What the Mountains Teach

00:00:03:02 – 00:00:29:16

Steve

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. Someone who has spent a lifetime exploring not only what lies beyond the horizon, but also what lies in the depths within.

00:00:29:18 – 00:01:07:01

Steve

He has mastered many roles mountaineer, environmentalist, adventurer, storyteller, but above all, a leader for Rick Ridgeway. Each of these pursuits is bound by a single thread, a relentless commitment to purpose. 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 from the rainforests of Borneo to a journey that began at the summit of Kilimanjaro and ended only at the Indian Ocean to standing atop K2.

00:01:07:03 – 00:01:40:06

Steve

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, 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 way is steep.

00:01:40:08 – 00:02:19:22

Steve

I’ve dug 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. 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.

00:02:19:24 – 00:02:40:10

Steve

Welcome to Voice of the 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.

00:02:40:12 – 00:03:07:04

Steve

But his mountaineering is rivaled only by his exploratory exploits, which have taken him 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 guests retelling has been just as impactful as his adventures. As a filmmaker and author, he has brought the world of adventure to life for television and film audiences.

00:03:07:06 – 00:03:45:04

Steve

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. He is also a successful entrepreneur who, besides being probably one of the first contracted climbers in North America with healthy equipment, built a company called Adventure Photo and Film, which became the world’s largest stock photo and film agency specializing in nature and adventure imagery.

00:03:45:06 – 00:04:10:03

Steve

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.

00:04:10:09 – 00:04:35:02

Steve

And I have to say, I think this is a huge deal. Rick convinced Wal-Mart to co-found with Patagonia the Sustainable Apparel Coalition in 2010, 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.

00:04:35:04 – 00:04:46:24

Steve

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. Welcome, Rick Ridgeway.

00:04:47:01 – 00:04:49:19

Rick

Thank you, Steve. Great to be here with you, buddy.

00:04:49:21 – 00:05:08:19

Steve

It’s really good to see you. I know we were just chatting about this, but I really miss seeing you at Patagonia in Ventura and that whole crew that was around that company. You know, during that time, we were both there in the in the nineties and late nineties. 2020 tens.

00:05:08:21 – 00:05:12:12

Rick

Yeah, what a great family it was and is still and I miss it too.

00:05:12:12 – 00:05:42:20

Steve

I really miss that. I want to remind you of a conversation that we had that took place in the cafeteria at Patagonia and I was sitting there eating lunch by myself and you pull up a chair and sat down across from me and I was pretty intimidated talking to you. You had, you know, had a big influence on my life, especially through your book, K2, The Last Step.

00:05:42:22 – 00:06:23:23

Steve

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 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, and I’d read your stories and 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

00:06:23:23 – 00:06:43:03

Steve

same things that I struggled 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.

00:06:43:05 – 00:06:45:04

Rick

And what did we talk about at lunch?

00:06:45:06 – 00:07:15:05

Steve

Well, it was you asking me if I had 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, Phenomenon 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 writing the then fledgling Patagonia books.

00:07:15:07 – 00:07:23:12

Steve

And I think that Beyond the Mountain was the second book that Patagonia books published after the Bend the Baja book grade.

00:07:23:14 – 00:07:25:06

Rick

So it had a good ending.

00:07:25:08 – 00:07:55:16

Steve

I had a good it had an amazing ending. Like you basically, you know, in just a matter of a few hour, I basically I had what became a book contract and a publishing deal. And then I was off to the races. You also told me something that day. I said, you got to get the contract before you write the book, because if you don’t get it, you’ll never finish it.

00:07:55:18 – 00:08:13:04

Steve

And I did that, and I’ve done that all my books since. And that has proven out to be very true because, as you know, books are these incredible labors of love, but they also get very difficult at the end to get those last five or 10% done.

00:08:13:06 – 00:08:40:09

Rick

Yeah, that’s right. Well, that makes me recall one of my mentors, Doug Tompkins, the founder of the North Face, and later as free, the clothing 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.

00:08:40:11 – 00:08:51:18

Rick

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 learning from my own mentor when I suggested that to you.

00:08:51:18 – 00:09:20:21

Steve

I mean, that’s what we all do, right? I mean, we’re all just vessels through moments of inspiration that people share. Know, 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.

00:09:20:23 – 00:09:41:06

Steve

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.

00:09:41:07 – 00:09:55:19

Steve

That was a value that wasn’t a goal, as they would say. It was like, No, I want to find out if this is possible or not. Do you relate to that in an, you know, kind of your career?

00:09:55:21 – 00:10:18:05

Rick

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 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.

00:10:18:07 – 00:11:02:18

Rick

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 maybe will even live after me and influence those who come after me to think about their own lives and perhaps a little bit of a different way.

00:11:02:20 – 00:11:29:01

Rick

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.

00:11:29:03 – 00:11:46:22

Rick

And when any of us can find that purpose. And it’s a lifelong job, I think that can lead to the some of the deepest senses of fulfillment and joy and happiness any of us can hope to own.

00:11:46:24 – 00:12:21:11

Steve

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. When you have built your life around journeys, I’m going to put them in those terms. Some would call them adventures. Some of them are climb, some of them are boating trips, some of them are, you know, all kinds of of things. And you’ve been a very multi-disciplinary adventure journey taker of the journey. 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?

