The next summer, July 2005, we were back in Cortina for our second installment of the No Barriers Summit. It was great to return to the stunning mountain setting, the village situated in a natural amphitheater ringed by jagged peaks. This year, Hugh Herr had seriously ratcheted up the technology and innovation, and he’d be running a whole new component called “Technology Meets Physical Disability.” Hugh was now leading a major biomechanical research lab at MIT, and he’d invited scientists and representatives from companies like Össur and Ottobock, both making advanced computer-controlled prosthetic limbs. All the technologies would be featured at our expo tent in the village center. The year before, we’d mostly been about showcasing, but this time, we were shifting into full-on active participation. Attendees would get the chance to test equipment and ideas and see what was possible.
Some of the clinics seemed more like science fiction. Mike May, a blind technologist, led tours on the mountain trails outside town, using a talking GPS device he invented that speaks with a computer-synthesized voice. He’d previously plotted waypoints at intersecting trails, picnic benches, and a scenic waterfall, and those auditory outputs guided the large group of blind hikers. At the end of the tour, he said, “Identifying beautiful waterfalls is one thing, but next year’s model will be even better. It will identify beautiful women.”
Mark Wellman was just off another adventure, a six-day mountain bike ride of the 103-mile White Rim Road in Canyonlands National Park. In places, the trail was so soft and sandy his wheels spun out, and he had to drag himself through the desert on his elbows while towing his mountain bike behind him. Mark had brought some of these three-wheeled, hand-cranked bikes and led outings with other paraplegics over rocky trails no wheelchair could ever access. A group called DRAFT (Disability Rights Advocates for Technology) brought Segways adapted with special seats for people with mobility and balance issues.
As I tapped my white cane toward the expo, I could hear the group whirring by and whooping as they performed 360s in the parking lot. To broaden the appeal beyond physical pursuits, we’d even invited a well-known artist to the No Barriers experience.
That morning, we all convened at the expo tent where Hugh Herr gave a short presentation to formally kick off the summit. We sat in folding metal chairs as he took the podium. His voice was low and measured. “There is no such thing as a physically disabled person,” Hugh began. “There are only physically disabled technologies.” He let this heady proclamation sink in, and then he went on. “What are the characteristics of an innovative person or an innovative community? The No Barriers framework that you’ll see and experience here over the next few days is all about exploration. At MIT, I’ve had straight-A students, but when they get work in the research laboratory, they’re paralyzed, because they view an unexpected outcome as failure. When you look at the great creative minds throughout history, there’s a characteristic of fearlessness.”
There was a collective quiet in the room. People leaned in, listening to Hugh’s soft voice growing in volume and confidence.
“Thomas Edison, for example, did not care if he was laughed at or if people thought his ideas were stupid or silly. That fearlessness enabled him to try things, to conduct experiments that a normal person would never try. One of his experiments was to take a rubber tube, and place one end of the tube near his ear or forehead, and the other end of the tube at the base of a pendulum. The experiment was to see whether he could think and move the pendulum. Even in his day—probably especially in his day—people would think that was very, very silly.”
The group chuckled at the image, and Hugh waited for the laughter to subside.
“But we have a representative here in this tent from a group called Cyberkinetics, whose new BrainGate System does essentially what Edison was trying to do—to turn thoughts into actions. The technology will allow people with traumatic spinal cord injury and loss of limbs to communicate and control common, everyday functions literally through thought. This is happening—as are many other remarkable advances that you’ll see in this exposition area—because of that childlike exploration. I believe that it’s important to explore, and if the world turns out to be different than you expected, to view that as adventure and not failure.”
We all applauded, and Hugh closed by inviting everyone to visit the booths and talk to the scientists and product developers. He encouraged the end users, those who would actually be putting the technology into daily use, to engage in dialogue with the creators, because No Barriers was the only event that brought these groups together in one place. Hugh’s talk made me consider all the days he had spent in the machine shop, intricately shaping wooden feet and slowly layering on the stealth-rubber coatings until they were works of functional art. I thought of Mark experimenting with different bars and grips for the pull-up system he’d conceived. Their initial inspiration to climb again had been followed by a lot of trial and error to develop the right tools and techniques. And now we had all these elements here in Cortina.
