Tejas grew his beard back for National Geographic’s Ultimate Survivor TV show
More than a decade ago, Vern Tejas suggested that his days of guiding many of the world’s tallest peaks might be nearing an end. He said perhaps he would build his own guiding company and supervise guides that traveled to the same mountains he was so familiar with. However, he never pulled the trigger on that venture.
Instead, he kept climbing the Seven Summits and leading climbers to the tops of the Seven Summits. Time kept passing and Tejas kept up the arduous task. He never seemed to age, retaining his fitness into his sixties, long past the time many guides give up the adventurous lifestyle. He never found his way to a desk job, because even being the head of an adventure company was more likely to entail paperwork than adventures. He seems at peace with his decision to avoid the world’s 8,000-meter peaks—with one possible exception down the road.
Stoking his competitive nature, Tejas appeared on reality TV shows of an adventurous nature, sometimes with teams of Alaskans, sometimes as a solo act. If he has cut back on guiding Mount Everest, he still maintains a seasonal annual schedule so that certain months of the year find him in Alaska, other months find him in South America, and still others in Antarctica.
He still loves the mountains. He does not tire of being out in the hills, high above cities and other landscapes with beautiful vistas spread before him. Tejas has joked that he probably will retire from guiding when he is eighty. That leaves plenty of time for new adventures, as well as repeat visits to the grand high points on each continent, except for Asia, where Everest reigns supreme. Never say never.
During his long guiding career, Tejas has been recognized with many honors. He broke the speed record for climbing the Seven Summits, which really included all eight peaks to satisfy both the Bass and Messner lists, by completing the circuit between January 18, 2010 and May 31, 2010.
He was recognized as one of the top fifty athletes in Alaska history by Sports Illustrated in 2000. Tejas was chosen as a member of the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in 2012 and his achievement of making the first winter solo ascent of Denali gained him recognition a second time in the Hall’s Moments category.
In 2012, Tejas was presented with the Governor’s Award as the Alaskan of the Year. He is a lifetime member of the American Alpine Club. He completed the Explorer’s Grand Slam by climbing the Seven Summits and skiing to the North Pole and South Pole.
In 2014, I was invited to participate in a thirteen-episode, National Geographic reality show called Ultimate Survivor Alaska. One of the other competitors was young Dallas Seavey. He is a third-generation dog mushing champion from Alaska who has now won the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race between Anchorage and Nome four times before his thirtieth birthday. He is a hardcore athlete.
It was interesting on many levels. One thing the producers did was make me grow my beard back to show the passage of time during the show. I had shaved it off long ago, but when it grew back, it showed quite a bit of gray and white that I had never had before. Another intriguing element was that we were pretty much sequestered in Alaska without being able to contact people so that we couldn’t leak the results of the shows.
If someone had told the shy me of the sixth grade who could barely talk to people, never mind engage in public speaking, that I would be in a TV show with a speaking part, I never would have believed that. Just like in mountain climbing I realized slow can be good. I didn’t want to rush and trip over my tongue.
Now I talk to elementary school kids. They go, “Wow, you’ve climbed the highest mountain.” They’re all over it. They’re bouncing off the wall. But high school kids are cool, too. You have to move around. Communication is about more than talking. Use your hands. You want them to stay awake. Sometimes they’re trying to look up the girl’s dress across the room and not even listening to you. I don’t talk to high school kids that often. I have now given enough talks that I know I am not going to die from fright doing it. It’s even better if there’s money on the end. You mean I get paid to talk? How rad is that? I am hoping to do more public speaking and appearances as I gradually spend less time on high mountains.
I have accumulated stories, and I can tie them into lessons to be learned. Another speaker told me that the biggest deal is to keep them awake. If you’ve got them laughing, you’ve got them. If you get them laughing and make some salient points related to your sponsor, the sponsor will be happy. The woman who told me that is someone who makes a substantial amount of money each year just by speaking. She was a story teller to begin with, and you know Norman Vaughan basically financed his trips to Antarctica by telling stories. Expeditions are story-driven. I heard many of Norman’s stories eight, nine, ten times. It didn’t matter. A lot of it was the delivery. You have to share your experiences in a way that is entertaining.