00:12:21:12 – 00:12:36:01

Steve

If you look back at all the different types of journeys that you have made and you think about the good journeys that evoked questions that you had not thought to ask, what were some of the commonalities?

00:12:36:03 – 00:13:10:13

Rick

Well, that observation you just quoted that came from a trip I made in the mid 1990 with a adventurer, 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 top of parks, the bushland above the coastline in Kenya to do a little walking safari to warm up after our climb.

00:13:10:15 – 00:13:38:07

Rick

And it was under the shadow of Kilimanjaro and looking up at the mountain, he said. I’ve always had this dream of how cool would it be to climb up Kilimanjaro and traverse the peak one side, the other from the summit. That’s where the trip would really start. The adventure would begin because from there we would follow the water courses off the mountain all the way into the Indian Ocean across these wild bush lands of the twin Tsavo national parks.

00:13:38:07 – 00:14:11:17

Rick

And I said, Let’s do it. So I arranged to write a book and make a television show about the trip to finance that. 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 park wardens to come with us, and that’s what we did. So I started 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.

00:14:11:17 – 00:15:02:20

Rick

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. 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 we were charged by a hippo or a crocodile, tried to get us, then one of the rangers I was with may have succeeded in shooting it, but then they also said,

00:15:02:22 – 00:15:45:23

Rick

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 shoot over its head. And if it’s a rhino, we’re not even going to do that. It’s up to you. You got to be on your own and you 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.

00:15:45:23 – 00:16:19:04

Rick

And I had never had that experience and that began an 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.

00:16:19:06 – 00:16:53:08

Rick

And then another thing happened on that trip, because once we got out of the Southall Parks, we entered an area where there were still native peoples living in villages along the river, as it were, getting wider and wider as we approached the Indian Ocean and two of the guys on our trip, Father had been the founding warden of those national parks back in the 1940s, and he had come to known these people who were elephant poachers at the time that he established the park, and they were actually hunting elephants with bows and arrows.

00:16:53:10 – 00:17:17:09

Rick

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 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.

00:17:17:11 – 00:17:41:06

Rick

And we went and visited these old men who used to be 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.

00:17:41:08 – 00:18:12:06

Rick

They were arrested and put in jail. Their culture fell apart and they disappeared. And what happened? Well, the elephant population started to explode. The human beings, we are human beings. We primitive hunters and gatherers had actually become an animal among other animals who was part of an ecosystem balance. And then a drought hit. And the overpopulation of elephants were crashed and there were dead elephants everywhere.

00:18:12:11 – 00:18:33:09

Rick

And people 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 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 a taste for ivory.

00:18:33:11 – 00:19:04:12

Rick

And then the whole population crashed. So here I was at this trip learning 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 in there has ever been in the history of our species on earth.

00:19:04:16 – 00:19:31:21

Rick

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 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. We’ve done that through our entire history on this planet, and that includes indigenous peoples.

00:19:32:02 – 00:20:15:20

Rick

I started to realize that that a lot of the stories Indigenous people tell them about, tell about themselves now aren’t necessarily held up under the lens of history. And what does that mean? 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, that we also have the capacity to moderate those instincts and learn how to regain the balance in our planet.

00:20:16:00 – 00:20:38:13

Rick

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.

00:20:38:17 – 00:21:22:18

Rick

And that trip was the most important one in my life 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

00:21:22:18 – 00:21:32:08

Rick

myself, more than just about being a mountaineer, going to the top of a mountain where I’m 10,000 people a year and go up there anyway, which doesn’t mean squat, does it?

00:21:32:10 – 00:21:53:09

Steve

Certainly doesn’t. And that’s so much what we struggle with is as mountaineers and I think as humans is what is the point like, what is the, you know, the sort of 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.

00:21:53:09 – 00:22:31:05

Steve

This one journey that you made is not in isolation like all of the other journeys were also part of the brick 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’re 18 or whenever you start it right, the other piece of this is something that you said, and I don’t remember his last name, but in, you know, the and this is a thread I want to pull on for our larger conversation is the relationships with the people that we go on and the relationships with ourselves.

00:22:31:07 – 00:22:58:09

Steve

He 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 going from autobiography to biography. As a storyteller. You spent much of your life as autobiography, graphical storyteller in books and in TV and movies, and then you made this big switch.

00:22:58:11 – 00:23:27:05

Steve

All these things are interesting. So let’s go back. I actually want 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 sort of hold this sacred place in our hearts. And one of your very first and very close partnerships was with a friend, Chris Chandler, and you and Chris climbed a number of peaks and first ascents, then the Peruvian Andes.

00:23:27:05 – 00:23:33:23

Steve

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.

00:23:34:02 – 00:24:05:14

Rick

Yeah, let’s see where 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 sixties saw the national Geographic article on the first American ascent of Mount Everest. And there was a picture of Jim Whitaker standing on the summit holding his ice sacks with the wind blowing the flags of the United States in the National Geographic Society.

00:24:05:14 – 00:24:27:19

Rick

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 ten years later, a little more than that, 12 years perhaps in the late seventies, there I would be on that expedition that made the first American ascent of K2. And Jim Whitaker was the leader of the expedition.

00:24:27:21 – 00:24:51:00

Rick

But then those intervening ten 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 went out to a local store and bought an ice ax and some crampons and some boots.

