Still jet-lagged from Tibet, I was relaxing on my couch in a half daze when I got a call from an old friend. Mark Wellman was a world-famous adventurer and a personal hero of mine who had skied across the rugged Sierra Nevada in California and the heavily crevassed Ruth Glacier of Alaska. His most well-known feats, however, were the stunning ascents he had completed on some of the most difficult rock faces in North America. Mark was also paralyzed from the waist down.
Recently, Mark and filmmaker Eric Perlman had produced a series of documentaries featuring a host of unusual athletes: a leg-amputee surfer, a paraplegic hang glider, and a quadriplegic, Larry Boden, who sailed independently by using an ingenious “sip ’n’ puff” system through which he lightly blew out or drew in air through a mouth tube to maneuver the mainsail and jib. “I went from a viewer to a doer,” Larry had said.
Mark was now planning some kind of festival and wanted me to be a part of it. Honestly, he could have asked me to wash his dirty socks, and I would have agreed readily, but fortunately what he had in mind sounded way more intriguing. “I’m calling it ‘No Barriers,’” he said. “I want to change people’s perceptions of what’s possible, but not in a gentle way. We need to come together to blast through one barrier after the next, until there are none left. It’ll be a gimp revolution.”
I chuckled. The word gimp was one of Mark’s favorites, one that, only by virtue of being blind or in a chair, could you get away with using without being scorned.
“Sounds ambitious,” I replied, picturing Mark in his wheelchair, leading an army of gimps—surfers and sailors and hang gliders—and Mark like the giant Kool-Aid guy, cranking forward and exploding through a solid wall, the boards and plaster splintering around him.
When Mark was twenty-two years old, he was hurrying down the Seven Gables, a thirteen thousand–foot peak in the Sierras, jumping from rock to rock, trying to beat the darkness that was coming on quickly. A rock shifted under his foot, pitching him forward, sending him somersaulting a hundred feet down the steep talus. He landed with a sickening crack on a small ledge above a sheer, one thousand–foot vertical drop. Blood poured from the back of his head, and his clothes were shredded. His body was battered, with electric shocks of pain shooting through his chest and arms. But worst of all, he obsessed over his legs that he could no longer feel.
Mark’s climbing partner covered him with a pair of pants and a sweater, staunched his bleeding head wound, gave him some water and food, and made the difficult decision to go for help, leaving Mark alone high on the mountain with darkness coming on. For an agonizingly long night, in which he worried about freezing to death, and most of the next day, Mark lay on his back, waiting for the rescue party, or for death to take him, whichever came first. He hadn’t died in the fall, but after being rescued, the diagnosis that he’d never walk again felt worse than death. “My hospital room was on the sixth floor,” Mark said. “If I could have crawled to the window, I would have jumped for sure.”
But then another patient showed up. He was a quadriplegic in his late twenties who’d broken his neck eleven years earlier and was now back for a bone spur surgery. He told Mark that he drove race cars, including a souped-up Mustang, using hand controls. He was confident and moved around the room in a sporty, lightweight wheelchair. “I have no time for self-pity,” he said to Mark. “It’s all up to you. If you choose to live, get off your ass and live. If you choose to die, lie down. Don’t get out of bed.”
Mark chose to live, inspired to attack his painful rehabilitation with drive and purpose. He built up his shoulders, back, and arms to such a degree, he eventually resumed climbing again with a special rope ascension system that no one had ever seen before. Seven years later, Wellman climbed the infamous three thousand–foot rock face of El Capitan with his new climbing partner, Mike Corbett. He’d inched his way up the vertical wall with the force of his will and the massive power of his upper body.
To thousands of people like me around the country, Mark became an overnight hero. He’d met presidents and wherever he went was accorded the respect of a visiting head of state. He was even lauded by the Paralympics when he opened the games by climbing a 120-foot rope up the Olympic tower with a torch strapped to his legs. Reaching the top, Mark touched the flaming torch to the Olympic cauldron and set the night ablaze to the ecstatic cheers of sixty thousand fans.
As I listened to Mark describe his latest project, I thought back to our last adventure together, one of the strangest and most magical experiences of my life. Mark had been making another film and wanted to lead it off in a one-of-a-kind way. “Well-meaning people use words like physically challenged,” he said, “even differently abled or handi-capable. But the term I like is gimp. Among my friends, it’s a badge of honor. So I want to begin my next film with an ‘all-gimp climb.’”