I was in some other TV things earlier. When my son Cayman was a little boy, I sat him down in front of the TV and started rolling a video of Denali. John Waterman, a former Denali ranger, was in the room, and he said, “Hey, your dad is a stud.”
Cayman said, “I want to watch cartoons.” That will keep you humble.
I helped guide a trip on Denali that was being filmed. My friend Marty Raney was involved, too. It was fun and we got paid. On the mountain, I started getting some more camera time. I wasn’t scripted. There were some skiers I zoomed past on a sled, carrying more weight than them and laughing, and they decided they should put me on film. John wrote a book called Surviving Denali, so that’s what we named the show. We spent a month on the filming on the mountain, and then rafted the Tokositna River. I’ve got a copy of the film in a can somewhere. I don’t think it played much, but it was a delight to make.
As a guide, I do a pretty good job of entertaining clients, but it is different in front of a camera. I try to remember to use humor and get into the role. I typically understate. I might be standing there with tons of mosquitoes buzzing around my head and they stick a camera in my face and say, “What do you think about the mosquitoes?” I might just say, “There’s a lot of them.” I’d be better off making some stuff up like, “This is the most mosquitoes we’ve seen in Alaska since 1903.” That would sell a lot better.
Ultimate Survivor, which involved three months of filming, was a wilderness race. Crazy things were involved. You have to get to a flag. The gun goes off and sometimes you have to cut through a swamp to advance. Sometimes you’re going up the side of a mountain. There was an ice-covered lake with the ice so thin you would break through if you try to walk across it. Putting you at risk, making you use your wits, all of that was intentional.
If you got to an intermediate flag first, you got maps and the first choice of equipment. That’s your reward. If you come in later, you get what’s left. You try to get to the finish line first each week, but the points accumulate. The racers that get to the finish line the most times out of thirteen, win. We spent three to five days on each segment. We did a lot of running and a fair amount of walking. Guess what? The cameraman can’t keep up with a fast team with a big camera on his shoulder. There is a lot of footage of us running through the woods, but you have to talk about what you’re doing for the camera. Other things affected progress. If a big rainstorm was coming, you had to go back to camp because they couldn’t film in the rain. Sometimes the safety guy would interrupt because of conditions if a river was getting too high, or we were getting hypothermic. It was only reality TV to a certain point. They maintain the premise that you are out in the woods all by yourself, but you’re not. They are filming you. They are keeping track to make sure you don’t kill yourself or something.
Tejas grew his beard back for National Geographic’s Ultimate Survivor TV show
We had teams. I was on Team Alaska. My friend Marty Raney and Tyler Johnson were two of the others on my team. Dallas Seavey was on the Extreme Team, not Team Alaska. There were younger athletes than us on the Extreme Team, and Johnson was a couple of decades younger than me and Marty. The young kids did eventually kick our butts. There was also tension on the show at different points between individuals on the same team and individuals on other teams. People got testy. Dallas Seavey was a huge success on the show. He won three shows in a row. He’s a winner, highly competitive; you can tell a lot about a man by who he competes with.
Dallas is way ahead of the curve for marketing himself as an outdoor adventurer for the rest of his life. He grew up dog mushing, was a star wrestler who almost ended up in the Olympics, and then turned back to mushing and has become a great champion. His grandfather Dan helped get the Iditarod started and was in the first race. His father Mitch has won a couple of times. He was a shrewd, strategic competitor. He wins those races for a reason. Another Alaskan on the show predicted Dallas would become governor of Alaska in twenty years.
We were sequestered for most of the three months. We weren’t even supposed to make phone calls. Yet, from time to time, depending if we made it near a city, we would hitchhike into town and get a pizza. At one point, we were in a camp near Portage on the Seward Highway. There is a wild animal preserve on the highway just down the road and somebody went over there. They invited all of the workers, especially the girls, to come over to our camp. We have musical instruments. They brought us beers. We had a couple of days off from shooting. All of the guys who had done the show before did not take the sequestering very seriously.
The whole show was a good time. Basically, I got paid to run around and do the same outdoors stuff I love to do anyway. I got to surf a bore tide. I had always wanted to do that. They gave us canoes and told us to go catch a wave. I caught the wave and rode it. Unfortunately, Tyler and Marty flipped. If we had all caught the wave, we would have moved into first place. Instead, we ended up third in that episode.
