Teamwork Carry To The Top

Last Sunday was a gift and a privilege. The kind of day that underscores the beauty of a group of individuals coming together to help their fellow human being achieve something big.

.

@nerissa_cannon joined a @nobarriersusa event this summer, came away fired up and decided she wanted to climb a Colorado 14er. She was keenly aware that as a high functioning para, she would need to put out a rally cry for a team of folks to help her.

.

The community answered her request in full force.

.

21 of us showed up predawn last Sunday at the Mt Beirstadt trailhead and over the next 9 hours we assisted Nerissa as she worked her modified off-road chair by pushing, pulling and carrying her and her chair all the way to the summit and back down to cold beers.

.

There was laughter, frustration, joy, tears, fatigue, pride, resiliency... all the good ingredients of a solid adventure.

.

The most beautiful things take place when we embark on a mission that is uniquely directed at helping someone else achieve their dream.

.

Thank you @nerissa_cannon for the opportunity to spend the day with you. What’s next?

.

Also proud of @sheepdog_05 who put every bit of his 95lb frame into this mission.

.

#beofservice #servantleadership #mountains #mountain #ability #leanintoit #dream #teamwork #teamworkmakesthedreamwork #getoutside #coloRADo #colorado14ers #travel #climbing #climber

Seek The Fear. Then Pocket It.

I’ve always looked a little kooky at snowboarders as a group.

“Yeah, that’s cute… you in your baggy snowpants and flannel shirt scraping down the mountain and flattening out the bumps that us skiers worked so hard to carve out”. 

Snowboarding has always seemed like a little brother sport to skiing in my eyes. That being said, many of my close friends were/are knuckle draggers as well as my wife of almost 12 years.

But the thought of me, with 35 years of skiing under my belt, strapping into a board and sliding sideways down a mountain was as conceivable as me driving a pink Prius around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Not happening.

Then, last weekend, my 9 year old asked to take snowboarding lessons while in Steamboat. Then that same 9 year old asked me if I was scared to learn how to snowboard.

Dude called me out.

Cool your jets, punk. It’s on.

And before I knew it I was strapped into a board and sliding sideways down the bunny hill right beside him. 24 hours later I was “carving” down a steep slope next to my wife with a big fat grin on my face… all the while trying to contain the fear that was trying to bubble over with each toe-side turn.

Turns out, going toe-side and heel-side (carving from front to back) are pretty sketchy maneuvers when you’re not accustomed to doing so. I suppose it comes from the inert fear of slamming your fragile little noggin down on the hardpacked snow at a high rate of speed.  At first, each turn leaves you feeling exposed. But as with all things… it progressively gets easier. Every time you succeed at a turn you get more and more comfortable with it.

That is, until you catch an edge… and before you can even let out a pathetic, high pitched “Oh, shit”, your ass and back of your head slam into the snow simultaneously causing a resounding shock through your entire body.

Then the fear sets in so that you don’t go and do the same thing again.

Self-preservation.

Don’t go and do the same thing that just catapulted you into the snow again.

What… are you an idiot?

And thus I was reacquainted with my old friend fear or, as my amigos down south say, “El miedo”.

Fear is an evolutionary response to a threat.

Fear is designed to keep you alive. Epinephrine is injected into your body in large volumes when you’re stressed or fearful. Too much of it is unhealthy. Extended exposure to epi or cortisol is bad for your kidneys, your skin, your hair, and your emotional happy factor.

However, small doses are good. That noteworthy metal-like taste in your mouth just as you commit to a scary action… it reminds you that you are in fact very much alive.

Yummy!!!

Scary shit has been happening to us as a species for thousands of years. Historically it revolved around being chased and eaten by a saber tooth tiger or perhaps a few thousand generations later, it was running from a pillaging Norseman that was chasing you down with a bludgeoning hammer.

Nowadays… it’s less consequential.

Maybe it’s the threat of your boss firing you from your unsatisfying but necessary job. Or perhaps it’s receiving a $200 speeding ticket for going 55 in a 54 (thanks Jay Z).

Our moments of fear are cordoned off these days. We have to go seek out fear in our sterile society. We pursue activities like BASE jumping, mountain climbing, dirt biking and skydiving to get those archaic moments of true fear. To get flooded with epinephrine and cortisol. Then go home and relax on the couch with a beer in hand.

