The peak of Mount Rainier reaches 14,411 feet. It’s the most glacially covered mountain in the lower forty-eight states and the tallest in the state of Washington. It’s a massive mound that dominates the western Washington skyline; you can’t miss it when you fly into Seattle.
Outdoor physical activities connect my mind to my body like nothing else. Surfing is my favorite activity, but I really enjoy anything that gets me outdoors. I believe the mind–body connection can have powerful healing effects. I would take my Care Coalition clients on outdoor adventures at every opportunity. There is nothing like a hard physical challenge, a good kick in the butt, to make you feel alive. In July of 2010, I joined a group to climb Mount Rainier. Our climb team included my friend and fellow Navy SEAL Jason Redman. A month after I was wounded, Jason took machine-gun rounds to the face and arm when he and his team went after an element of the same terrorist cell that shot me. Two other SEALs on the climb team were Brian Smith, who had survived an IED blast that had sent shrapnel through his brain, and Kevin, a Navy medic who was wounded when the Humvee he was riding in was hit with an IED.
Other members of the climb team included Scott Parazynski, a Harvard-trained medical doctor and former NASA astronaut. Scott is an avid mountaineer and reached the summit of Mount Everest several years prior to our climb. There was also Walt Leonard, a dentist from South Carolina and a huge supporter of service members and veterans; Wynn Tyner, a retired Marriott executive; and Robert Vera, a successful entrepreneur and bestselling author. The climb was sponsored by Camp Patriot, a veteran-focused nonprofit organization.
Climbing Mount Rainier is serious stuff; on average, only 50 percent of the able-bodied climbers reach the summit, and every year an average of three people die in the attempt. We were mostly able-bodied, but it really didn’t matter—we were climbing it anyway. I needed these types of adventures, and I knew the other guys were excited for the climb.
We all met at Sea-Tac airport and together made the trip to Ashford, Washington, to gear up and go over the plan. Curtis Fawley and Art Rausch would be our guides. The pair had guided on the mountain during their college years and together had over three hundred round trips to the summit. They had both gone on to pursue other careers, but came out of retirement to lead our group. Curtis’s fourteen-year-old son, Keegan, was also with our group, along with several local guides to help carry extra food and gear.
We spent the first night at Whittaker’s Bunkhouse, owned by the Whittaker family, who are climbing legends. The place was jammed with other climbers—seems like everyone who climbs Rainier passes through Whittaker Mountaineering on their way to the hill. The next morning, we all piled in the van for a ride up to Henry M. Jackson Visitor Center located in an area called Paradise. This is where we would start our climb. Paradise sits at six thousand feet above sea level. I have spent most of my life at sea level, or slightly below it while surfing or diving. Maybe that’s why I felt my lungs burning while walking around the parking lot…
Curtis knew that most of us were low-landers and some of us came with bullet holes, so he demonstrated the “rest step” method of walking. Basically, it’s step, rest, step, rest. Very slow and methodical, but my lungs and legs appreciated the technique. We’d start the hike at six thousand feet, and rest/step our way up another four thousand vertical feet to Camp Muir. It would be at ten thousand feet from Muir that we would launch our summit bid. Muir is basically the base camp for all the climb teams trekking to the summit by way of the Disappointment Cleaver route. This is the fastest and most direct route to the top. I had not put a pack on since being shot, and I had some crazy muscle spasms even before we started walking uphill. The hike up to Muir put the hurt on me, but I couldn’t let anyone know. When we arrived, I unpacked, helped to organize the tents, hydrated, ate dinner with the team, and crammed into my tent with Jason and Brian on a slice of frozen mountain away from the other groups of climbers.
Rainier is covered in snow and ice year-round, and even summer storms can roll in and dump snow. I woke up the next morning cold and stiff, but good to go for a summit bid. We would spend the day learning how to use our ice axes to self-arrest and avoid falling into a deep crack in the ice or pitching off the mountain in the event of a fall. After the lesson, we rested most of the afternoon and had an early dinner of chili, beans, and mac and cheese. As soon as the mountain was cold and hard, we would attach crampons to our boots, rope together, and move in rope teams toward the summit. Late in the afternoon, the winds picked up and the day turned dark. The weather forecast indicated a summer storm rolling in off the Pacific. Rain below six thousand feet and snow above it with sustained winds of forty miles per hour and gusts of seventy-plus miles per hour. A seventy-mile-per-hour wind gust would be more than enough to chuck me off my feet and toss me to the bottom of the mountain. We would not be climbing up or down for a while. I piled into my tent with Jason and Brian to wait and listen. The weather delay was unexpected; if we had known it was coming, we would have taken the chili and beans off the menu. There are consequences to these foods, and I swear that being in altitude and being crammed together in a small tent amplifies them. That night and all the next day, the winds pounded us, sounding like an angry freight train—we could hear the gusts winding up and then a blast would slam into our tent and bend it in half. There were a few times that I thought for sure we would be blown off the mountain.
We got a break in the weather and Curtis and Art gave the thumbs-up. We would make a run at the summit that night as soon as the snow turned back to ice. Crampons, the metal spikes attached to the bottom of climbing boots, don’t work well in slush or soft snow. It was about 10:00 p.m. when Curtis knocked on our tent and said, “Saddle up, boys. Time to climb a mountain.”
We all noticed that Jason was not looking or sounding well. He was coughing up neon-green chunks and looked exhausted. Doctor Scott checked him out and made a preliminary diagnosis of bronchitis or some other type of respiratory infection. Jason had been shot in the face—the round entering the back of his head just behind his ear and exiting out his nose—and another machine-gun bullet had hit him in the elbow and almost took off his arm. Any other person would have been dead. An infection was not going to hold him back. He told Doc Scott, “Thanks, I’m good.”