Other teams chose quadricycles and ATVs, but we actually won one segment on horseback because the horses were good at crossing the river. I had a fair amount of horseback background, actually, from growing up in Texas. I also worked as a cowboy in Oregon and rode in Patagonia, so I knew my way around horses.
In one segment, they wanted grizzly bears, but the bears weren’t interested in being filmed. They sent us out into the woods hoping we would find the bears. You could say we were chasing grizzly bears. We were on an island north of Kodiak Island, on an island that has more bears per square inch than anywhere on earth. They avoided us. We went there for three days without seeing a bear. We saw bear scat. We saw hair rubbings on trees. We saw scratch marks. Everything but bears. There were safety guys with us carrying shotguns and pepper spray. It’s hard to sneak up on bears when there were so many of us. Bears are no dummies.
We went fishing off of Kodiak in a little kayak. We caught some halibut, but didn’t want them to be so big we couldn’t get them into the boat. It was beating the crap out of the boat. Once Marty took out a gun and shot a monster halibut in the head and the shot went right through the boat, so we politely asked him to put away his firearm. Another time, we were paddling across an iceberg-filled lake. Somehow Marty poked a hole in his raft and sprung a leak. The camera wasn’t on us. Too bad. We had a rescue situation.
After it all aired, my friends and family thought I was a hero. They were all bragging about me. There was a little buzz.
I did some other TV shows at different times. Way back after the late Jay Hammond was governor, he had a show called Jay Hammond’s Alaska. We talked about mountaineering and climbing, and right at the end we played a harmonica duet of “Old Susannah.” A life highlight, jamming with Governor Jay Hammond.
Also, I hosted on a show called Tasting Alaska. It was a small production for the Food Network. It was a special. I had to eat sourdough pancakes, and we set that up at the Talkeetna Roadhouse. People were bragging about how old their sourdough starter was and how good it was. One guy walks in, throws his down on the table, and goes, “This goes back to the Gold Rush.” Mine actually came from California from the other Gold Rush.
We ate some Cajun food out on an oil rig. We caught salmon in Kodiak and made caviar out of its eggs. We did a segment on the giant cabbages that people grow for the Alaska State Fair. We opened the show with video of me flying off Denali with my paraglider. The next thing you know, I was in the Ruth Amphitheatre looking up at the mountain and cooking something. They liked the idea I would have this big, massive beard and look Alaskan, but I shaved off the beard for a job six months before they called me, so I had to grow it back.
One reason I went to the mountains in the first place was because I was not exactly socially adept. Then I became a guide and became really good socially with small groups of people. Next thing you know, I have to talk with a script on TV to an audience of a million people. I was not as good with a script. Some people are natural in the social graces. I have to work at it. I have worked with many groups since then, and you know what, the more you work at it the better you become.
The first time since sixth grade that I did anything in public was the day after I got home from the Denali winter solo. There was a St. Patrick’s Day dance, and I wanted to take my girlfriend Gail. She loved dancing. To obtain tickets for the dance, I stopped in a music store and the lady recognized me as the person who had just finished the climb. My frostbitten nose was probably a clue. I was really attracted to the traditional Irish drum. So I picked up, saw the price, and put it back. It is surprising what imported products cost.
Later that night, this lady was at the dance, called me up to the stage, and presented me with the drum. Suddenly, they were talking about me and 500 people were giving me a standing ovation. I was embarrassed, beet red. The band wanted me to play on stage, which of course I did. I acted as if I was enjoying myself, but I was mortified. Afterwards, I took a Dale Carnegie course just to get myself more comfortable. Just a few days later, I gave a slide presentation on the climb at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I don’t know how they got my film back so fast. I also didn’t have many good shots. On a solo climb that can happen. Especially if you get caught in a storm and you are risking your life. The paucity of the photos meant I really had to talk since I couldn’t rely on the pictures to carry the show. The line for the talk stretched to the parking lot. So many more people came than the auditorium held so I had to do it twice in a row: a double-header. I walked down the aisle to the stage and the first thing I said was, “Shucks.” Everybody broke up laughing. I thought I was being modest. At the time, the presentation seemed harder than the climb, but now I actually enjoy giving talks.