In my 20s and half of my 30s I sought out every opportunity I could find to get scared on rock faces and mountains all over the world. Fear was my friend. It was a drug and I was addicted. I used to love those idiots from the early 2000s with their “NO FEAR” stickers on the back of their jacked up F-150s. I would always think, “I’ll show you fear, dumbass.”

Then a wife comes along and it changes a slight shade.

Then a kid comes along and whoa Nelly… shit gets put on lock down. For no other reason than “I don’t want my kid to grow up without his daddy.”

As we get older the safety cocoon gets softer and pillowier. It’s easier to accept comfort and complacency. Why mess with comfort? Why risk my life? Why risk a broken bone? Takes 5 times as long to heal as it did when I was in my 20s. Even when it does, the arthritis will be a bitch. Not to mention… my achin back.

It’s easy to feel fear and back down. Our ancestors relied on that reaction to sustain our species. But now we live in a time when fear is designed and once we find it, we have to suppress it. Ironic for sure.

I made a conscious decision when I turned 40 to fight complacency tooth and nail. Even though I knew I would never climb the same scary shit I did 15 years ago, it was up to me if I wanted to keep my instincts sharp and stay emotionally engaged with my environment. I would have to redefine the pursuits that would keep me challenged and excited. Part of that equation was to feel scared when doing an activity.

For me it came down to picking up a new sport every few years.

Five years ago it was kitesurfing.

Talk about fear.

After a half dozen hours of lessons I decided to save money and just figure it out on my own in the dark depths of the Sea of Cortez. I remember physically trembling those first few times out solo.

At first I was holding on tight. Scared of getting hucked around by the kite. Scared of getting dragged under water. Scared of getting chomped on by a sea critter.

Then I let go. I quit holding on so tightly. I embraced the movement and pocketed the fear.

Once the fear was released the joy filled its place.

Five years later… kitesurfing is my absolute favorite activity on the planet.

This year, it’s snowboarding.

I noticed clearly this past weekend that when I held back due to fear, I would promptly be thrown forward or backward. Quickly. Painfully.

I realized after my first bumpy run (read ‘crash filled’), that in order to make these turns, I had to let it rip. I found myself sitting at the top of the run saying out loud, “Don’t hold back. Don’t be afraid. Go hard in to the turn. Commit to the heel-side turn.” Once I embraced that, I was off. Carving. Cruising. Fast.

Not to say I didn’t fall and bust my ass a few more times. But I felt the motion and I was hooked.

Clearly there are unhealthy versions of fear. The hours you lay awake in bed worrying about this thing or that. The things that you can’t control. Those issues that seem monumental at 3:00am but are more manageable when you are up on your feet with a cup of coffee in your hand. Fear based culture is disseminated 24hrs a day by mainstream media. Sociopolitical behavior is controlled by the fear mongers  on CNN and Fox News. This is unhealthy fear.

Healthy fear is based on courage. And courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is doing that thing that scares you the most. Having courage to risk failure. Being courageous enough to fall down. Hard. And then get back up. Stretching yourself whenever you get the chance. Not necessarily with X Games sporting pursuits. It doesn’t have to be kitesurfing and snowboarding. It’s whatever you want it to be. But it has to scare you. Expose you. It has to contain doubt and a sense of the unknown. This is healthy fear.

Fear needs to be healthy. It’s primal. It’s one of the missing pieces of our primitive make-up.

See if you can remember the last time you were feeling absolute fear. That your life or limb was in ‘perceived’ danger. For most of us, it’s been awhile.

Go find that fear. Learn a new sport. Take a chance. Go toe-side. Get spooked a bit. Then pocket the fear.

The Water That Binds

Just before I boarded my flight back home from another successful climb up Kilimanjaro, I got a texted photo from my wife Merry Beth of our son Jace stomping around in what looked like a few inches of standing water in our driveway.

“Been raining for 3 days now. Our grass is loving it and so is Jace. Safe travels honey.” Merry Beth had no idea the impact this deluge of water from the sky would have on our home and our state of Colorado. No one did.

My 14^th Kilimanjaro expedition was just a pleasure as I guided up a wonderful group of women, most of which were from New Jersey.  They all performed well and in spite of my mild reservations on spending 2 weeks with a group of “Yankee gals”, they blew me away with their kindness, humor and fortitude. I was honored to stand on top of Africa with all 12 of them after a long hard summit night. I would return home with a smile on my face and sense of satisfaction assisting these good people in achieving a life long goal.

