Alaska is such a special place and Denali is such a special mountain that someone who enjoys climbing and challenges, but has a full-time career in a city such as Anchorage, might be content to never seek to climb any other big mountains, or with merely taking the periodic vacation.
There are many Alaskans who fit that description. However, as illustrated earlier in his life, Vern Tejas was often struck by wanderlust and a desire to visit new and exotic lands. By establishing a reputation as both a renowned and experienced guide on Denali, and enhancing it with his solo winter ascent of that mountain, Tejas became a guide in demand. He was not someone who had deep pockets and could afford to simply fly anywhere in the world he chose. For Tejas to undertake world travels and take advantage of invitations, he had to be paid. He was not a wealthy citizen-adventurer, but a professional.
What he accomplished by succeeding at the winter solo on Denali was to make himself into a hot commodity.
Making the first solo winter ascent of Denali changed my life. It put my name out there in the field. People who never knew my name before now associated it with an important climb, and when they went shopping for a guide, they thought of me.
The actual first thing that happens after such an adventure, doing something difficult, is that your confidence level changes, your self-image changes, internal stuff. The external stuff changes when people begin to invite you to do things. My solo opened doors. I fell in love with Denali, and she blessed me multiple times throughout my life. Gradually, I came to believe that my calling was to meet the challenges where the most difficult conditions could be found. It’s not that I was the hottest climber in the mountaineering world—actually, I was probably the coldest—but I was willing to challenge myself in the harshest conditions. I was not the greatest of climbers, but I could withstand really harsh environments. Working on the North Slope of Alaska in the winter helped me get my chops together on how to stay warm.
My friend Dave Johnston, who was on the first team winter climb in 1967, tried a solo of Denali. In fact, he started skiing from his cabin near Talkeetna and made it up to 12,000 feet, but he ran into a brutal storm and turned around. If it hadn’t been for that, he probably would have succeeded, but there are so many ifs involved with Denali in winter. In the main season, there are people around, even if you are climbing solo. You may be doing all of the work yourself, but you can’t avoid the company. Yet if you fall in a crevasse and can’t get out, you’re still just as dead.
In most ways, 1988 was a special year for me: I got invited to climb on Mount Vinson in Antarctica. The Denali climb jump-started it all; that got the ball rolling for me. Up until then, I never thought of climbing mountains like Everest. Mostly, I was happy to climb in Alaska. I lived in Alaska, and Alaska had plenty of mountains. It was not as if I grew up dreaming of becoming a mountain guide. Even after I began doing it, I did not plan on it becoming my career. It was obvious nobody got rich being a full-time guide. However, I eventually made a conscious decision that I wanted to stick with it. To me, having the opportunities to travel the world and live a life of adventure out-weighed staying home and making more money. People started asking me to lead trips to countries I otherwise never would have visited. I went to Iran to climb the highest mountain there. How would I have ever gotten to get to Iran otherwise without becoming an oil executive?
One job I did off-and-on for quite some time, about twelve winters, was helping build and maintain telecommunications towers on the North Slope of Alaska. That is the coldest job in the world. I climbed towers when it was minus-forty degrees out and the wind was blowing twenty or thirty knots; forty knots was my limit. I don’t think anybody can say there is a colder job than that. At the end of each project, I was paid a big chunk of cash and sent home. Some people compare it to mountain climbing, which is probably why they thought I would be the perfect fit. It paid good money, but that was not full-time, year-round work, either. When I was done, it was “Goodbye. Thanks a lot. Here’s your big bucks. Go home, kid.” The appreciation was there monetarily, but I would rather have somebody notice, “Hey, you’re really good at this. You’re the best guide I’ve ever met for doing high altitude work.” People appreciated me for that, and I wanted to go where I was appreciated.
Now my job description as a guide is to go to the most beautiful places in the world with very interesting people and have fun. There is nothing not to like about a job like that. Climbing has taken me to Bolivia, Kenya, Chile, Argentina, India, Indonesia, Iceland, South Georgia Island, Borneo, Peru, Tibet, Switzerland, Japan, Bhutan, France, Greenland, and Fiji—places most people in the U.S. don’t ever see. It is an exciting way to live: a current passport always in your pocket, visiting different corners of the world, getting to know people from different cultures you would never otherwise meet.
