Essay: Success is Not the Summit

There’s a moment in every big climb when you realize you can’t go back. The terrain is too steep. The weather’s too bad. The way down is more dangerous than the way up. The only option—the only hope—is to keep climbing.

Peter Metcalf had that moment on Mount Hunter in 1980. Thirteen days on a new route with no tent, half-rations, and snow caves for shelter. One partner was badly frostbitten. The weather was unrelenting. There was no retreat, only resolve.

Two short years later, he would find himself in another storm—this time at the helm of Chouinard Equipment as it slid toward bankruptcy. Lawsuits mounting. The insurance industry was turning its back on outdoor companies. Everyone else walked away. Peter didn’t.

Instead, he rallied his team. Climbers, not investors. Partners, not employees. He fought through and found a path forward. Not just to save a company, but to reimagine it—building Black Diamond from the wreckage of what came before.

That’s good business. That’s leadership. And it’s no accident that it came from a climber.

Climbing teaches us to face consequences. To stay calm in storms. To trust our partners, and to be trustworthy in return. It teaches us that style matters. That the summit is not the meaning. The meaning is created in how you get there. And who you become along the way.

As I spoke with Peter, a pattern emerged. The skills that got him through Hunter are the same ones that built Black Diamond. Not a checklist. Not a business plan. But something harder to quantify and more essential: clarity, earned through risk. Judgment, forged in moments of grave consequence. Vision, born in the dead ends and refined in the redoubling of effort.

This episode reminded me that all of us—athletes, leaders, parents, artists— are each in some version of this climb. We are solving for meaning. For impact. For legacy. And that the hardest part isn’t the planning. It’s when you look down and realize the only way forward is to keep moving up, away from where you have been. That’s when you find out what you’re made of.

Peter’s story isn’t just the story of Black Diamond Equipment. It is the story of the apprenticeship of one of our community’s greatest leaders. Of becoming. Of choosing not the easy line, but the right one.

And that’s what Voice of the Mountains is about. Not summits. Not success in the material or in any measurable sense. But the process of becoming someone who earns the right to lead, whether that’s up a pitch or through a crisis. Someone who knows how to find the way to go up when you can’t go down.

Because that’s where meaning lives.

In the effort. In the unknown. In the act of the climb, because only there can you become a climber.