Then the real climb began….

I awoke Thursday morning in Miami where I was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech to a group of financial advisors the next day. My first night in a comfy bed in 2 weeks provided me the kind of early morning where I continuously kept rolling over and finding deep sleep…over and over again. Until my phone rang and I saw that my wife was calling. Wait, it’s 6am there…an unusually early hour for my morning allergic wife.

“Honey, we’ve got 2 feet of water in our downstairs and it’s rising fast.”

“Not sure I heard you right…. Did you say 2ft of standing water inside our house?”

“Yes. And it’s raining hard. And I’m scared.”

Helplessness. That was my initial emotion. Then fear and concern. Then… it was time to problem solve and assure MB that we would figure this out.

Before I could even send out the help signal flare, my phone began blowing up with texts and calls from my friends that were headed over to help MB with the house.  Friends who knew I was thousands of miles away and unable to take care of my family. The cavalry was on its way.

I heard multiple times from dozens of people…

“We’ve got this.”

“What can I do to help?”

“Tell me what you need.”

“I’m on the way over to your house.”

As the morning unfolded I began receiving photos of a dozen of our friends hauling furniture to higher ground, crawling around in the muck to access soggy boxes filled with random keepsakes and artifacts as well as making calls to our extended network to get the mitigation of water underway quickly.

Throughout the day I continued to hear stories of neighbors installing sump pumps in my house to relieve the volume of water even though their own homes were still filling. Tales of friends taking 90 minutes to drive across town to our house in the middle of the night to deliver pumps and hoses… trying to find roads that weren’t washed away.  I received photo after photo of random shit from my hippy days being saved by the salvage team. I found it so poetically beautiful that many of my old “hippy friends” were finding my old hippy flotsam and jetsam saturated in the crawl space. They put their energy and love into ensuring that hundreds of old Grateful Dead ticket stubs and photos from days gone past were given a chance to dry out and perhaps be saved. The true find of the day was perhaps the most beautifully absurd… my friend Avery comes upon a ziplock bag containing a 2 ft ponytail that, perhaps in an effort to never let go of the long haired hippy that I was in my 20s, I still kept in a box, deep in the crawl space. And now…I get to keep it for another 20 years, thanks to Avery.

I returned home the next night to a house in shambles and a wife that had been strong until she saw me and finally let out all of the tension… sobbing on my shoulder.  She had been so strong the past 48 hours…not sleeping, vigilantly monitoring the house and showing our 8-year-old son how to be strong in the face of adversity.  I held her as the tension and stress of 2 days poured onto my neck from her eyes.

The smell of mold and mildew hit me first. Worse than any locker room you’ve ever stepped foot in.

My furniture and belongings piled all over the garage…pools of water surrounding stacks of soggy boxes. My Dad’s antique dresser dripping water from its drawers. All the furniture stacked high with the wood wilting with water. My son’s childrens books, lying soaked on the cement with all the pages stuck together. All of my medical school textbooks soaked from cover to cover.

Then it was time to step inside…

The living room was filled with mattresses, tables, photos, clothes, guitars and gear. Not any available floor space left. The downstairs was a maze of fans, hoses, dehumidifiers, extension cords and soggy carpet. The water heater was ruined as well as the washer/dryer and HVAC unit. The toilet was off its flange in an attempt to allow the water to flow down the sewage hole. The tub was filled with a layer of brown muck.

Ugly.

As most of the country knows now, Boulder County was crushed with biblical rain last week…. “The 500 Year Flood” hit us. Over 200 folks are still missing. Countless homes were lost. Thousands of basements were flooded and property damaged. Colorado got beat up…bad. Clearly it will take years to rebuild our roads and the communities and lives they lead up to.

But I have seen something beautiful through the clouds. Something stronger than the power of a swollen river or a flooded home.

I have seen love and compassion. I have seen consideration and kindness. Well beyond my house and its efforts, the stories of heroism abound throughout the Front Range. Daring helicopter rescues and life threatening rescue missions. Tales of taking folks in who have lost it all.

In the end we will replace the dry wall, carpet, appliances, furniture and gear. These are just “things” that have only material value. We are viewing all of the lost items as a mandated “Spring cleaning” from the universe. Time to get rid of all the shit you don’t need. A solid exercise for us all.

What I can never replace is the community that I witnessed rally in an effort to help out a friend. I am grateful and proud of our local folks. They are rock-star-heroes and I will seek out opportunities to repay the favor every chance I get.