Hugh Herr would be our third partner. Hugh was another legend with an illustrious climbing career. On the surface quiet and introspective, when he talked about climbing or the doctorate program at Harvard in biophysics he had just finished, his soft words sparked with intensity. That intensity had burned his whole life, giving him the tenacity to power through immense challenges but also contributing to his life’s lowest point. When Hugh was seventeen years old, already a brilliant rock and ice climber, he and a friend had pushed to the top of a steep ice gully called O’Dell’s on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in the midst of winter storm conditions. They decided to try for the summit, but after going only a few hundred yards, the winds increased to ninety miles per hour, and temperatures plunged below zero degrees. They turned around to descend, but in the whiteout they went the wrong way, accidentally entering a vast wilderness area called the Great Gulf. They were hopelessly disoriented.
They walked for what seemed forever until Hugh broke through snow and ice, plunging him thigh deep into a river. His boots and feet were soaked and soon froze. He told me it was crazy looking down at his feet that he couldn’t feel, willing them to move and realizing the circuit between his brain and his legs was broken. His legs refused to respond. He’d try to take a step and simply fall on his face. Their only choice was to hunker beneath some boulders, covered with a few spruce boughs, and wait for help. As the storm raged, mountain search-and-rescue teams scoured the area for three full days, and miraculously Hugh and his climbing partner were found by a snowshoer who happened by their makeshift shelter. After a difficult helicopter rescue in dangerous winds, they both lived.
Doctors confirmed the first news, something he had already feared. Both legs had suffered frostbite and would need to be amputated below the knees. His family told him the second tragic news. During the search, a young member of the rescue team named Albert Dow was caught in an avalanche and killed. Albert was a beloved climber and resident of North Conway, New Hampshire, and Hugh became deeply depressed and angered that his poor decisions had cost a human life.
Hugh had believed with certainty that he would die on the mountain. When he survived, he became fueled by the memory of Albert Dow, and he vowed not only to walk again but to climb and maybe climb better than he ever had before. The prosthetics then available were crude, passive limbs unsuited to the mountainous outdoor adventures that Hugh envisioned. So, having an engineer’s mind, he began experimenting in a machine shop at a local vocational school, attaching composite polymer, wood, and rubber-coated feet to aluminum legs, with padded suction-cup sockets affixed to his stumps. He tested different-size legs and various versions of climbing feet. One pair had squared-off toes that could balance on rock edges the width of a dime; another set were pie shaped and could wedge into vertical cracks; a third pair were thin blades that could stand inside shallow grooves in the face. Less than a year after he’d had both of his legs amputated, he was scaling routes more difficult than he’d ever been able to climb on his biological legs. Even more surprising was that, despite being viewed as a pariah in the town of North Conway, Hugh eventually faced his colossal mistake head-on and moved back to the little town for a time.
At a rest-stop diner near Moab, Utah, Mark described our route—a steep, five hundred–foot sandstone tower jutting fiercely out of the desert. I had heard of the Ancient Art tower, one of the desert-climbing classics known for its corkscrew summit. Mark was a laid-back climbing bum who laughed easily, and I liked him immediately. He lent help just like he laughed, with an easy confidence. He wheeled behind me in the diner and said, “Big scary sign ready to clock you in the head on the left,” or while I was eating my dinner, Mark chuckled and said, “Dude, you’re about to eat the garnish.” He knew what it was like to need help, especially in his days recovering in the hospital. Mark wasn’t shy about receiving help either. As I sat in the passenger seat of his truck, he’d ask me to jump out and pull his chair out of the back. I learned to unfold it, pop the wheel on, and place it near the driver’s side so he could use his arms to shimmy on.
Along the mile-and-a-half trail to the base of the rock face, I got the privilege of carrying Mark on my back, piggyback style, his legs resting on my curled arms as they strained to jab my trekking poles out in front of us. With all 165 pounds of him on my back, his head protruding over my shoulder and his muscular arms clutching my neck, we were an out-of-control video game in which this sputtering, slightly defective vehicle tottered and swayed while Mark desperately worked the joystick. Knowing that if I bit the dust, he would too, Mark’s directions were urgent. “Deep ruts in the trail.” I jerked to the left to avoid them. “Cliff on the left!” I jerked back right and bounced jarringly through the ruts. “Whoa! Rock straight ahead.” With Mark’s directions and the sound of Hugh’s footsteps a few feet ahead, we managed to progress up the trail. Near the base, Mark directed us to a large boulder where I turned around and lowered him onto it with relief.