We launched out of Camp Muir at 11:30 p.m. and headed toward our first major obstacle: Disappointment Cleaver, a rocky outcropping that separates two glaciers. Two hours later, we arrived at the base of the cleaver. A year or so earlier, my buddy Brian survived a penetrating brain wound after being hit with shrapnel and had to relearn how to swallow, talk, and then walk. Now the guy was trudging up a big mountain. The cleaver is steep, like climbing a ladder, and at the time it was mostly exposed rock with some areas of hard-packed snow. I could see sparks above me generated by the other climbers’ metal crampons grinding against the rocks. The route is extremely narrow, basically a one-way trail. There was a group of sketchy climbers above us, moving very slow and kicking rocks down at us. Then ping, clank, clank, ping, clank, ping, and someone above me yelled, “Look out below!” A climber in the sketchy group above ours had lost his grip on his aluminum ice axe and it was bouncing down the rocks, headed straight for us. You don’t want to be in the path of an ice axe; they’re all business and no fun, with sharp points at each end. Luckily, nobody was hit.
It took us about an hour after that to navigate up the cleaver; then we took a rest break on the steep glacier a few hundred yards above it. I was already smoked, and we had hours more of uphill climbing before we would reach the top. Jason sat with his head down; he didn’t talk. We ate, drank, then rallied and moved up the mountain, walking around a series of huge crevasses. The moon was so bright I turned off my headlamp. Looking out to the east, I could see the lights of Yakima, Washington, some seventy miles away. We would take one last rest break, then do a steady push all the way to the summit. Five hours had ticked away since we left Camp Muir, and now the sun was coming up and the summit was in view. Brian was chugging along, and Jason moved forward with his head down like he was on autopilot; he was hurting but would not quit or complain. I was crushed hours ago but kept moving. One last push and my rope team stepped into the summit crater. Mount Rainier is a volcano, and you can smell sulfur and feel steam welling up from deep inside the earth. It releases through cracks all around the top. We celebrated and took photos; Jason took a nap. One of the photos was of Scott, who’d brought the same American flag he’d taken into space and to the summit of Mount Everest. We gathered around it and snapped a picture with it on the summit of Mount Rainier. A few hundred yards across the crater, there was a small rock outcropping where a guest book is stored in an ammo can. The last thing I wanted to do was more walking, but I figured that I may not get back this way again, so I made the trek and signed the book.
The way down seemed more dangerous than the way up because in the daylight we could actually see the steep incline and how far down the landing would be if we fell. The sun created another hazard, melting the rock-hard snow into slush and rendering our crampons useless. Most of my way down was a controlled—or out of control—slide.
Our climb had been in honor of Ryan Job, another Navy SEAL who had been wounded in Iraq by a sniper, an injury that had left him totally blind. I had only met Ryan once, at Mike Monsoor’s Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House. (In September 2006, Navy SEAL Mike Monsoor was on a rooftop in Ramadi, Iraq, fighting it out with some insurgents when a grenade landed beside him. He could have just jumped down the hatch to get out, but instead he jumped on the grenade. He died thirty minutes later; his teammates were wounded but all survived.) In 2008, Ryan Job climbed to the summit of Mount Rainier blind. A year later, in 2009, he died as a result of a hospital error. Most people know Ryan from the books American Sniper and A Warrior’s Faith. He was the character Biggles in the film American Sniper. On my own way down, I closed my eyes once and gained a new, profound respect for Ryan Job—I couldn’t take ten steps without opening my eyes.
One common characteristic that I have seen among SEALs is an ability to effectively manage fear. As SEALs, we do so much scary stuff that we need to deconstruct and control fear. The most common fear is the fear of the unfamiliar or the unknown. SEALs have been conditioned to override this natural fear response. We have learned that the odds of success are far better if we boldly move forward into the unknown. What makes SEAL training different is that we are taught to handle both known and potential threats. A “potential threat” is one that we may have never encountered before and is basically unknown. SEALs are trained to step forward into the unknown and handle whatever we encounter. I don’t believe that all SEALs are fearless; it’s just that they feel fear and do it anyway.
We moved down from the summit in a slow-motion slide. We landed back at Camp Muir in the early afternoon. The extra food that the other guides carried up for us would be our lunch. Eventually we all made it down the mountain without any missteps. When we arrived at the bottom, Jason needed a round of antibiotics to kill the bloom of bronchitis growing in his lungs.
Climbing mountains forces you to build trusted relationships because you are all tied together with ropes. If someone slips and falls, it’s up to everyone else to save that person. There are deep crevasses all over the mountain that swallow people. I learned that a member of the Whittaker family is buried in one of those cracks on Rainier. If you survive the fall and manage not to drag your rope team into the crack with you, then the only way out is by the other members of your team working together to haul you out.
Climbing Mount Rainier came at the perfect time in my recovery. It empowered me and gave me a sense of agency after being wounded. The climb also connected me with all the right people, many of whom I have built trusted relationships with. Over the years, I have brought more of my Care Coalition clients on adventures with the nonprofit group Camp Patriot. Jason Redman and Brian Smith are still close friends. A year or so after the climb, Walt Leonard hosted a white-water rafting trip for me and some of my Care Coalition clients. Whenever I visit Arizona, Wynn Tyner rolls out the red carpet for me at the Marriott Camelback Inn. Curtis Fawley helped Brian find work as a mountain guide after Brian retired from the teams. Robert Vera has become a close friend and is the coauthor of this book. Each of these trusted relationships, along with the new skills I’ve developed, has become a critical part of my personal resiliency portfolio.