Now we dry out and move on.

Endless gratitude to my wonderful community of friends… Keith Berger, Mike Z, Terry Stonich, Avery Stonich, Jamie Young , Finn Ingalls, Marci Zakreski, Kelly Garrison, Matt McQueen, Mary McQueen, Paul Lugar, Jerry Kress, Raeanne Vincelette, David Fowler, John Hatch, Kelly Salence, next door Dan and the countless others that offered assistance to MB and I over that 48 hour period and beyond.

Making Friends With My Nemesis

Sitting in my tent at 19,000 ft in the middle of the Andes Range in Argentina, I remember coming to the realization that the wind is my enemy.  We were not friends and we would never be.  Seventy mile per hour constant winds were pummeling my tent with unbelievable and unrelenting force. This had been going on for 2 days now and I was convinced that it had become personal. A gloves off, ass kickin, vindictive battle. And as much as I didn’t want to admit it…I was going to lose.

And this disdain was fostered early on…

As a child, I remember riding with my parents in my Dad’s T top Camaro with the windows down on a summer day. My parents seemed to be embracing the wind blowing around the car, enjoying the warm breeze. But I clearly remember worrying that the paper and objects in the car were going to blow away…maybe even me from the backseat. I didn’t like the chaos that came with heavy wind. Around that time I also remember being made very aware of the wrath of a southern summer time thunderstorm.  Immense lightening crashing all around, buckets of rain filling the woods and of course…my soon to be nemesis, the wind…just hammering the house with what felt like hurricane force power.

I have never liked the wind and throughout my mountaineering career this animosity has been nurtured with countless events that have supported my contempt. I have had dozens if not hundreds of summits rejected due to high winds. I have returned to lower camps on mountains from up high only to find my tents and gear throttled beyond recognition from a recent windstorm. I have retrieved bodies that were cast down the glaciers of the Alaska Range like rag dolls by the high winds. 

No, the wind I were not friends. And we would never be.

One of the things I have realized in my path towards middle age and the slight bit of wisdom that comes with my quickly populating gray hairs is that I refuse to foster negativity. I am realizing how important it is to surround myself with positivity…with clarity and goodness. And I mean exclusively positive.  By doing that, it becomes so very easy to push away objects or people that exude toxicity or anything of the Darth Vader ilk.

As I inventoried the good and the bad…I started on my culling process…jetting the bad and nurturing the good.  Some were clearly defined on one side or the other…some a bit more vague.  Some required a change in my own perception…some just required getting closer to things/people that I felt held promise.  Some required cutting the lines completely.  It’s been like Spring-cleaning of the soul. I recommend just such an exercise. It’s enlightening and cleansing to say the least.

Mountaineering and climbing were at the top of my list of “What brings me joy”. As I reflected on my 20-year mountaineering career though, I realized that the wind was a variable that was the yang in my alpine yin. I knew that it was a vital force in the construction of the very mountains I was climbing and through its forces, vital weather patterns were born. I knew that it had its place and appreciated its presence. Just not while I’m high on a mountain please.

So I decided it was time to become friends with the wind. I thought on how to go about doing this. I had paraglided quite a bit a few years back and although that was flying and dancing with the wind it was more about thermals and floating. There was way to much sitting around with paragliding.  Too many other variables in play. I wanted to harness the wind…I wanted to seek out the wind and desire it’s presence. I wanted to hunt the wind instead of being hunted.

Then it occurred to me as Merry Beth, Jace and I were planning for our inaugural trip down to Baja in 2010. We were heading to a small little fishing village on the East Cape of Baja that sits on the Sea of Cortez. Los Barriles was known for fishing in the summer but it in the Mexican winter it became a hotbed for this crazy sport called kiteboarding or kitesurfing. This wasn’t windsurfing with all of their cumbersome and unwieldy gear. This was a dude or dudette flying across the water, on a board under a huge, beautiful kite…being powered by the wind and the wind alone.

Eureka!!!!

The more I studied it and learned about it the more it turned me on. Within 24 hours of stepping foot in Baja I was in lessons. A week later (and dozens of epic crashes) I was finally getting up on my own and flying across the ocean.

Bliss.

Two years later I have now kited in Florida, Colorado, Texas, South Carolina, Haiti and next week, the Dominican Republic.  I have not only made friends with the wind but now we have an intimate relationship. I seek her out. I look for her on websites. I jones for her when she goes away.  I follow her to remote places.