I will also admit that living that lifestyle did not make me the best father or husband. My son Cayman, named for the islands, who is twenty-seven years old, grew up mostly with his mother Gail. She was my partner at the time of the Denali winter solo and for many years afterwards. I figured I would slow down and help raise him, but all of these opportunities were coming my way and I could not say no. I did not settle down. I learned from trying to raise my son that a mountaineering lifestyle is hard on family relationships. It’s great work. It’s fun. We’re out there climbing and skiing, but here’s the deal, it’s rewarding on certain levels and not very rewarding on other levels. If you want to have many exciting experiences and not much money in the bank, it might be your cup of tea. Do you want to have a wife? A home? A car? Kids? Forget it.
I know from raising my son as poorly as I did that it is hard on families. He turned out quite well, but that was mainly due to his mother. In retrospect, I wasn’t such a great father because being a mountain guide is pretty selfish. There is a responsibility people should have for raising a kid well. Fortunately, I had a great partner and she was a very good mother. She probably overcompensated for me not being there. We did things together when I was there, but I wasn’t there much. I was doing three Denali climbs a season, and in the winter I was on the North Slope.
I have long been in demand for guiding on Denali, but that only filled four months of the year tops. The 1988 solo led to invitations to make trips to the North Pole and the South Pole, Mount Everest and to Greenland. It opened the gateway for me to become a full-time guide with a major company. Also, once clients began taking regularly scheduled trips with me to such places as Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Elbrus and others, they started approaching me to guide them on trips around the world that are not standard guide service offerings.
Becoming a guide is a process. It is not just about gaining experience. There is a rigorous certification process that can now cost a young guide between $30,000 and $40,000 and take three or four years. You might as well go to college and become a lawyer, make more money and spend it hiring a guide to take you on trips. I know guides that make only $20,000 a year working year-round. People only climb Denali between April and July, but working there only four months of the year, you cannot make a living.
I have been in demand as a guide for Denali for decades, especially after the solo winter climb. I would like to think that it is more than just ego; I could not see me in a city in an office all of the time. Yes, I would have been home more frequently, but I felt a little bit of me would have died inside if I was not developing the best of me, not pushing my abilities. Ego is involved, but I would rather say there is a big because-it’s-there drive within me, part of the definition of who I am as a person, that keeps me doing these adventurous things.
One example of leading a climb to a rarely visited spot was being asked by four guys from New York to guide them in Iran. I know a lot of Americans don’t want to visit because of all the troubles there and throughout the Middle East, but I jumped at the opportunity. In the late 1990s, we were in a little period of détente with Iran.
Mount Damavand is 18,406 feet tall, a substantial mountain. Mount Damavand is as big as Mount Elbrus in Russia, one of the Seven Summits, and maybe a little taller by some measurements. If it was located a few hundred miles north, it would have been the second-highest mountain in Europe, but it is in Asia instead, so it is out-classed by all of the Himalayan peaks. It is Asia’s highest volcano, and the route was pretty straightforward. Being farther south, it did not have much snow on it. Actually, as we got higher and I saw white spots on the mountain, I thought they were snow patches, but as we got closer, I realized they were sheep. We thought the sheep would run away as we approached, but they couldn’t; they were dead. These were the bodies of sheep that had been walked up there and sacrificed to the God of Abraham. I thought, “How Biblical. Things don’t change much here in 2000 years.”
Just because bombs weren’t going off did not mean that Americans were particularly welcome. We weren’t having a war, but some of the people still hated America. There was still the “Death to America” feeling, and that was the government’s daily opening line on broadcasts. But we had free reign to travel all over the country, except for entering mosques. I squelched that idea pretty quickly since my climbers were Jewish and that could have set off a riot. I did not particularly want to go in one anyway, though my climbers did.