As the three of us sat side by side, I listened intently as Mark and Hugh shared their epic stories of loss on camera. I had gone blind from a boring genetic disease and, at that moment, longed for my own cool disaster story. When they turned to me, the words began to spill out of my mouth. “I was five hundred feet up on an ice face,” I started, building steam as I went. “At that very moment, two giant stalactites simultaneously broke off and plunged into my eye sockets. I hung there, flailing in pain for … four days until help arrived!” They both hesitated and then laughed awkwardly. With Mark’s cameraman shooting video, Mark said, “My accident was in 1982.”
“That’s weird,” Hugh said. “Mine was too.”
And again, I plunged forward, blurting out, “Mine too,” and waited through the next few moments of uncomfortable silence as the cameras rolled.
Hugh then pulled a small tool kit out of his pack and proceeded to pop off his prosthetic legs, unscrew his walking feet, and screw on his smaller plastic and rubber climbing feet. He made it seem as normal and commonplace as changing shoes. Mark donned his chaps and assembled his rope ascension system. I laid out the ropes and slung my harness with gear, and up we went. Hugh led the five-pitch climb. I seconded, followed by Mark. As I played out rope for Hugh, I heard him make delicate face moves up thin, sloping holds. He told me that he had learned to feel the rock through his feet.
“I’m a better climber now,” Hugh laughed down from the face, “because I’m lighter, about twenty pounds to be exact. In fact, when I first started climbing with prosthetics, I was making it onto the cover of magazines like Outside. Some people wrote that I should be banned from entering climbing competitions, because I was cheating. They thought my prosthetics gave me an unfair mechanical advantage. When people started complaining about my unfair advantage, that’s when I knew I was back on top.”
Hugh’s prosthetic legs were designed to suction onto his stumps. His climbing tights acted as another precaution to hold them on while he dangled in midair. “I’m glad you’re wearing a helmet!” Hugh yelled down. “My climbing tights have a rip in them, and I’m not sure if my left leg’s gonna hold. It’s happened to me before. I was climbing Skytop, in the Shawangunks, working on a new route; I took a fall and spun hard into the wall. One of my feet snapped off and fell a long way, clattering in the boulders below. A freaked-out hiker down at the base retrieved it for me, and I named the route ‘Footloose and Fancy-Free.’ So if you hear something whizzing past your head, it’s probably my leg.”
On the top of the first pitch, we were starting to feel comfortable around each other, and I asked Hugh if he minded if I felt his prosthetic legs. He didn’t, and I touched the thin metal shafts like stilts. I knocked on them with my knuckles, and they made a hollow sound. “When I was seventeen, I was five eleven, but with these things, I can be whatever height I want. On an overhanging, gymnastic climb, I can be short, so I can crunch my body up. On a blank face, with the holds far apart, I can make myself as tall as I want.” Hugh told me he liked to shock people at weddings by extending his legs as far as they would go, so he was about seven feet tall. Then he’d hit the dance floor, grabbing various unsuspecting women and throwing them over his shoulder and swooping them through the air.
The day was growing colder. I wished I had brought my gloves. I yelled down to Mark, who was just beginning to climb, “You got an extra pair of gloves? It’s so freaking cold, Hugh can’t even feel his legs.” Hugh humphed, and I got the impression that my joke wasn’t that original.
With that, Hugh yanked up the rope, and I started climbing. Reaching the top of the pitch, Hugh and I secured one end of the rope to an anchor in the rock, so that the rope dangled down to Mark. “We’re finally doing it!” Mark yelled up a few feet off the ground. I could hear the rope twanging with Mark’s weight. He had invented an ingenious climbing system. He wore a body harness attached to an ascender, a mechanical device that bit into the rope like teeth, making it possible to slide up but not down. Above, Mark used another ascender to attach a modified pull-up bar to the rope. He’d then slide the bar up, and when it locked off, he’d hang from it and do a pull-up to its base. Afterward, he would hang from his ascender, rest for a second, and repeat the whole process. With the stretchy rope and the wobbly bar, each pull up only gained Mark about seven inches. He’d climbed El Capitan in this same way, doing over seven thousand pull-ups in eight days.