I would encourage everyone to do a soulful recalibration. Bring in the good. Dump the nasty. Embrace the things that scare you and don’t be afraid to face the dragon. Joe Campbell would be proud.

Me and my new friend the wind will tell you…

Its time to fly!

Flip of a Coin and Your Life Goes…. This Way →

One of the many good things that came out of Expedition Impossible was getting to reconnect with a number of old friends from back in the day that recognized that scrawny, tattooed redneck running around Morocco with a blind guy on TV.

Perhaps the most remarkable was hearing from my pal Mike Morgan…an instrumental person in my life. Mike and I just spent a couple days together recently and had a blast reminiscing about many of the countless situations we found ourselves in, back in the day. One event of chance though, was perhaps the most critical in who I am as a person today.

At the ripe age of 18, Mike and I were attending East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN with a number of other guys of our similar ilk. What is that ilk, you ask? Well, let’s just say that we spent a significant amount of our time that year in J. City pretending we were in some country music video…chasing the “Ws”…whiskey, weed and women.

Oh, and going to class? That was optional… at best. I followed my stellar 1^st semester academic performance of a 1.2 GPA with a “is that really possible” 0.6 my 2^nd semester. Needless to say, it was clear that ETSU wasn’t going to ask me back for my sophomore year.

As that underachieving end of my first year of “higher” education was coming to a close, the restlessness that I felt brewing inside was also felt by Mike Morgan, one of closest pals on “Team W”. We had discussed on many occasions the fact that we needed to get out of the south. That we needed to explore and adventure. That we needed to see what else was out there. We didn’t know what any of that meant in terms of how to execute, but our intentions were clear. We wanted to go and do something.

After a few weeks of discussion and a VERY small bit of research, Mike and I had determined that snow skiing would be the activity that would guide us to the promised land of adventure. I had been skiing since I was 13 (thanks to my parents noting my interest after a church group trip to Snowshoe when I was a wee kid). Mike had in fact been racing on a ski team in the rugged hills around Gatlinburg for almost a decade. We both loved skiing but knew that it was only a catalyst in getting us out on the edge of something we had yet to see and feel.

To that end result, we had narrowed our landing spots down to one of two places… Vermont and the northeast slopes Killington, where we would only be a day drive from the safety of our family network should we decide to tap out at any point. The other option was the vast unknown of Colorado and the clear umbilical cut that comes from moving ¾ of the country away from anyone you know. Just the thought of “goin out west” at the age of 19 to ski and explore was enough to stand the hairs up on our necks. I bet between us we had less than $500, a couple of vehicles held together with some duct tape and bailing wire and some ski gear. We weighed the pros and cons of both locations for what seemed like a fairly substantial amount of time (considering we were still very busy in our pursuit of the Ws, and clearly this was very time consuming). We were torn. Vermont vs Colorado. It seems clear now that the decision should be a no brainer… but at the time, it was tough.

Then, as all good life changing decisions do, it came down to the flip of a coin.

Heads = Vermont

Tails = Colorado

I remember it as clear as yesterday, Mike and I sitting in a fairly deserted cafeteria on a beautiful southern afternoon around 2pm (we had just woken up).

Quarter comes out. Mike flips it and I watched, somehow knowing that my future was very much wrapped up in which way the coin landed. He held his hand over it, painfully extended the delay. Both of us smiling at what would dictate at the least, a year of our life.

And there it was… tails. Colorado. Oh shit. Should we flip it again? See if we get the same answer. That’s a long way from here. Other than some guy Mike had met once from Gatlinburg, we didn’t know a soul in Colorado.

We giggled a bit and decided we had to listen to the coin flip forces that be.

A month later our cars were packed, our families were kissed and we began our drive west.

The subsequent 23 years have been eventful to say the least. Colorado is my home. Boulder is as a part of me as any place that I was raised. Clearly my career, my family and my happiness have been, in part, defined by Colorado and the proximity to these wonderful mountains and lifestyle that exists here. This venue has been instrumental in how it has sculpted me.

That quarter landed on tails for a reason. In my humble opinion, random chance doesn’t exist. We make our own paths and then we walk on them. The way we walk down these paths is entirely up to us.

Go ahead and flip a coin. Perhaps a roshambo …but I’m pretty sure that the result is not random. Hard sayin.