The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  Headlamps of the cinched-in climbers swiveled toward us as we approached and went by, then swiveled back without a word, down toward the snow. People were locked into their struggles, it seemed, or in battles with their demons, as much as they were bound by the rope.

  * * *

  TOWARD DAWN, as brilliant pink light began filtering across the bluish black of the sky, Pasang Bhote and I reached a place where sheer drop-offs lined either side of the rope—a mile or more to the rocks and ice below and too risky to stay unclipped. The wind was beginning to pick up by then, which meant that the cold on the rope line would be even worse, but the added safety was worth it. As we clipped back in, feeling optimistic from the progress we’d made through the night, I reached for my extra heavy parka.

  But as I put on my parka, I had to pull off my right glove for a second—and, looking down, I felt every muscle of my body go absolutely rigid with horror.

  My hand was completely black—the black of severe frostbite that meant death of the tissue, the black of gangrene and amputation. The cold, I immediately concluded, was worse than I’d thought. I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d been so focused on the pain of the rib that I hadn’t felt the cold clamping its grip on my extremities. I felt the brief irrational impulse to look at my other body parts—to check my other hand and my feet, my nose and cheeks, which would of course have been the stupidest possible thing to do, in exposing more of me to the cold. So even as I shuddered with the terror, I pulled the glove back on.

  And then without thinking, almost through the force of momentum, I resumed climbing, trying to figure out what to do next, stiff with fear and unable to focus on anything but my hand. The sights and sounds around me were exactly the same as before—the growing, gorgeous pink of the sky, the crunch of my boots, the hissing of my breath through the oxygen tank, Pasang Bhote there ahead of me—but none of it got through. I was a shell, moving but feeling somehow as though I’d already died. I’d promised Jenna and myself that no risk on any mountain or any expedition was worth not coming home in one piece with all my fingers and toes, and I’d violated that without even knowing where it was all going wrong.

  After a few minutes, even though I knew I probably shouldn’t, I had to look again. Maybe, I thought, there was something I could do… though I had no idea what. So I stopped and pulled off the glove again. If it was as bad as it had looked the first time, I knew I’d have to turn back. But this time it seemed different. I saw a streak in the black, a place where darker and lighter areas looked almost smeared, and when I pawed it with the glove on my left hand, the smear changed shape. I rubbed harder and saw pieces of the black actually fall off onto the snow, revealing flesh underneath that was pink and alive.

  I breathed as though I’d been holding my breath forever, an exhalation that even my wounded rib didn’t complain about. The black was activated carbon. The chemical hand-warmer inside my glove had ruptured. I pulled the glove back on, flexing my fingers, feeling whole again, feeling as though my body might be able to unclench.

  Throwing my arms up in the air, I screamed—a howl of release and relief and joy that made even the most exhausted climbers around me perk up for a second. Pasang Bhote, just ahead of me in the line, didn’t jump or flinch. He was utterly unflappable. But then he slowly swiveled back to look at me.

  “We are not yet at the summit,” he said, completely deadpan.

  “Right,” I said, resuming the climb but unable to stop smiling.

  * * *

  AND FINALLY, JUST AFTER 7:30 A.M., the top came into view, and as Pasang Bhote and I stepped up to the mound of brightly colored prayer flags laid down in the snow at the summit by previous climbers, I was completely overcome by emotion. Snapshot images flickered through my head as I thought of how impossible this moment had seemed through that long night in the Death Zone when the first attempt had failed, and then through the long, dispiriting climb back down and those days of watching and waiting for another chance. And now here I was.

  “Top of the world! No words can describe…” I shouted, my voice choked by the thin air and the emotion as I smiled at Pasang Bhote in admiration of his seventh successful summit. The morning was perfectly clear, with a view out over the vast horizon of Himalayan peaks that seemed to go on forever; a panorama that felt limitless.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON that day of the summit and what turned out to be a long, bone-wearying descent, I called Jenna exhausted from my tent. “I made it to the summit, baby—back down at Camp 4 now!” I gasped and went into a coughing fit. “Only one mountain to go,” I spluttered when I could catch my breath. The last stop on my Explorers Grand Slam itinerary, Denali, was feeling pretty abstract at that moment.

  “Amazing!” she screamed back. “I’m so happy for you, and so proud. How are you feeling?”

  “Completely wiped. Took me an hour just to get my boots off,” I said.

  “How’s the rib?”

  “It’s painful, but compared to the high of making it up there, seeing that sky, that feeling of limitlessness—it’s nothing,” I said.

  “Hands, fingers, toes, and nose all good?”

  “Perfect and pink,” I said, deciding I’d tell her about the black-hand scare later and lower down the mountain, when I had more breath.

  “Great, great, in that case…” she said, then paused a second. “There’s one more thing…”

  She then said something I’ll never forget.

  “I need you to put your boots back on.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’ve been doing some calculations”—there was a pause—“and if you can get down from Everest today and we can get you to Denali quickly, you might be able to set not one but two world records. The Seven Summits speed record is in play.”