As the audience dispersed, I headed over toward Hugh. I flicked my cane in front of me, found the table Hugh was behind, and greeted him with a handshake. Though we’d climbed Ancient Art together and I felt a deep connection with him, he wasn’t much of a hugger, at least not in public when he was in his professional mode.
“This is what I’ve been working on,” Hugh said, handing me a solid, heavy device that was about a foot in length, four inches by four inches, rounded and circular at the top. It was smooth and dense and felt sort of like a car part.
“That’s the Rheo,” he said, his voice rising with enthusiasm as he described his creation. “The first artificially intelligent knee.” He guided my hand to the top, rounded section. “The muscle, if you will, is up here, and there’s a magnetic field inside that changes the resistance as a person walks and moves. The part you’re holding, the knee, gets bolted to a socket interface above that attaches to the user’s residual leg or stump. And a pylon and foot attaches to the bottom of the knee. Inside, it has a microprocessor that responds to input at one thousand times per second, integrated sensors, and a fluid actuator, all allowing the user to walk more naturally, even over rough terrain, and up and down hills. It’s a major breakthrough—a bionic knee.”
I laughed, then did my best voice-over impression: “A man, barely alive. We can rebuild him. Better, stronger, faster.” Like most American boys in the mid-’70s, I’d been a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man series in the years before I lost my sight.
“That’s right,” Hugh said with a modest laugh. “Electromagnetic artificial body parts. That’s bionics, and that’s what we’ve been focusing on at the MIT Media Lab. Only problem is that, with all the R&D, he’d be closer to the Sixty Million Dollar Man.”
I handed the Rheo knee back to him, very carefully, totally impressed. I thought how far his designs had come since the first legs and feet he’d created and could not imagine what he would come up with next.
“These are going to change lives,” he said. “With the number of vets we have coming home injured—especially those with above-the-knee amputations—these knees will be instrumental in getting them up and out of wheelchairs and even walking with a natural gait.”
I could feel people pressing in behind me, wanting to talk with Hugh, so I moved on.
In the far corner of the expo tent, Andy Parkin was displaying his paintings and sculptures and giving a talk. I could hear his distinctive Yorkshire dialect that I had to work to understand—he pronounced the name Doug as Duke, the word love as loov.
I’d met Andy the year before, while I was climbing Les Droites, a mountain face above Chamonix, France. We didn’t get the chance to spend a lot of time together then—just a dinner and a quick tour of his workshop and studio—but I was immediately drawn to his passion and drive. Climbing friends of mine told me that in the early ’80s, Andy had been one of the most respected alpine soloists in the world, known for taking on extremely difficult and dangerous routes throughout the European Alps, South America, and the Himalayas. In 1995, he’d won the coveted Piolets d’Or award—the Golden Ice Axe—for pioneering a new ice and rock route up the Esperance Col on Cerro Torre in Patagonia.
“I wasn’t always an artist,” he began as the audience of about thirty people settled in and listened. “I dabbled some as a young lad, sketches of the countryside and such, but nothing serious. Growing up, I read some about the famous British alpinists—like Mallory and Irvine—and started to dream about life as a climber. By 1984, I’d moved to Chamonix and was living full-time as a climber and mountain guide. That year, I had a serious climbing accident. The doctors all told me that I’d never climb again. I remember getting very angry when they told me that—I thought, But you don’t know me! I developed my painting in that time while I went through surgeries and physical rehab and all the rest of it. Painting saved my mental health. Honestly it did. And I got my climbing back through art. So now I think of myself as an artist/climber.”
That was the end of his talk, and he started chatting with people about his art and sculpture. He’d been unsatisfyingly brief, though I knew that he was more about action than words. But I also knew there was more to his story, parts he’d revealed to me in France. He’d been leading a client up a route on the Riffelhorn, near Zermatt, when a huge slab of rock he was standing on cleaved from the mountain, and he catapulted thirty-five feet down, slamming onto a flat belay ledge. His left pelvis shattered in thirteen places; he ruptured his spleen; one arm snapped like kindling, and he fractured a bunch of ribs. His client was able to call for help, and a helicopter came and whisked Andy off the mountain. But the horrid detail I remembered most—a pretty important one to leave out—was that after the doctors performed open-heart surgery on him and saved his life, they said that his heart had literally “exploded out of its casing”!
I headed straight over and greeted him warmly, thanking him for coming.
“I’m just over the mountain in Chamonix.” He laughed. “It’s no bother at all.”