00:24:51:00 – 00:25:10:08

Rick

And I bought a book called Freedom. The Hills was the only thing that was close to a tutorial that I could find. 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 book and my mother’s radar started buzzing for a high school graduation.

00:25:10:08 – 00:25:52:11

Rick

She sent me to the first Outward Bound school. And in Washington, I mean in Oregon, in your old stomping grounds. And that’s where I started to learn the fundamentals of climbing. And that led to an idea to get myself down to Peru and really mix it up with true high altitude mountains. And 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 Monterrey, where there was a dormitory where you could stay for $0.50 a night.

00:25:52:14 – 00:26:21:18

Rick

And I showed up and here was this wild man climber named Ron Fea. And he took me under his wing and he became my my mentor that first year in Peru, knowing nothing, I climbed six peaks, including a new route on a peak called Swaroop 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.

00:26:21:24 – 00:26:49:12

Rick

And I was, you know, scared to death. And he got me up that thing. And I even let 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 Hammer. 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 the Kink.

00:26:49:14 – 00:27:28:15

Rick

And then later that summer in a rafting trip, we got mixed up in some rapids that I had fortunately walked around and Enron didn’t. And he died. He got killed in a raft accident. 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.

00:27:28:15 – 00:27:52:20

Rick

But very quickly I caught up with him and we were equals. 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 twenties and at that time I thought I was going to be an academic. You know, I kind of loved school, I loved traveling, I loved native peoples in decent places.

00:27:52:20 – 00:28:21:18

Rick

I loved anthropology and I’d put it all together. And I had managed to get into a Ph.D. program in cultural geography in Berkeley, 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 to the Himalayas.

00:28:21:18 – 00:29:08:13

Rick

Like, that was the dream to somehow, some way someday get to the range of the highest mountains on the planet. And I said, You’re kidding. What’s the peak? And he paused, which I later learned was probably for a fact before he said Everest. And I said, Everest. Well, 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 are businessmen, lawyers, one who worked in the State Department and through his connections in the embassy of Kathmandu, who got a permit to climb Everest after the French had dropped out.

00:29:08:13 – 00:29:36:23

Rick

And in those years, in the seventies, China was closed and Nepal only allowed one expedition per season, per year on Everest, two per year. And the waiting line was 12 years to get a permit. And this guy had suddenly got a permit for the 19 the fall of 1976. And they chatted up with Chris and they all hit it off and they had invited him to come on the expedition.

00:29:36:23 – 00:29:46:00

Rick

And he said, okay, but I’ve got to bring my climbing partner. And they said, No problem. When he’s some climbers, what was I going to do?

00:29:46:02 – 00:29:52:11

Steve

Is that how Chris was? Was he just one of those guys that would, you know, meet someone in the coffee shop? The next thing you know, they’re.

00:29:52:13 – 00:30:00:21

Rick

Yeah, 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 would be cool.

00:30:00:23 – 00:30:02:02

Steve

And that was zero.

00:30:02:04 – 00:30:21:18

Rick

Except I was starting school in two weeks on a program I worked so hard to get into. I probably don’t even 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?

00:30:21:22 – 00:30:51:09

Rick

Yeah. The other road. Yeah, but no. I went to Everest and left academia behind, and that was back when you kind of put the route in. You’re not even kind of. We put the route in ourselves. We had Sherpas help us carry our loads 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 route up yourself and that meant through the icefall.

00:30:51:11 – 00:31:17:02

Rick

And that’s where Chris and I, 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 got to what 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 road say face it did most of the leading on that with Chris.

00:31:17:04 – 00:31:40:01

Rick

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 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 to strong teams too.

00:31:40:01 – 00:32:13:10

Rick

And then I was partnered with another with Kari, wrote She 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 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.

00:32:13:10 – 00:32:34:07

Rick

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. 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 it. At the Vision in our climbing partnership that was more mine than his.

00:32:34:09 – 00:33:19:14

Rick

And I realized over many years that the vision that I felt between us because he had made the summit of Everest and 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, you know, had the tough decision of transferring out where to start it because I had all these cool stories from the early years of my life in my twenties, some of them that I’ve just told you now, it eventually had to

00:33:19:16 – 00:33:47:00

Rick

leave those on that editing floor, as it 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 that’s where I realized that’s where my life as a mountaineer really started with that wrestling match. And I wanted to start the book there because the book needed to be more about than just getting to the top of the mountains.

00:33:47:02 – 00:33:50:02

Rick

It had to be the why, not just the how.

00:33:50:04 – 00:34:06:01

Steve

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?

00:34:06:03 – 00:34:09:04

Rick

It was coming off the mountain? Yeah, really it was.

00:34:09:06 – 00:34:16:21

Steve

I remember a much wiser man than I think motivated me a decade.

00:34:16:23 – 00:34:49:23

Rick

I remember just outside of Namche Bazaar, some let’s see, we had a film crew there showing us for television special, and I can remember so clearly them setting up this interview with Chris. And I was standing off to the side and I was feeling sorry for myself, standing there, you know, in the crowd, watching Chris getting interview. And I remember thinking, Why are you feeling sorry for yourself?

