Tejas removed his mask for a quick top-of-the-world selfie on one of his first Everest summits
The first time Vern Tejas saw Denali, he was in his late teens, almost twenty years old. He was fascinated by the concept of Alaska and had worked his way north, curious as to what the Great Land offered. He’d only seen the mountain in pictures, and knew one basic fact about it: this 20,310-foot peak was the tallest in North America.
Vern was in the flatlands, perhaps twenty-five horizontal miles from Denali’s summit. He remembers having to crane his neck and tilt his head back to look upwards and peer at the summit. The summit, as often occurs with this mountain that creates its own weather, was invisible.
Each year, some 500,000 tourists visit Denali National Park. They come to admire one of the last great scenic and unspoiled places on earth, see wild animals, and gaze upon the legendary mountain. It is not certain how many of them actually even obtain a glimpse of a purely visible Denali. It may be raining with thick cloud cover where they pause. It may be snowing on the mountain. Dense clouds may obscure the entire hunk of rock or portions of it.
Those who are fortunate sometimes are blessed enough to be in the right place at the right time when those clouds dissipate and the blue sky opens up and reveals the magnificence of the humongous peak before their eyes. Tejas was open-mouthed with awe, bright-eyed with respect, and excited for an unwritten future.
It took five years before Tejas had his first chance to climb Denali. He has never stopped, climbing one of the world’s most famous and impressive mountains as if it is a neighborhood playground. As of 2016, he had reached the summit of Denali fifty-seven times, a record.
For several years, Denali was a specialty. But the fame Tejas gained after completing his 1988 winter solo of the peak changed the course of his life. No longer was he just a Denali guide. He was able to parlay his experience into work around the globe, climbing the biggest mountains and catching the front end of a new wave of popularity in mountain climbing.
Dick Bass, operator of the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah who died in 2015 at eighty-five, was looking for a new life challenge in the 1980s when he dreamed up the concept of the Seven Summits. Bass, who was neither a professional climbing guide nor an accomplished climber on the order of the world’s best, invented an adventure challenge that he began with his friend Frank Wells, president of Walt Disney Company. Until then, no one in the mountaineering world had given much thought to ascending the highest mountains on each of the world’s seven continents. It was not as if the world’s most prominent mountaineers couldn’t do it, it was simply that the accomplishment was on no one else’s radar.
At the time, likely few mountaineers could even readily name the Seven Summits. Some of the mountains were not terribly well known, and some were not coveted destinations. After the appropriate geographical research and establishing their quest, Bass and Wells chased their goal.
Their list consisted of Mount Everest for Asia, Denali (then called Mount McKinley) for North America, Aconcagua for South America, Elbrus for Europe, Kosciuszko for Australia, Kilimanjaro for Africa, and Vinson for Antarctica. They went by the numbers, matching the heights to the continents. It was a straightforward selection plan. No one tried to argue that these were the seven most rugged mountains in the world. Besides Everest, all of the other six are shorter than even the second or the sixty-seventh tallest mountain in Asia.
It all began for Bass and Wells as a hobby, a later-in-life fun physical challenge. Everest, acknowledged as the most difficult, was saved for last. Alas for Wells, he climbed the first six, but could not summit Everest. So rather than a co-success, it fell to Bass to become the first climber in the world to reach the top of the tallest mountains on each continent in 1985.
Unexpectedly, Bass’s achievement had repercussions far beyond his own personal gratification. He gained wide notoriety, authored a best-selling book called Seven Summits, sparked an entire sub-industry of mountain guiding, and even influenced geography debates on true definition of a continent. The debate continues today.
It turned out that another mountaineer was also pursuing nominally the same goal. Canadian Pat Morrow completed the Seven Summits in 1986, but they were not the same Seven Summits as Bass ascended. Instead of Kosciuszko in Australia, which by all definitions is a walk-up needing no mountaineering equipment whatsoever and very little stamina, he climbed a mountain called Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea.
Kosciuszko stands 7,310 feet high. Carstensz stands 16,064 feet high. No one contests the belief that climbing Carstensz is the worthier mountaineering achievement, but they do question if Carstensz belongs on the list. Some say New Guinea is part of Oceania. However, the general listing of continents in most sources fails to recognize Oceania (or Austral-Asia) as a continent in lieu of Australia.
Morrow’s accomplishment was significant, but it was overshadowed by Bass’s. It did not help Morrow that Bass completed his journey a year earlier. Also, because Bass was more of a citizen-adventurer than a professional climber, his climbs resonated strongly with the average Joe and Joan. They swiftly came to believe that, as long as they were following a mountain guide, they too could do what Bass did. This threw open an entire area of opportunity for guide services. People clamored for the opportunity to go into the mountains, climb the high points of the world (usually saving Everest for last because it was the most difficult and most expensive), and the need arose for qualified guides.
Suddenly, the Seven Summits appeared on the life lists of many. Running with the bulls with Pamplona was one thing. Running a 26.2-mile marathon in some exotic location was another. But this, chasing the summits of seven mountains, that was something to put on your résumé. As long as you had the money and time and trained like an Olympian for stamina, a guide would help you fulfill your grandest dream.
This sudden intense interest, arising from almost nowhere, enabled Vern Tejas to transform himself from a Denali mountain guide into a citizen of the world mountain guide. Whereas before 1985, it was extremely difficult for a man of Tejas’s talents to make a living year-round at high altitude, he was now in demand.
The Seven Summits quest opened a world of opportunity and a lifetime of adventure for Tejas.