Doing more shows like that, giving motivational speeches, making public appearances would be fun. Sooner or later, I will have to slow down guiding. Nobody can do it forever. I still enjoy my trips all over the world and going back to the mountains I know so well. But looking ahead, my body is slowing down. I’ve got to make a conscious effort to treat myself right, eat properly, stay hydrated, train, stretch, all that good stuff. I have to be more consciously aggressive in preparing myself for climbs. You lose body mass as you get older. I used to have bigger guns, but those arm muscles are getting a little smaller. Oh well, lighter is righter.
I really am trying to keep my act together. I am doing different kinds of guiding, some exotic trips that are not on the Seven Summits. I take people to Peru, Italy, Greece, and the Everest base camp. I have been into kayaking for a long time, but now it is whitewater kayaking. Paddling in the Greek Isles was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. It’s in a warm weather place. I’m usually traveling in such harsh environments and you have to worry about getting killed. Paddling in Greece is just the opposite. When people go to climb mountains it’s like a mission. When they go to paddle kayaks in Greece, it is a real vacation. I can see a long and enjoyable career guiding that way.
During World War I and II in the Dolomites, soldiers camped in the mountains. They set up all of these steel ladders with climbing pegs and rocks. You can clip into cables. They call it going the Iron Way. You get the same kind of thrill of exposure you do on a mountain, yet it is a lot safer. I heard about them a long time ago and only recently got to check them out.
I have made other adventure trips and climbs that aren’t part of the Seven Summits. One trip I am proud of was a journey to Greenland as part of a nine-member group in 2001. It was called “The Return to the Top of the World Expedition.” I was one the climbers who made the second ascent of Helvetia Tinde, and the first one since 1969. That is in the mountain range the farthest north in the world. We also made an ascent of the second highest peak in the range and named it after our hero John Denver. For the fun of it, we climbed the northernmost mountain in the world. When I get the opportunity, I wish to climb Mount Howe, the southernmost mountain.
One thing that has been on my mind is to climb the second Seven Summits, the second highest mountain on each continent. I have done some of them. You also get back into the debate of what is a continent, so there are eight nominees. In North America it is Mount Logan in Canada. Others are Mount Townsend in Australia, or Puncak Mandala in Indonesia; Ojos del Salado, on the Argentina-Chile border for South America; Dykh Tau in Russia, for Europe; Mount Kenya for Africa; Mount Tyree for Antarctica; and K-2 for Asia. K-2 is the second tallest mountain in the world at 28,251 feet. It is also a far more difficult challenge than Everest and is climbed much less frequently. K-2 would be the biggest challenge. I have been asked to guide a K-2 trip, but I do not know if it is going to work out.
One great honor for me was being selected as a member of the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame, actually twice. I had not anticipated mountaineering being considered as a sport. To me it seems more of a lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong. I think it was a wonderful honor to be acknowledged as a noted sportsman. Certainly, we are athletes. Some of the strongest people I know are mountaineers. You can say mountaineering is an athletic activity of the highest degree, pun intended. It is a great honor for Alaskans to consider mountaineering a sport, and for Alaskans to choose me. Mountaineering is an adventure sport. You don’t know the outcome. Making the summit is not a foregone conclusion. You may make headlines or get killed instead.
Alaskans as a people are unique people. They have a little bit different definition about what life is about. For all of my travels that take me away from my state, I consider myself an Alaskan in spirit. That’s one reason I was so happy they officially changed the name of McKinley to Denali in 2015. I think I signed my first petition for that thirty or forty years ago. I feel vindicated by the change. Very pleased. I felt the circle was connected to the first peoples of Alaska.
With so many mountains under my feet, I always seem to identify with the naturalist John Muir who said, “I hear the mountains calling and I must go. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.”
I read a book by R. Waldo McBurney called My First 100 Years. It is an inspiring book. Maybe someday I can look back in the same manner. Helen Keller did not climb mountains, but she is inspirational to adventurers nonetheless.
“Security is mostly a superstition,” she said. “It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is not safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
You can never predict what’s out there and what you can do. I’d like to think I still have a lot of miles to cover all over the world and a lot of adventures still in me.