00:34:49:23 – 00:35:14:15

Rick

What what is this about? Are you really thinking down to that depth that you’re standing here feeling sorry for yourself, watching one of your closest friends in the world, you know, in his moment that he earned so hard that he did? And I started, yeah, chastising myself. And then I couldn’t help myself. So it was it was a wrestling match that started right away.

00:35:14:15 – 00:35:36:12

Rick

And it’s an it lasted for a while. So then nevertheless, you know, the television show came out and it was a CBS special prime time 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.

00:35:36:14 – 00:35:57:01

Rick

And so for a year and a half later, Chris gets invited on by Jim Whitaker on another American attempt on K2 interest says the same thing. Well, yeah, I want to come back. I want to bring my climbing partner with me so I get invited, go to K2. That’s how that happened.

00:35:57:03 – 00:36:28:14

Steve

And I’m going to save it. It’s different. The expeditions for those of our listeners that are younger at that time were different. 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 in the seventies. I mean, that really didn’t start until till the early eighties with guys like, you know, the Polish climber is and, you know, eventually, you know, Messner and some of these other other Himalayan climbers.

00:36:28:14 – 00:36:56:11

Steve

But at that time, it was, you know, sort of a national of 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 K2 had not been climbed by Americans, though famously, Fritz Wiesner had climbed very, very high on it. Gosh, I want to say it wasn’t like 800 feet below the summit.

00:36:56:11 – 00:37:22:00

Steve

And right 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, 8000 meter peak wasn’t climbed until 1950.

00:37:22:02 – 00:37:50:04

Steve

And this was 1939 and it was so close and there was so much, you know, that story of that expedition. And, of course, the 1952 K2 Expedition with Pete Chewning. And there was a lot a lot of baggage, I would say, and I mean in the good sense and and and then the bad sense or the difficult sense of what that what climbing K2 meant for American mountaineers in the seventies and late seventies.

00:37:50:04 – 00:37:57:24

Steve

It was feeling overdue. And I’m sure there was a ton of pressure on you guys to to pull that off. But what a what a team.

00:37:58:01 – 00:38:06:21

Rick

You were the six American attempt on K2 six and back then the mountain had only been climbed twice by anybody. Okay. Italian times.

00:38:06:21 – 00:38:08:11

Steve

First Japanese.

00:38:08:13 – 00:38:22:06

Rick

Or and then the Japanese had made the seven the second ascent the year before us. And they they had a team with 80 climbers. Well, they had 2000 porters to get the base.

00:38:22:06 – 00:38:25:08

Steve

That’s right. That’s right. I remember that now. Yeah.

00:38:25:10 – 00:38:45:19

Rick

And the lead the Japanese leader, you know, fashioned himself some sort of a Duke Duke of Abruzzi character. And the story was he even had he had a tent bigger than anybody else’s. And it had a carpet in it that some poor porters had hold up to the base of K2.

00:38:45:21 – 00:39:11:06

Rick

And our team was huge. 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 had back then we had to walk 120 miles, 110 miles each way just to get to base camp from road, head to the foot of the mountain.

00:39:11:08 – 00:39:33:08

Rick

And we had these like 380 porters to carry all of our food and supplies. And we were at that point intending to try to use oxygen to our oxygen bottles and their way to tent. But then we realized that since at least half the route was unoccupied, we needed more porters to carry the food for the porters carrying our stuff.

00:39:33:10 – 00:40:05:09

Rick

So we hired 80 more guys, was to carry food for the porters, not us for food. Yeah. And then we realized we needed 50 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 and that’s what expeditions were like back then. You know, they were these national affairs, as you have said, in the style of the military campaign, requiring the same sort of logistical organization.

00:40:05:11 – 00:40:09:11

Rick

You would have it as if you were an army, because in a sense, you were a small army.

00:40:09:11 – 00:40:34:20

Steve

But even in 1999, which was I went to Ashram four with a sort of 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, 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.

00:40:34:22 – 00:40:55:01

Steve

And that was when we left from a scholar, which, you know, was probably five days of walking for you in 1978 just to get out slowly. The road was obviously had been pushed much closer to the mountains that so it’s still the karakorum, I think much more than like especially like the the Khumbu and stuff. It still has this very expeditionary feel.

00:40:55:01 – 00:41:13:18

Steve

It’s still very remote. It’s still very hard to because it’s on you’re on a glacier. I brought up Chris because I wanted to actually talk about that relationship and how that changed during that expedition. And over the course of that climb and the years years after.

00:41:13:20 – 00:41:59:20

Rick

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 he had ignored his child support responsibilities. And he wasn’t trouble with the courts. 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 expedition, he took up with the wife of another one of the climbers who were both on the team.

00:41:59:22 – 00:42:33:04

Rick

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 claim for these amorous affair with this other climber. And I confronted him with that. And then I felt obligated to do what I could to try to repair the schism that was shaping.

00:42:33:04 – 00:42:58:08

Rick

So as Chris, his best friend on the climb, I went to the husband. The cook called. It has been 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.

00:42:58:08 – 00:43:28:24

Rick

But but they couldn’t be just 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 that’s what happened. And it split Chris and I apart and I very purposefully sought out another climber on the team, John Ross Kelly and we partnered with him and we hit it off and we made a really strong pair.