  We were both silent for a minute. Images fluttered through my memory as I thought of Joshua Tree, and the Seven Summits book, and those long miles of reading aloud to each other through California and into Oregon. I saw the book’s pictures and route maps and Jenna’s face as she listened to me intently behind the wheel as she drove.

  We’d never thought, in planning the Explorers Grand Slam project, that I’d have any chance of breaking a speed record for climbing the Seven Summits, because of the time involved in reaching the North and South Poles. But even with the delay in my needing two tries to get to the top of Everest, Jenna had glimpsed a new possibility and improvised.

  She didn’t wait for a response. “So I’ve arranged for a helicopter to come pick you up at base camp,” she said. “The helicopter will take you to Kathmandu, but you won’t have any time to rest there or get a hotel. An evening flight will take you to Dubai, then Seattle, and then Anchorage. Then to Denali’s base camp.”

  Finally, she stopped and I could hear her take a breath. “And here’s the other thing—you know how it usually takes three weeks at best to climb Denali? Well, you’ll only have three days to summit.” She let that sink in for a second. “So what do you think?”

  Right then, I thought that Jenna’s plan seemed impossible and halfway to absurd. I was still in Everest’s Death Zone, twenty-six thousand feet on the mountain. Denali seemed a universe away. But denying the possibility of it, I knew, would definitely make it impossible, and I thought as I lay there, phone pressed to my head, of one of my favorite quotes from Henry Ford: “He who says he can and he who says he can’t are both usually right.”

  I sighed, but mainly for effect, and the expression of love it conveyed, and the admission that she was so right and knew me so well.

  “Okay,” I said, sitting up. “I can at least put my boots back on.”

  * * *

  I WOKE UP OFTEN through that bleak night on the Antarctic ice, thinking about Everest and brooding about whether it was time to say “I can” or time to say “I can’t.”

  And then sometime toward dawn, I found myself thinking of a visit I’d made to an elementary school in Denver shortly after the Grand Slam project was finis
hed. The kids had gathered in the gym.

  “I’d just climbed to the top of the tallest mountain in the world, I was so so tired,” I told them. But then as I gestured at photos on a screen behind me, I explained that I wouldn’t have realized my full potential in that moment if I hadn’t pursued that second world record.

  “I had one more mountain to climb, the tallest in North America,” I said, tickled at seeing the kids lean forward in their seats. “It was a really challenging mountain called Denali, in Alaska. But instead of having the normal three or four weeks to climb it, I’d have only three days. So I put my boots back on, and climbed down Everest as fast as I could.” I then took them through the plan Jenna had devised for me to fly around the world to arrive at the base of Denali just one hundred hours after standing on the summit of Everest. The students’ eyes were really wide now as I wound up the Denali story. “And when a bad storm struck halfway to the summit—one hundred and thirty-nine days after this all began at the South Pole—I felt like quitting. But I kept going, and with twenty-four hours to spare, I reached the top. In the same moment, I broke the world record for climbing the Seven Summits and completing the Explorers Grand Slam faster than anyone before.”

  I love the curiosity of young students. I hadn’t asked for questions yet, but a boy in the front row had had his hand raised for the past few minutes.

  “What’s your question, buddy?”

  “Do you think I can climb Mount Everest one day?”

  “Absolutely! It all starts with believing in yourself. Believing that something is possible is the first step to making it really happen. That said, I don’t expect that all of you will want to climb mountains—that might not be your thing at all, which is totally fine. All of us have a dream, something we might one day hope to do or become. All of us have an Everest. The question I want to ask you all is: What’s your Everest?”

  Hands launched upward all around the gym. I called on a freckled redheaded girl in the second row. “My Everest is to be the first person in my family to graduate college,” she said proudly.

  “That’s a wonderful goal!” I replied.

  Next, I called on a rambunctious boy near the back whom I’d noticed earlier, partly because he couldn’t sit still. “My Everest is to be an astronaut who explores space!” he proclaimed.

  Hearing students reveal all of their awe-inspiring dreams warmed my heart. Ironically, I’d been trying to inspire them, but the kids, with all of their boundless hope and excitement for the future, got me thinking. That “What’s your Everest?” question, I realized, wasn’t just for kids. I needed to answer it for myself. Crossing Antarctica was my next Everest. I’d pursued it with absolute commitment, and now here I was in my tent, alone, searching for the courage to go on.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME MORNING CAME, my forty-ninth day on the Antarctic ice, I felt as though I’d been through a kind of trial—a test of my grit and determination, all in the course of one night. Thoughts of quitting were banished. As I pulled my boots on in the tent, I felt a renewed sense of resolve.

  The storm was still raging, and through another twelve-hour day in the harness, it never let up. But I was in a different place inside my head. I’d found something in that bleak night of bottoming out, in the power of memory and inspiration, and it gave me a new fuel.

  The next day brought still another gift, as it became clear that the worst of the storm had finally passed. The winds began to diminish, and gradually the long days of whiteout parted. I could see a horizon, which further lifted my spirits. I could see beyond my own skis and my compass. The world around me, after so many days of storm, felt vaster than ever.