I asked him to talk about some of the paintings that were on display.
“Ah, well, there are a few just here from my early days right out of hospital,” he said, pointing my hand to a wall behind him. “The critics quite rightly call this my ‘dark’ period. I saw the mountains then, immediately after my accident, as dark and somber and foreboding. And life was like that for me too. They are images of mountains drawn in dark pastels and charcoals because that’s the way they can be, if you spend enough time in them—not some pretty, lovely mountains the way people like to think of them, but mountains with dangerous, dark moods as well. The dark side of the mountains.”
I’d been in mountains when they were ominous and stormy, so I knew what he meant.
“But I’ve lightened up some.” He laughed. “And my painting has too. Say, we’re set for the Hexenstein tomorrow, yeah?”
We’d made a plan for him to take me up a classic local crag while we were in Cortina. I still had so many questions for Andy, and an ascent together would be the perfect opportunity.
* * *
The Sass de Stria Hexenstein is a classic Dolomite crag rising at the junction of the Falzarego and Valparola passes, just a short drive west of Cortina. I felt the morning sun on my face as we made the twenty-minute approach to the South Arête for eight roped pitches of climbing. I followed the sound of the bear bells we’d mounted on Andy’s trekking poles as he hiked ahead of me up a steep mountain trail for about a mile. I could hear Andy’s shuffling, herky-jerky gait in front of me, his left side just a beat behind. It made me envision the Frankenstein monster in the old black-and-white movies. As if reading my mind, Andy remarked, “I’m not as fast as I once was. My hips and pelvis have lost the free movement they had before, and I drag a bit. One of my climbing friends calls my walking ‘the movement of a very graceful crab,’ and I s’pose that’s about right. But I still get on, don’t I?”
I laughed. “We’re even,” I added. “Because my friends tell me that with my trekking poles jutting forward, I look like a giant praying mantis and that my walk looks like a controlled stumble.”
As we walked, I asked him how he’d been able to start over, to start from scratch after being so badly broken.
He came to a stop ahead of me.
“It was fits and starts, really,” he said. “After my accident, I was in the hospital for a long time, surgeries on my pelvis, hips, and elbows. I got very depressed, thinking about myself as a cripple, really. I couldn’t imagine a future. It was soul-destroying. But in the hospital, I never stopped thinking about climbing mountains. Out of boredom, I got some sketchbooks, paints, and pencils and started sketching and painting from memory. At some point I rolled my wheelchair over to the window and started looking out at the mountains and painting. After the hospital, I was on crutches for four years. I threw myself into painting then. I was hobbling around, riding up on the teleferique, limping about a hundred feet from the cable car and painting—that was my only contact with the mountains. It was the closest I thought I might ever get to them again. But I kept scrambling around, testing my capabilities, getting stronger. Remaking my body. Remaking myself, really. Anyway, I s’pose you could say I painted my way back into climbing. I started trying short routes, new routes that were hard for me at the time, and each route for me was a healing process.”
It was the most I’d ever heard him open up. We started up the trail again, and the ground changed from dirt to looser scree that skittered down the hill below us as we went.
“Almost there,” Andy said. “Just a couple of hundred yards ahead. I can see where the trail ends and the crags begin. It’s funny, what people tell you that you can or can’t do and what you are willing to believe,” he went on. “After the accident, secretly, I did actually believe that my climbing days were probably finished. But it turns out they weren’t. And here we are.”
The two of us geared up, and Andy led the rope upward. The beginning of the route followed a long arête—a ninety-degree edge like the corner of a tall building. Andy called down to me, “It’s exposed but comfortable climbing.”
The morning sun warmed the rocks, and it felt good to be in the mountains with Andy, whose solo endeavors—especially hard, remote, winter solos—were the stuff of mountaineering legend. “What was your favorite climb?” I asked as we sat on a ledge eating candy bars.
“That’d have to be Makalu,” he said without hesitation. “Funny choice too, considering I never stood on top of it.”
Makalu was the fifth-highest mountain in the world and one that interested me. It was only fourteen miles from Mount Everest, in the Khumbu region. Standing at almost twenty-eight thousand feet, it is known for its perfect pyramid shape, with four distinct ridges. Climbers said that it was one of the most beautiful peaks in the world.