00:43:29:01 – 00:44:06:04

Rick

And then Chris went and paired with his new Leah’s and her husband, and I was trying to figure out without wanting to get my head into too much what that was about. But then that was none of my business realized that it was so complex and yet somehow we all managed to come together enough to keep the two camps and the team that had been divided around this issue, working together enough that we were able to pull this thing off.

00:44:06:06 – 00:44:34:04

Rick

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 wait it out at our advanced base camp. Instead of eating the food and burning the fuel. We’d all worked so hard without Sherpas to stockpile in those upper camps.

00:44:34:06 – 00:45:04:14

Rick

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, we were nearly completely out of supplies at the upper camp and the tempers had grown desperately thin and cut.

00:45:04:16 – 00:45:34:23

Rick

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 after. By the time we got back down to Advanced Base Camp, we’d been above 18 feet for for 68 days in a row. And then those of us on the summit team were above 8000 meters for four, five days and nights without oxygen.

00:45:35:00 – 00:46:09:06

Rick

And that’s hard, you know, And that and coming off the mountain. Oh, 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.

00:46:09:12 – 00:46:37:09

Rick

And my half my beard burned off and my sleeping burned. And we had to cram in together into a tiny little thing called an omnipotent with four people at 8000 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, as you know, at the at the very end, decided to try it without oxygen.

00:46:37:10 – 00:47:07:15

Rick

We pulled that off. But then I went to write that book the last step 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.

00:47:07:17 – 00:47:30:07

Rick

And I also knew it was going to be really hard to tell that story because I’d have to tell a very uncomfortable story, very uncomfortable for Chris, who was my close friend and my climbing partner for so many years. But I knew I had to do it. And I had this hope that he could recognize that I had to do that.

00:47:30:09 – 00:48:19:00

Rick

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, and nor did his girlfriend on K2, Sheri Beck, who went on to live a life with and tell on Conscience Younger a few years later on an attempted winter ascent at a very high altitude, Chris got terrible demand.

00:48:19:02 – 00:49:07:19

Rick

Sheree 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. So next, 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 us who’s a climber, knows the closeness between men and women sitting on the village, 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 bind you together as climbing partners, you know, ruptured forever.

00:49:07:21 – 00:49:08:10

Rick

Yeah.

00:49:08:12 – 00:49:14:01

Steve

I mean, I hear that that wounded you. How did you heal from that?

00:49:14:03 – 00:49:14:20

Rick

Oh.

00:49:14:22 – 00:49:17:07

Steve

Or is it possible to heal from that with Chris gone?

00:49:17:11 – 00:49:45:22

Rick

Yeah. Heals not the right word. I think that what all of us need to do against tragedy and loss are death. And it was death in Chris’s case, not on a trip. I was with him, but 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.

00:49:45:24 – 00:50:40:00

Rick

Reconciliation isn’t the right word for how to accommodate something like that. 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 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.

00:50:40:02 – 00:51:44:22

Rick

So that takes a lifetime served us. That’s a job that never quite gets finished and you keep absorbing the lessons from it and you keep living. You keep integrating it into you through embrace. Instead closure. The time that you and I and our friends get to spend in wild nature, 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 planet, that in those wild corners where we’re really close to nature and often in potentially dangerous situations, we get

00:51:44:22 – 00:52:30:17

Rick

into our bones. This awareness that death is the prerequisite of life because that’s how life works. 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.

00:52:30:17 – 00:53:01:16

Rick

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 in my life to do a better job living through the pandemic, for example. That is a source of deep, deep resilience. And of course, it’s what our forebears learned millennia ago.

00:53:01:18 – 00:53:34:09

Rick

It’s what the Stoics learned to do. And the Catholics, with their idea of Memento 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 of that connection between life and death.

00:53:34:09 – 00:53:40:04

Rick

And you also start to understand, I think, that the clock is ticking the moment we’re born.

00:53:40:06 – 00:54:10:06

Steve

One of the deaths that you experienced, that you wrote very poignantly about that. I want to I want to bring and bring 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, Right. And about your later journey with his daughter. Is how did you meet Jonathan and who was Jonathan for you?

00:54:10:08 – 00:54:57:18

Rick

Jonathan was a photographer who lived in Aspen, Colorado, who was a little younger than me by three years. And I met initially through common friends, not climbing, but, you know, through photography and filmmaking initially. And he, at a very early age had become a national Geographic photographer. He was very talented. And he also, 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.

00:54:57:20 – 00:55:37:17

Rick

But Jonathan was on that trip, and he and I hit it off and we started to spending every chance we could get together during the climb in the tent in our moments of rest where we could hang out and talk. And he was already a season and a seasoned traveler in the Himalayas where he had become a student of Buddhism, and he had spent time in a monastery in India.

00:55:37:21 – 00:56:18:21

Rick

Quite a bit of time, including time and in deep meditation with guides, gurus who had allowed him to see himself in a perspective that just captured my imagination. I 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.

00:56:18:23 – 00:56:48:18

Rick

And he would say, real quick, look at how beautiful that mountain is there. Or look at that, that pheasant scratch. 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.

00:56:48:20 – 00:57:15:24

Rick

Like, he never said, Get over your ego, dude. Pay attention to the beauty. He didn’t do it that way. It was this very subtle hand-holding. Yeah. 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 going to be the best friends for the rest of our lives.