Around Mark’s legs, he wore a pair of ballistic nylon chaps to protect them from the continuous abrasive sliding against the rock. Surprisingly, for Mark, the steeper the climb, the easier it became, since that meant the rope was mostly suspended in space, away from the rock, eliminating the added resistance of sliding and scraping. But the second pitch of Ancient Art forced us to climb inside a narrow, three-sided chimney containing a hodgepodge of deep grooves, overhanging bulges, and needle-sharp spears of rock. Inside the chimney, Mark yelled up, “What a scrape fest!” and he couldn’t have been more right. Mark constantly had to stop, reach down, and free his feet from an unending series of tight slots. Since he couldn’t feel his legs, he’d heave on the pull-up bar to no avail, look down with growing frustration, and see that one of his feet was wedged again. When he finally moved up, his rope would rub against the loose sandstone, sending down a spray of pebbles and dirt that bounced off his face and collected in his eyes, nose, and his open mouth. Halfway up the chimney, I heard Mark grunt. As a paraplegic, Mark had no bladder control, so he wore a pee bag strapped to his leg. While struggling up the wall, the bag had ripped off and spilled all over him. Covered in his own urine, his hands and elbows torn and bleeding, his face marred with grit, Mark just kept hauling himself up the sheer sandstone face.
Finally, above the chimney, Mark dragged himself onto our ledge and said, breathing hard, “Wow! I’m pumped, but it sure is good to be out of my wheelchair.”
The top of the climb was even worse for Mark. A long rock ridge, as narrow as the saddle of a horse, spiraled to the top like a corkscrew. I put my hands flat on the middle of the ridge and, with my legs straddling the sides, shimmied across. Mark laid his whole body flat on the ridge and pulled his way across, adding significantly to his assortment of scrapes and gouges. Beyond the ridge was a formidable obstacle—a flat, protruding shelf of rock about chin height that climbers call the Diving Board. I reached up and laid my hands on the edge, then used my legs to spring myself up and give me the momentum needed to heave my body over. I honestly couldn’t perceive how Mark would do it. I got ready to say, “Good enough. We’ll just call this the summit,” but fifteen minutes later, I heard the familiar scrape and the sound of Mark’s heavy breathing. “I’ve gotta get in shape,” he panted as he arrived at the large boulder that signified the very top. “Not bad for three gimps, huh?”
Each of us was incomplete, missing eyes, legs, even the use of half a body, yet I had carried Mark on my back up the trail; on the face, Mark had told me where to reach when the holds were just out of range, and Hugh had led the pitches using his miniature rubber feet. Together, we were a brotherhood, like those flawed, dejected, pimply characters I’d read about in comic books who came together to form an invincible fighting force. We were the X-Men. We were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even better than that, together we had become Super Gimps.
The wind blew, and it snowed heavier than before. “What does it look like?” I asked, waving my hand out into space.
“We’re at the highest point, as far as I can see,” said Hugh in his quiet, understated voice. “The desert floor is flat, with hundreds of sharp reddish-orange pinnacles piercing the sky.”
I thought about those pinnacles, rock eroded and sculpted by wind and rain over thousands of years. The result of that process was sometimes miraculous. The three of us had only spent a couple of days together, but I already felt a deep connection, born not from our triumphs, but from our common experience of loss and challenge, of being pulverized by those forces, and the arduous journey of reemerging.
The experience had awakened me to that process, to all the gritty sensory images that lay beneath the summit: the wild roller coaster of a blind/para/piggyback team, the chalky taste of desert sand grinding between your teeth, the violent scraping of rock tearing bloody gouges into skin you couldn’t feel, and the acceptance of a bursting pee bag and the stench of urine. I wanted to understand the impetus behind all that flailing and suffering. It had to be something deep and internal.
The question brought me back to the visceral memory of being thirteen years old and watching Terry Fox limp and shuffle across Canada on a clunky prosthetic leg. The miles had taken a terrible toll on his body, on his blistered stump. His thin face and his burning eyes had been the last clear image I had taken with me into blindness. In the hospital, Terry watched children dying of cancer around him, but that darkness hadn’t ultimately destroyed him. Instead he’d gathered it up, harnessed it, and converted it into something else. I felt like those burning eyes had reflected something deeper, a blazing internal light. In college history, I’d studied the Middle Ages when medieval alchemists toiled to turn lead into gold; they had never succeeded. Now, I wondered if there was another kind of alchemy, turning pain into purpose, darkness into light. It was a never-ending fuel source to struggle forward. A rare few had learned to tap into it, but for many, that light had dwindled and even flickered out. I wondered if you could grow it, nurture it, and ignite it in others …
“Hugh’s already agreed,” I heard distantly. “So are you in?” Mark’s voice came back into focus. “Dude, are you still there?”