“That was major for me, the whole experience,” he said. “It was 1988, four years after my accident, and I was just off crutches. When I got invited along to trek to its base camp, I went just to paint, really, and I didn’t expect to climb. My climbing lifestyle was finished. I brought some supplies up there, packed all my paints and canvases in my rucksack. I painted the mountains at each camp, hanging canvases inside the tents to dry and to view, and after my mates headed up to try the summit, I started venturing alone, higher and higher each day. I struggled mightily, limping, dragging my bum leg. It was slow slogging. But each go, I’d study the face of Makalu, just sit there in the snow, look at it and think about it for hours: how the shadow and light moved across its ridges, and precisely how the ice seracs cracked and broke away from the face when the sun lit them up at the perfect angle, and how late in the afternoon, the wind whipped and shifted plumes of snow over its four ridges. Then I’d go back to the tents at base camp and paint. Each day, I felt a little stronger, and I’d go a bit higher up. Always alone. Eventually, all the way up to twenty-four thousand feet.”
I pictured Andy there, a tiny fleck on an endless expanse of snow and rock gazing at the mountain until he knew every inch of it, its intricacies and patterns, how it changed from one minute to the next.
“And one day,” he went on, “I’d just finished a canvas. I looked at it, and the energy of the art fueled my desire to climb again. I realized I could climb! I could carry on; I could do this! I had come full circle. The painting brought me back to the climbing, but now in a deeper way. I was remade back into being a climber, but en route, I became an artist. I went there looking for space to find myself, but I also discovered something new.”
Since that expedition, I knew that Andy had gone on to become a famous artist throughout Europe, known as much for his artwork as for his climbing. His art was in such demand that he’d expanded his studio, and he was frequently commissioned to create unique outdoor sculptural installments. The critics raved about his work, as one wrote, “Not for its chest thumping on the top of a mountain, but for its expression of fragility.”
Another two hours of easy chimney climbing and we reached a corner crack where the rock got super smooth and polished. I struggled as I scanned and groped for holds, but Andy talked me through it, and eventually we arrived at the last belay.
“There’s an easier gully curving over to the right,” he said. “But I like this nice slab just overhead, leading straight to the summit. Let’s take that.”
At the top, we sat quietly in the sun next to the large metal summit cross and ate some bread and cheese as a cool mountain breeze swept over the summit.
Finally, I said, “I didn’t know how art and climbing could be so connected.”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “I use my paintings as a barometer to gauge when I’m ready to go climbing. When I start painting well in a place, it means I’ve really adapted to it. Then I’m ready. It’s all inseparable: art, climbing, and life. It’s less about conquering or dominating and much more about adapting in the face of change.”
* * *
Later that afternoon I met Andy back at the expo tent where he was showing people his art exhibit. He’d agreed to show me some of the sculptures he’d been working on.
“I’ve been fabricating objects out of materials I’ve found wandering around the mountains,” he said. “There’s one I really want to show you.” He led me to a display pedestal, guided my hand to chest level, and placed it on a sculpture.
I ran my hand up and down the piece to get an overall impression. There was what felt like a marble base, and then a long, skinny metal post, onto which was mounted something angular and tilted, like a rock about the size of a large book. My fingers felt holes and ridges, and on one side, as I slid my hand around trying to figure out what this thing was, my knuckles bumped into metal, like tendrils of woven wire. It wasn’t big at all, but packed with a lot of movement. I touched the form, feeling what could be a leg hanging out in space, then another leg touching what I was realizing was a rock, then a shape like a body, a small rounded head, then two arms reaching upward and pulling, holding the top of what felt like an overhang.
“A climber!” I said with delight. I was certain.
“Exactly right,” Andy confirmed. “I really like this piece,” he went on. “The rock is mounted on that post, and there’s a pretty good overhang. The climber—he’s made of copper wire. You can feel the muscles in his thighs, his arms. He’s hanging free, climbing up and over a steep angle.”
“Like he’s barely hanging on,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. Precarious, I’d say. Expressing a sort of fragility. From the time we’re born, we’re sort of staggering, falling into the next moment in a state of … déséquilibre, as the French say.”
“What’s that word?” I asked.
“Déséquilibre. It means … that point of imbalance. That moment, hinged there, vulnerable and tenuous. Maybe about to lunge toward something else.”
“Déséquilibre,” I repeated. “One foot on, one foot off.”
