'd discussed. And then the bottom would say, if there's anything here different from what you remember, call me back.
01:15:31
Speaker
I'd never see a thing like that. I'd never. So anyway, he calls me up and he goes, I'm ordering stationary. And I go, great. We need a name. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. Well, neither have I, but I was noodling on it this morning driving into the office. And I thought, you know, there's seven continents or seven Mountains, what about calling ourselves seven summits? And I said, well, it does kind of roll off the tongue. It goes, OK, that's it. I'm ordering stationery. We're calling it seven summits. That's how it started.
01:16:07
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's as simple as that, right? Like just, I think people forget that, you know, normal human beings come up with this stuff. Yeah, that's it that's a great story. You know, this is one of the things I i really am curious to talk to you about both here and and in the future is just kind of the connection between mountaineering, climbing, adventuring, and entrepreneurship because you know, risk is a big topic in both of those pursuits. What have you found that has connected between those different areas of your life? Well, there's two things here, Steve. There's the lessons that we all might take from, as I said before, to use that, repeat the phrase that from the high places and take down to our lives at sea level, and in this case, apply to our lives as business people.
01:17:06
Speaker
And you know, there's the hokey ones, the metaphors, rope up to people you can trust. ah Don't take risks, manage risks. That's kind of those bullshit things. But the one thing that's not bullshit that you learn in the mountains that is so useful.
01:17:22
Speaker
In business as an entrepreneur, it is that lesson of of tenacity um of ah just really sticking at it. You also have to know when to turn back and when to say, okay, this isn't going to work. Let's push the reset button. And I would say those two things together are the the main things I've learned from my mountaineering. I was talking to Yvonne really recently, just a few weeks ago. And I had been thinking about the topic you just asked. And I asked him about it, Yvonne Schwinard. I said, Yvonne, what lessons have you taken from the mountains that you brought down to the way you run Patagonia? And he goes, oh, shit, nothing. said You know how he talks. So I didn't want anything climbing about how to run my business.
01:18:12
Speaker
And I said, oh, come on, you know, you learned like making pitons, you learned about quality. And I go, and he said, oh yeah, that's true. So he backed off a little bit. and And I said, so you wouldn't learn about quality if you hadn't been a blacksmith, you wouldn't have been a blacksmith if you weren't a climber. And he goes, yeah, yeah. And I said, what else? And he said, you know, it's not about how to run a business, it's about why to run a business. And I said,
01:18:42
Speaker
Keep going. And he said, it's about how when you're in nature and you're in wild nature, you learn pretty quickly how vulnerable nature is. And he said, we've been out there and we've seen the glaciers melt and we've seen the overgrazing and we've seen the clear cutting And we've seen the insects disappear and the birds die off, and we've seen all this shit with our own eyes. And that means we've got to do something about it. And that's why I'm in business, and that's what all business has a responsibility to do. That's the main thing I've learned, is the responsibility of all businesses on this earth to protect the earth because that supports their business at the end of the day. And you'll remember, Steve, that
01:19:37
Speaker
his own mentor, the activist David Brower, reminded us all that there is no business on a dead planet. And that's what Yvonne was getting at. That's what I was thinking about as you were saying that.
Sustainable Practices and Business Responsibility
01:19:50
Speaker
You know, I've thought it through a little more than that, and ah it's pretty simple.
01:19:55
Speaker
And in fact, it's a self-evident truism that I can't believe all CEOs don't understand. And it's just simply that all business depends on a healthy planet, to supply all businesses with a healthy and renewable stream of resources, and that to have healthy societies, you got to have a healthy planet and you got to have clean air and clean water.
01:20:19
Speaker
And without healthy societies, there is no such thing as healthy markets. Those are the dots that connect. It's a simple, Is that yet? How is it that not all business leaders recognize that? I don't get it, but I take every opportunity I can as as a storyteller to remind them that. I wish someday I had the opportunity, maybe it'll come up to be on a panel with Elon Musk. God, would I ever love to do that? To call that asshole out. And I would love to have a chance to tell him that there is no way
01:20:58
Speaker
will ever turn Mars into Earth. But if we don't figure it out soon, we're going to turn Earth into Mars. I think that a lot of people are in, I would say, denial because I think that they, in their view, were in a transition, right? Like, it's not it's not Mars yet, and it won't. I know that pessimism is no fun.
01:21:23
Speaker
ah But ah I think it has to get worse before it gets better, I'm afraid. I call myself a hopeful a hopeful pessimist. And that's something I wanted to talk to you. So with your permission, let me talk about hope for a minute. I'm bringing it up because I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few months. um And I've realized just how complex of a topic it is and how easy it is to oversimplify.
01:21:53
Speaker
um And I think that at the highest level, it's about this human yearning that we all have for a future that's different than the present and maybe a future that doesn't repeat some of the shortcomings that we make in in the past.