00:57:16:01 – 00:57:47:23

Rick

And we had that feeling about each other. So I was back in those years 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.

00:57:47:23 – 00:58:18:05

Rick

And so we put together a proposal to do a story on what in the late seventies was the recently created Mount Everest National Park Sagarmatha National Park. And the Geographic had approved the proposal and Jonathan had gone out to Nepal to do a preliminary photographs. And then we were planning a trip together to do the main part of our assignment.

00:58:18:09 – 00:58:50:02

Rick

When I got this invitation through Yvonne Chouinard and Kim Schmitt and a couple other guys to join an expedition to China to try to attempt men to conquer 25,000 foot 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 in a and surrounded in a Tibetan by Tibetan culture.

00:58:50:04 – 00:59:16:22

Rick

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 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.

00:59:16:24 – 00:59:36:19

Rick

And in fact I had a job on the film crew as a film producer, and he was one of the cameramen and I was one of the climbers on the team. And so then we got we had the geographic 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.

00:59:36:19 – 00:59:57:11

Rick

Hitchhiking busses. We were going to get ourselves from conquered 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, you know, no man’s land. You couldn’t get there. And they had figured out how to get permission for us to do it.

00:59:57:11 – 01:00:30:17

Rick

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.

01:00:30:19 – 01:00:53:24

Rick

And I went out to Aspen to get ready for the climb and we all went to Jackson together to plan out there with the guys who were with the exam guide service. And I got to meet Jonathan’s new wife and 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.

01:00:53:24 – 01:01:19:05

Rick

And I knew that a little girl and his we were all going to be an extended family. I just knew that until on menu conquer coming down from our camp to position at about 20,000 feet, roped with Yvonne and Kim and Jonathan, who was filming the three of us putting in the hike, what then was the high camp position?

01:01:19:05 – 01:01:48:02

Rick

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 avalanche thing. Snow and and it had to be close to 60 seconds, maybe even more. And then as time slowed, I just knew I was dead and that was it.

01:01:48:04 – 01:02:14:17

Rick

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 avalanche and 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.

01:02:14:19 – 01:02:45:00

Rick

And then I saw the tents and our camp one position rocket by and I remembered that getting up to camp two, we had to work our way through this little gully system going up a cliff and we went over the cliff and 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.

01:02:45:00 – 01:03:19:04

Rick

And I went into the salt bug airplane crash mode position trying to create the bubble with my arm. As if it stopped and I was buried. I’d have an air pocket to give me whatever hope there might be when the avalanche started to slow and send and then stopped on this slope and we gone over the cliff and hit another alluvial fan and it had stopped and I was somehow still alive.

01:03:19:06 – 01:03:56:07

Rick

And I looked around and the other guy seemed to be alive, too. 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. Had a rip, 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 he didn’t know where he was.

01:03:56:07 – 01:04:22:11

Rick

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 the most grievously injured.

01:04:22:14 – 01:04:51:07

Rick

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 buried him on a promontory of rock right next to where he had died.

01:04:51:09 – 01:05:51:07

Rick

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 then we went home 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 a eventually has to arrive out 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 what that meant to you, and how from all those times in the mountains you’ve become a person

01:05:51:07 – 01:06:18:04

Rick

different than you would have been had you never gone there. And what it meant to not only lose my friend who was going to be my companion in life for as far forward as I could see, but also come so close to losing my own life, where for those 60 seconds I didn’t think there was any hope of getting out of it alive.

01:06:18:06 – 01:06:48:18

Rick

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 that, of course, made it all a lot harder. But then I also had the vocation part of it to work out 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.

01:06:48:21 – 01:07:22:04

Rick

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 she helped me a lot, you know, by pointing out that this is who I was and that’s who she married.

01:07:22:06 – 01:08:02:03

Rick

He 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 that may be at the end of the day, what becomes even of most value to those of us who live this life of adventure and exploration and climbing a mountain, sharing is not even 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

01:08:02:03 – 01:08:38:23

Rick

the mountains. And she helped guide me with that. And she said, you know, 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 if ever an opportunity came along where it felt like the rewards could outweigh the risks and were rewards in all kinds of shapes and formed, that included this idea of finding new people to take you in different directions.

01:08:39:00 – 01:09:16:07

Rick

The idea of, Yes, this is how I make my living, the idea, yes, this is who I am because this is the path I’ve been on for this whole first half of my life against the risks. Well, let’s keep an open mind to 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 partner with some guy that he just met who owned the Snowbird ski resort named Dick Bass.

01:09:16:09 – 01:09:40:04

Rick

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. And Frank’s case, all he’d ever done is hike up Kilimanjaro Deck and Lisa Scale McKinley or Denali, excuse me. And they needed guides.

01:09:40:06 – 01:09:41:14

Steve

Yeah.

01:09:41:16 – 01:10:06:22

Rick

And I went to Jennifer and lay out the whole thing. And she said, you know, Rick, these two guys sound kind of interesting and maybe you think they’re just having a midlife her, but you’re going to 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.

01:10:06:24 – 01:10:34:15

Rick

And so I ended up helping those guys on two of their climbs, guiding them up, Con Coughlin, Vinson. But then I also got a job with the film crew recording their attempt on Everest in 1983 and then help follow it through until Dirk finally did climb Everest two years later in 1985, becoming the first guy ever to climb the Seven Summits.