Andy let that statement hang in the air for a few moments, like his copper figure clutching the rock. “We’ve all been there,” he finally said.
I heard the clicking of a cane approaching behind me and a woman’s voice. She introduced herself to Andy and me. I knew her from earlier in the festival. I’d tried unsuccessfully to get her to join us on the GPS tour with Mike May. Despite my best efforts, she’d declined, admitting to me she was out of shape and overweight, and being blind herself, she was really frightened by the idea of hiking or climbing. She asked Andy if it would be okay for her to touch some of his sculptures, and he led her to the same one I’d just felt.
“Put your hands on it just there,” he said. “Tell me what you feel.”
I wondered how long it would take her to figure it out.
After a few minutes of exploring the form, she exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a mountain climber, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right!” Andy replied, pleased.
“I could never do that,” the woman admitted.
“What do ya mean, make sculpture?” asked Andy.
“No.” She laughed nervously. “Climb on a rock face. Just the thought of it makes me break out in sweat.”
“Ah, but you can, love!” said Andy. “Feel the figure again and tell me what you see.”
“It feels terrifying,” she responded. “There’s nowhere for him to go, and he’s about to fall into space, to his death.”
“Feel just above his left hand,” Andy said.
“I don’t feel anything,” she replied after a minute. He allowed her to keep searching through another long pause and then said, “Do you feel a little dish in the rock? About an inch above his left hand?”
“Yes,” she finally said with relief. “I feel it.”
“That’s where his left hand will reach next. Now feel to the right of that, just a little higher. Do you feel a ledge?”
After several more moments, she replied, “Yes. I think I feel it.”
“That’s where his right hand will go,” he said. “Now tell me where his left hand will reach next.”
“To this little knob here?”
“That’s it,” he said, getting excited now. “Keep finding the holds above.”
“I think there’s a hold here to the right,” she said, also now excited, “and another ledge up to the left.”
“See?” he finally said, his voice elated. “It may look like he’s going to fall into space, but there’s a way forward if you look carefully.”
“Those holds, they’re like a trail leading him up,” she said.
“That’s right, and soon he’ll be at the top.”
As they went back and forth, I chuckled to myself. Leave it to Andy, I thought, to forge a sequence of tiny secret holds in what felt, at first, like blank, featureless rock.
“We’re doing a climbing clinic above town in a little bit,” Andy continued. “And I think you should join us.”
“I don’t know if I could do it,” she said hesitantly.
“Feel the figure on the face again,” he said. “Feel the holds again. I think you know how to do it, and I think you want to try.”
She scanned the sculpture for another few minutes, carefully tracing the figure’s feet, his hands, his body position, and the holds above. Then her head lifted up, and she said softly, “I guess I could try it.”
“I’ll be there to guide you every step of the way,” he said, beaming.
As we all walked out of the tent together toward the climbing clinic, I almost couldn’t believe what had just happened. Almost twenty years earlier, Andy had painted the face of Makalu over and over until his possibilities had emerged like colors and images forming on a canvas, and now he had somehow passed that same clarity on to a total stranger, a woman who had already decided something was out of the question for her. It almost felt magical, like he’d infused himself into his art, so that it transferred on to all those who encountered it. She had touched the sculpture once, and then again and again and again, until, slowly, painstakingly, she’d been able to see the way forward, like a hidden map, leading her up the seemingly impossible face.
* * *
As the festival concluded, I was sad to say good-bye to so many friends like Andy Parkin, Mark Wellman, Mike May, and Jim Goldsmith, but I also had another adventure to look forward to. Hugh had agreed to stay an extra day to climb one of the Tre Cime with me. The Tre Cime hosted the most famous rock climbing in the Dolomites, consisting of a massif of three strikingly vertical towers standing apart from all the other peaks around it.
After breaking down the equipment, we drove forty-five minutes to the Rifugio, at the base of the Tre Cime. We arrived after sunset and had time only for a quick meal before settling into our bunks for the night. We’d be getting a predawn start the next morning to climb the fourteen rope pitches of the classic Cassin route on the Cima Piccolissima. Wind rattled against the bunkroom windows, and I heard Hugh sit up to secure the latch, then slide back into his sleeping bag. Then the wind stopped, and it grew eerily quiet and still as all the climbers in the main room also retired to their bunkrooms.