01:22:14
Speaker
And then in thinking it through, and and in fact, this is just something I was thinking about like two days ago, I realized that when you think about hope, that the first thing you need to do is is discuss whether you're talking about the hope that a lot of people have for another life after the one that we live here on this planet, that the hope that comes from religion. Or are you discussing the hope for a better life that we might have for ourselves and those who follow us while we're living on this planet. And that's the hope that I talk about. And I've also been thinking how hope can so easily become a platitude. If you don't define for yourself what that vision is for yourself of the future that you want,
01:23:15
Speaker
for the planet and the living beings, you know, not just humans, but humans and non-humans, the life that inhabits the planet. Like, what's your personal vision for the world? And, you know, for me, it's at the highest level, like I suspect it is for you and many people listening in.
01:23:37
Speaker
It's this world where we figured out how to live in harmony, where we're not taking from our home planet anymore that can give back to us on ah on an annual or long-term basis. and And it's a world where we figured out how to use the technologies that are already here without adding any more fancy new ones to solve those twin crises of climate and energy. and extinction. And those are the mega crises right there. And it's not just climate, but it's just interrelated crises of extinction. And then that's the vision. So where is the hope? Well, how do you make that vision come true?
01:24:26
Speaker
And that's where I'm a pessimist full of hope. Because i the pessimist part is that you know I'm doubtful that we'll probably come together and align on the solutions for those twin interrelated crises and in time to avoid going over the cliff. It's not looking right now too too great that we're going to do that, but yet I'm steadfastly hopeful that we're going to figure it out because the solutions are there. Like I've dug into it technically, and you know there's a pathway right in front of us to keep the planet to 1.5 degrees and really mitigate the extinction crisis with tools already and on our belt.
01:25:12
Speaker
But then our friend, Chris Tompkins, who we both know and adore and love. Amazing person. Has told me that you need to earn hope. You can't just claim hope, you gotta earn it. And to earn it, you have to take the tools off your belt and do your part to solve those crises. And then our other close buddy, Yvon Chouinard, says that If you write, you got to write about the injustices of the world. And if you're a good speaker, you got to speak up. and And if you got time, you got to go out and volunteer. And if you got money, you got to donate it to the people who are doing the work on the ground. So what are the tools in my box? And I think that it's where we started our conversation here. That I'm a storyteller.
01:26:10
Speaker
and That's what I do. And so that's what I spend my time doing now. I write books and I go out and give talks. And I talk to friends like you who are putting the word out that we all got to use whatever tools are in our box to do what we can to solve those twin interrelated crises.
Hope, Action, and Interconnectedness
01:26:36
Speaker
Because there's another thing about hope And that is that it's contagious. That is true. It becomes self-fulfilling. That's our tipping point to hope. That's what I want to leave you guys with here, that go out there and do what your skills are good at, it to do what you can.
01:27:01
Speaker
And I want to read a poem back to you that you wrote in one of your books. You may remember, I'm sure, the poem. It's a seven-word poem. And it you would you like to recite it from memory? It's that that haiku. Everything is connected. Everything changes. Pay attention.
01:27:25
Speaker
Thank you. I think that that sticks with me because this phrase, pay attention, actually kept me alive a lot in the mountains, because i used to I used to say that to myself, like, especially when I was tired and, you know, you're descending and it's dark or whatever, you know, in those situations where you're prone to making mistakes. But it has a much broader application here. And I think that it kind of summarizes for me almost everything that you've you've talked about and shared today.
01:27:55
Speaker
everything is connected, everything changes, and pay attention. Yeah, you've got to have your your eyes open and your senses tuned, and then your life becomes so much richer. I think that all of us listening, and you and I for sure, we are moved to be outside in the wilderness, in the wild. We're moved by the beauty we see And it it moves us, and it's outside of us, but then we realize that by witnessing it, we're we're a part of it. And that's something that you've really eloquently communicated so many times in your life's work, how we are a part of that. And you you had a quote from Doug Tonkins. He said, there is no synonym for God more perfect than beauty.
01:28:52
Speaker
And I have loved that quote ever since I read it because we are witnessing beauty when we're in the mountains. We're all moved by it. We all know that feeling of standing, you know, on a mountaintop watching a sunrise or a sunset or the storm roll in or whatever it is. And we're moved by that beauty and we're part of that beauty. And therefore, we're part of the divine or the God or the infinite or whatever you want to call it. and I think that that is a tangible experience for so many of us, and it's certainly been a part of the mountain experience that you've helped me unlock in myself through your work and writing, particularly your writing, Rick. So thank you for that. and Thanks for your time today. I really appreciate you. You're welcome. Steve, it's been my pleasure.
01:29:48
Speaker
Voice of the Mountains is a production of Uphill Athlete Incorporated. Our producer is Alyssa Clark. Sound engineering and editing is done by Christoph Lucaser. Voice of the Mountains is scripted and hosted by me, Steve House, with research and writing help from Jamie Lyko. Thank you for listening to Voice of the Mountains.