01:10:34:17 – 01:11:15:00

Rick

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 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.

01:11:15:03 – 01:11:27:13

Rick

Things that I 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, right.

01:11:27:15 – 01:11:51:09

Steve

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, you know, in the negative sense. That’s that’s such a gift.

01:11:51:11 – 01:12:15:18

Rick

So many things came out of that claim that I had not ever expected. And of one of the ones I had to wrestle with for years was that the book that we wrote afterwards 7/7 and how it kind of became a hit? Me not even kind of. I really haven’t added it up, but that all the various editions of that book, it sold like 250,000, almost hundred thousand copies.

01:12:15:18 – 01:12:17:01

Rick

That’s pretty good for a book.

01:12:17:01 – 01:12:19:02

Steve

That’s amazing.

01:12:19:04 – 01:12:52:14

Rick

When 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 creating that whole industry and this embarrassing because it’s the opposite of why I went to the mountains, why the opposite of what I’ve tried to encourage others to think about the reasons for own attraction to mountaineering and why, you know what?

01:12:52:14 – 01:13:04:20

Rick

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.

01:13:04:20 – 01:13:31:20

Steve

Well, I think you should give yourself a little slack. There, Rick, because you mentioned earlier about a human in there, sort of our sort of most base impulses and to take anything away from people that want to climb the seven summit. 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.

01:13:32:01 – 01:13:51:16

Steve

That’s a fundamental part of human nature, I would argue. And, you know, if it hadn’t, that would have happened. Regardless. I don’t want to step on your ego, but I think that, you know, while you are 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.

01:13:51:18 – 01:13:56:02

Steve

So there’s no cause. And I would argue that there’s no cause and effect there.

01:13:56:04 – 01:14:22:00

Rick

But Reinhold, after he did the 14th, he might have realized that, oh, he could do the seven, you know, Steve, an anecdote that you enjoy and your listeners might 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 remember it so clearly.

01:14:22:00 – 01:14:51:16

Rick

I had an office set up in the corner of the kids bedroom and I was sitting at this window looking out over the backyard, and Frank was and he called me just about every day and he would never say Hi Records, Frank He would. I would the phone, you know, no landline way before there was any indication who was calling you, you’d hear the phone ring, you’d pick it up.

01:14:51:18 – 01:15:22:00

Rick

You always expected somebody say, hi, is this Rick? Yes. You know, is this so, you know, that was the protocol for phone calls. Well, I pick up the phone, he just start launching it. He’d never say, Rick, this is Frank. He just start talking. And you had this 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 the same day you had a conversation.

01:15:22:00 – 01:15:45:04

Rick

And it would be a 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, I’d never see a thing like that. I’d never. So anyway, he calls me up and he goes, I’m wearing stationery and go, Great, we need a name. Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.

01:15:45:04 – 01:16:07:24

Rick

Well, neither have I, but I was new. 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 goes, okay, that’s it. I’m ordering stationery. We’re calling it seven summits. That’s how it started.

01:16:08:01 – 01:16:40:11

Steve

That’s 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 that’s that’s a great story. You know, this is one of the things I really am curious to talk to you about, both here 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.

01:16:40:15 – 01:16:46:09

Steve

What have you found that has connected between those different areas of your life?

01:16:46:11 – 01:17:12:13

Rick

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 from the high places and take down to our lives at sea level and in this case apply to our lives as business people. And, you know, there’s the hokey ones. The metaphors grow up and you can trust.

01:17:12:15 – 01:17:39:05

Rick

Don’t take risk, manage risk. It’s kind of those bullshit things. But the one thing that’s not bullshit that you learn in the mountains that is so useful in business as an entrepreneur, it is that of tenacity, of 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.

01:17:39:07 – 01:18:04:05

Rick

And I would say those two things together are 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 Chouinard I said, Juan, what what lessons have you taken from the mountains that you’ve brought down to the way you run Patagonia?

01:18:04:11 – 01:18:27:17

Rick

And he goes ahead and I said, You know how he talks. Yeah. So I learned in climbing about how to run my business and I said, Oh, come on, You know, you learned like making pitons. He learned about quality. And I go and he said, Oh, yeah, that’s true. So he backed off a little bit 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.

01:18:27:19 – 01:19:12:07

Rick

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, Keep going. And he said it’s about how when you’re in nature and you’re in wild nature, you learned 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.

01:19:12:07 – 01:19:44:03

Rick

And we see shit with our own eyes, and that means we got to do something about it. And that’s why I’m in business and that’s what our business has a responsibility to do. That’s the main thing I’ve learned, is that 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 his own mentor, the activist David Brower, reminded us all that there is no business on a dead planet.

01:19:44:05 – 01:19:47:05

Rick

And that’s what Yvonne was getting at.

01:19:47:07 – 01:19:50:02

Steve

That’s what I was thinking about, as you were saying that.

01:19:50:04 – 01:20:19:00

Rick

You know, I’ve thought it through a little more than that, and it’s pretty simple. And in fact, it’s a self-evident truism that I can’t believe all CEOs 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.

01:20:19:02 – 01:21:01:17

Rick

And without healthy societies, there is no such thing as healthy markets. Those are the dots that connect. It’s as simple as 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 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, but I would love to do that, to call that asshole out and would love to have a chance to tell him that there is no way we’ll ever turn Mars into Earth.