  And then on the following morning after that, December 23, I glimpsed for the first time the Transantarctic Mountains.

  I couldn’t quite believe it at first. After so many weeks of flat and featureless terrain, of hunger for anything different on the horizon, of emptiness that felt like it could swallow me, the idea that the great mountains of Antarctica were finally there before me seemed almost unreal. Like my one-night trial of the spirit in reliving Everest—which reminded me right then of Ebenezer Scrooge’s one-night examination of his life in A Christmas Carol—the mountains felt like a Christmas miracle come early.

  I pulled off my mask to rub my eyes. I blinked and squinted and closed and reopened my eyes again, but the peaks were definitely there, looking deep and mysterious. They shimmered in the distance, hinting of a finish line that was somewhere beyond them, and they made me think of home, and of Oregon.

  Looking east from Portland toward the majesty of Mount Hood always comforted me somehow, as if the mountain were a shelter or sanctuary, a kind of guardian, and I felt a wave of that now. Hood had felt like family to me because of my frequent trips there when I was a child. The Transantarctic Mountains were my pathway home. Seeing them meant that the Leverett Glacier, the great ice river through the mountains that my route would take me on, was straight ahead. For the early polar explorers, the Transantarctic Mountains had been a great and daunting barrier cutting off the sea ice of the Ross Ice Shelf from the interior—it wasn’t until 1902 that a route was found all the way through them—but for me now, it felt like the exact opposite, as though the mountains were a great beacon of hope, drawing me on with every step as they grew clearer and sharper on the horizon.

  But that thought also scared me. Just as the descents from places like Mount Everest are the times of greatest danger—80 percent of accidents on the mountain happen on the way down—the moments near the end of anything are where emotion and overconfidence can lead to error. I found out later that three people died coming down from Everest on the day I made it to the summit. It’s not over until it’s over. And one of the great lines from The Alchemist, the book I’d treasured and given to Jenna that day in Sydney, came back to me.

  “Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way,” Coelho writes. “That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one ‘dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.’ ”

  My palm trees had appeared on my horizon in those shimmering, luminous mountains. And I knew I’d made the relaxation mistake before, when the end almost seemed in sight and the peril became most profound.

  In Greenland.

  I’d been on the Greenland ice cap for nearly four weeks when it happened. I was training for Antarctica, and had almost completed the east-to-west crossing—nearly four hundred miles in total. I’d arrived at my final campsite. I was feeling confident and strong, young and invincible, and I let my guard down. I saw the finish line in my head and thought I was across.

  I’d religiously poked and prodded every square foot of ice around my tent space through the previous nights, searching for partially covered crevasses, which were numerous and deep. But that night I didn’t, or didn’t do it thoroughly enough. I’d pulled out my tent and laid it down. And then just a few steps from the tent door, I fell.

  Within an instant, I felt nothing below my legs but air. I’d caught myself with my outstretched arms as I went down, which kept me from falling farther, but everything beneath my armpits was dangling in the crevasse. My legs had nothing to get purchase on. They kicked into empty nothingness as I desperately held on, fearing that my mittens might start to slide toward the chasm. Finally, I managed to swing to one side and climb up, and only then, in looking back down, did I truly grasp the danger my overconfidence had exposed me to. The crevasse was blue-walled deeper than I could see. It went down into the ice’s inky darkness and would have spelled almost certain death if I hadn’t caught myself.

  I now stood on an even larger expanse of ice, staring at the Transantarctic Mountains, determined not to forget the lesson learned. The ends of things, in descending from great mountains or in the distraction or elation that comes from feeling almost there, are where hope and peril can combine in the cruele
st ways, and I knew I’d have to be vigilant.

  “It’s not over, Colin,” I said aloud. Then I said it again, whispering it out toward the mountain ridgeline as the skies grew clearer and bluer. “It’s not over yet.”

  * * *

  WHEN I CALLED JENNA the following night, Christmas Eve, day fifty-two, I had a million things I wanted to share about my journey-within-a-journey through the previous few days—the crashing low, the new sense of resolve, the parting of the clouds to reveal the great mountains at a moment when my soul desperately needed a reminder of Oregon. But she cut me off before I could start.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “How bad is it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, blinking up at my tent roof, which was about as quiet as on any night I’d experienced so far. My solar panel lay almost completely still in its little pocket.

  “The storm! I thought you just got out of it, and now it’s back?”

  “There’s no storm. It’s about as clear as I’ve ever seen. What makes you think…” I glanced around the tent again, feeling suddenly uncertain. But all was calm, all was bright. No roaring flap of the tent, no pelting slap of ice crystals. Strong 10 p.m. sun.

  “Lou’s live map is down because you guys are experiencing such severe weather conditions,” she said. “That’s what his website says.”

  “Hmm…” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know—would the weather be any different where he is?”

  “No, I don’t see how…. It’s clear for a long way in every direction,” I said. “The mountains are just amazing…. But it’s Lou… so I don’t know. Do you think he has something up his sleeve?”

  “Well, I don’t think he can catch you, Colin—he was more than twenty-one miles behind you when his tracker last reported.”