Not having heard any of the details, I finally said, “Yeah. I’m in!”
* * *
Later, I was delighted to learn the details. The No Barriers Summit would be held in a storied place, in the heart of the Italian Dolomites, Cortina d’Ampezzo. This was the birthplace of climbing itself, where legends like Walter Bonatti grew up and trained to climb giants like K2, the second-tallest peak in the world. And it was where Reinhold Messner had gained the experience to eventually become the first person to climb the fourteen eight thousand–meter peaks of the world without oxygen. I even convinced Ellie to come along with Emma, who was a toddler now. We’d make it our first family vacation.
When I arrived in Cortina, we had dinner with Mark, Hugh, and the many supporters who had helped organize the event. Jim Goldsmith was a retired businessman who had met Mark at an event where he spoke about his historic climb of El Capitan. Jim was enthralled by Mark’s message, and the two of them had begun brainstorming. The idea had eventually led to this region of Italy where Jim had ties through family. I met the members of the city council who had invited us over to stage the summit and bring disability awareness to the community. Cortina was a beautiful resort town, yet it was poorly designed for those with disabilities. The cobblestoned sidewalks were narrow, twisting, and had few wheelchair ramps into buildings. Elevators had no Braille labels. Hotel room showers were cramped, slippery, and treacherous for those with mobility issues. And although Cortina had been the location of the 1956 Winter Olympics, the chairlifts were inaccessible, and the lift operators were untrained in how to help. The result was that people with disabilities didn’t venture out, especially into the mountains.
That week Hugh, Mark, and I gave talks and showed our adventure documentaries. We introduced Cortina to an array of adaptive sports like goal ball, a popular sport for the blind in which you dove for a ball with a bell inside and tried to huck it past the opposing team. It was all about hand-to-ear coordination. We showcased sled hockey in which paraplegics on sleds propelled themselves across the ice using two sticks, one side with curved blades and the other side with sharp metal teeth for pushing the sleds.
The second day, Jim Goldsmith, who had written a trekking guide to the Dolomites, led a few of us on a hike to a high mountain hut called a Rifugio in Italian. Jim was an amateur geologist, and he described in detail the Dolomite rock, a kind of limestone, porous and filled with a calcite that painted the rock with distinct hues of rose, yellow, and grays. He described the ring of high, jagged peaks, spires and towers and the continuous, sheer walls—some nearly three thousand vertical feet above us. Near the top, he took my finger and pointed it directly above us to the rock route Mark, Hugh, and I would be doing in a couple of days to close out the festival. It was the Cinque Torri (meaning Five Towers in English), a formation of five distinct limestone towers of varying heights and shapes that ruptured the skyline.
When it was time for our demonstration, everyone rode chairlifts up to the Cinque Torri despite a sketchy weather day in the Dolomites. Hugh and I lifted Mark piggyback style off the lift and carried him along the trail to the climb. As we ascended the five hundred–foot sheer, vertical limestone, we climbed into mist and clouds, and by the top it had begun to pour. This time, however, we weren’t climbing alone; we had an audience of a hundred observing through the giant bay window of the nearby Rifugio. When we rappelled down and entered through the large wooden door, we were surrounded by a group of children with Down syndrome, kids in wheelchairs, and some on prosthetic legs. They gathered around us, crowding in to check out Mark’s pull-up equipment and Hugh’s prosthetic feet. Jim said, for most of the kids, it was their first time in the mountains. We laughed and high-fived, trying to communicate despite the language barrier. It was a special moment, but I couldn’t stop thinking about these children watching us climb the Cinque Torri through the bay window like I had watched Terry Fox through a TV screen many years ago. It was a good start, I thought, but it felt like only the faintest beginning of something bigger. I wasn’t satisfied with these children standing inside, separated from all the adventure. They should have been outside, running and wheeling, soaked by rain and covered in dirt, right in the thick of it. I already knew this idea of No Barriers wasn’t just about disability awareness, accessibility, or even extreme sports. No Barriers was about bridging that dark expanse between the dry, cozy Rifugio and the wild mountaintop, and all the alchemy needed along the way. It was tantalizing to ponder all that it could become, but the prospect felt a long way off, like Mark scraping and bleeding toward a distant summit.
After everything concluded, we got together in the lobby of my hotel to debrief. Mark, always direct, cut to the chase. “This was a good start, but No Barriers is not a spectator sport. As my old friend Larry Boden says, ‘It’s about going from a viewer to a doer.’ So I don’t think we’re finished here.”