01:21:01:19 – 01:21:07:03

Rick

But if we don’t figure it out soon, we’re going to turn Earth into Mars.

01:21:07:05 – 01:21:28:00

Steve

I think that a lot of people are in, I would say, denial, because I think that in their view, we’re in a transition, right? Like, it’s not it’s not Mars yet and it won’t. I know that pessimism is no fun, but I think it has to get worse before it gets better.

01:21:28:02 – 01:21:54:19

Rick

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. Mm hmm. I bring it up because I’ve been thinking about it a lot in the last few months, and I’ve realized just how complex of a topic it is and how easy it is to oversimplify.

01:21:54:21 – 01:22:19:20

Rick

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 may in the past. And then in thinking it through. And in fact, this is just something I was thinking about like two days ago.

01:22:20:01 – 01:22:52:02

Rick

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 a 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?

01:22:52:04 – 01:23:27:22

Rick

And that’s the hope I talk about. And I’ve also been thinking how hope can so easily become platitude if you don’t define for yourself what that vision is for yourself of the future that you want for the planet and the living beings. Not just humans, but humans and non-humans. The life that inhabits the planet. Like what’s your personal vision for the world?

01:23:27:24 – 01:24:03:19

Rick

And you know, for me it’s at the highest level. Like suspect it is for you and many people listening in is this world where we figured out how to live in harmony, where we’re not taking from our home planet any more that can give back to us on an annual or long-term basis. 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 an extinction.

01:24:03:21 – 01:24:44:17

Rick

And those are the mega crises right there. And it’s not just climate, but it’s this interrelated crisis of extinction. And then that’s the vision. So where is the hope? Well, how do you make that vision come true? And that’s where I am a pessimist for hope, because I’m the 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.

01:24:44:19 – 01:25:12:13

Rick

Yeah, right. It’s not looking right now too great that we’re going to do that. But yet I’m steadfast, fiercely hopeful that we’re going to figure it out because the solutions are there like I put into it technically. And you know, there’s a path 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.

01:25:12:15 – 01:25:19:02

Rick

But then our friend Chris Tompkins, who we both know and adore and love.

01:25:19:06 – 01:25:20:04

Steve

Amazing person.

01:25:20:04 – 01:25:45:00

Rick

Has told me you need to earn hope. You can’t just claim hope. You got to 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, Yvonne Chouinard, says that if you write, you got to write about the injustices of the world.

01:25:45:00 – 01:26:12:19

Rick

And if you’re a good speaker, you’ve got to speak up. And if you got time, you got to go out and volunteer. And if you have money, you have 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 and that’s what I do.

01:26:12:21 – 01:26:43:21

Rick

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. Because there’s another thing about hope, and that is that it’s contagious.

01:26:43:23 – 01:26:45:14

Steve

That is true.

01:26:45:16 – 01:26:48:02

Rick

It becomes self-fulfilling.

01:26:48:04 – 01:26:51:22

Steve

So it has a tipping point to hope.

01:26:51:24 – 01:27:01:09

Rick

That’s what I want to leave you guys with here that go out there and do what your skills are good at to do what you can.

01:27:01:11 – 01:27:16:18

Steve

And I’m going to read a poem back to you that you wrote in one of your books. You may remember, I’m sure the seven word poem and it you would you like to recite it from memory?

01:27:16:20 – 01:27:19:04

Rick

It’s that that haiku.

01:27:19:06 – 01:27:25:01

Steve

Everything is connected. Everything changes. Pay attention.

01:27:25:03 – 01:27:26:10

Rick

Yeah. Thank you.

01:27:26:12 – 01:27:47:20

Steve

I think 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 when, you know, in those situations where you’re prone to making mistakes. But it has a much broader application here.

01:27:47:20 – 01:28:01:19

Steve

And I think that kind of summarizes for me almost everything that you’ve you’ve talked about and shared today. Everything is connected, Everything changes and pay attention.

01:28:01:21 – 01:28:09:19

Rick

Yeah. You got to have here your eyes open and your senses tuned and then your life becomes so much richer.

01:28:09:21 – 01:28:39:22

Steve

I think that all of us listening and you and I are 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 a part of it. And that’s something that you’ve really eloquently communicated so many times in your life’s work.

01:28:40:02 – 01:29:12:12

Steve

How we are a part of that, and you had a quote from Doug Tompkins and he said, There is no synonym for God, more perfect than beauty and. I have loved that quote ever since I read it, because we are witnessing beauty when we’re in the mountains all moved by it. We all know that feeling of standing, you know, on a mountaintop, watching a sunrise or sunset or the storm roll in or whatever it is.

01:29:12:12 – 01:29:38:10

Steve

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 in myself through your work and writing and particularly your writing.

01:29:38:12 – 01:29:43:11

Steve

Rick So thank you for that and thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

01:29:43:13 – 01:29:48:00

Rick

You’re welcome. Steve It’s been my pleasure.

01:29:48:02 – 01:30:11:01

Steve

Voice of the Mountains is a production of Uphill Athlete Inc.. Our producer is Alyssa Clark, Sound Engineering and editing is done by Christoph Lucas. Her 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.