I couldn’t sleep and just lay awake, with too many thoughts crowding my brain. I had met so many people at the festival who had smashed through barriers in their own lives and had introduced the world to new ideas and innovations. Their stories of moving forward seemed very different in some ways, but in others, they were the same. Hugh’s and Andy’s stories were at the forefront. There were so many confluences. I kept thinking about Andy trying to rebuild his life from shattered bones and a heart burst from its casing to creating art so powerful it could make a person glimpse her possibilities. I thought about Hugh’s unlikely journey from lying in a freezing snow pit on the side of Mount Washington, waiting to die, to leading a bionics research lab at MIT and building the most sophisticated prosthetic legs in existence, legs that were enabling people to get up from their wheelchairs and walk for the first time since their loss. In Hugh’s journey, however, there was a terrible casualty: Albert Dow, the young man from the search-and-rescue team who had died in the avalanche trying to save him. When he was rescued and carried out of North Conway, Hugh was despised by many of the local climbing community for causing this tragedy. I could hear him tossing and turning in the upper bunk, just a few feet above me, and I figured he was still awake too.
“Hugh, when we climbed Ancient Art together,” I said, “I remember you telling me that after your accident, you moved back to North Conway, back to the scene. Why would you ever do that?”
I knew my question must have seemed like it came out of the blue. “I mean, why did you move toward the very thing you should have been running from?”
Instead of being offended, or pretending to be asleep, he answered, “That’s a good question, one that I’ve also asked myself.”
It was as if lying on his back staring up into the darkness had temporarily freed Hugh, and he began to speak more openly than I’d ever heard him before. “My time in North Conway was a healing time, definitely for me, and, I hope, for the community. Since I lost my legs, so much had happened in such a brief amount of time, and I think I had been building toward that decision for a while. Moving there felt like a natural extension of a process I was going through.”
“But how did you summon up the courage,” I asked, “to go back to a place where you knew you wouldn’t be welcomed?”
“It’s kind of like looking at a big face you want to climb. From a distance, it appears forbidding and impossibly steep. The rock looks featureless, with no way up. But as you hike closer, you begin to see how it might be done. You start seeing the ledges scattered up the wall, and the cracks that you can use to connect them. You start to see the places that are less than vertical, the seams and pockets you can use to surmount the roofs. I guess I knew I needed to get close up if I were going to see the way forward.”
Although Hugh was casting his memory back more than twenty years, he spoke with vivid recollection. “In the hospital, after my amputations, I remember looking down at the sheets where they dropped off—the space where my legs used to be, where my legs should have been. And I just started wailing. It wasn’t only the loss of my legs; it was that Albert Dow died trying to find me. I felt like a monster, both physically and because I had screwed up and my actions led to another’s life ending. I was consumed by tremendous anger, and that anger became a fierce drive, a kind of fuel source. Lying in that hospital bed, I dreamed of climbing again. The first prosthetic legs they gave me were awful. There were a lot of bloody stumps. Going climbing with my brothers, there were times I barely made it to the climb. I just took off my legs and crawled through the brush and creeks for hours until I reached the rock. One time I was so angry, I just started yelling and cursing and actually threw my prosthetic legs at the rock wall.”
“That anger eventually led to some good things,” I added.
“Eventually,” he agreed. “My first breakthrough was the realization that I didn’t need human-shaped feet for climbing. Initially, I put a rock-climbing shoe on a prosthetic foot. It immediately appeared utterly ridiculous. It occurred to me that it was unnecessary to have a foot the same size and shape as an adult human foot. I realized that I didn’t need to reproduce the legs and feet I’d lost: I could create something altogether new, prosthetic designs that no one had ever thought of before. Feet perfectly suited for their task, for wedging into tiny cracks and for balancing on small edges. Once I was wearing the new climbing feet and was back on a sheer rock face, there was no stopping me.”
Just as Sabriye had done with Tibetan Braille—instead of waiting around for someone else to innovate a solution, Hugh did it himself. His lack of lower legs had become like a blank canvas on which he could create anything he wanted.
“My climbing reached levels I’d never achieved before, and I just kept pushing the boundaries. By 1984, just two years after the accident, I was back in North Conway. The owner of a local climbing shop hired me to help stitch harnesses and packs, so all I did was work and climb, riding my bike back and forth between the shop in town and the rock faces. I had set my sights on making the first ascent of Stage Fright, at Cathedral Ledge. It was really more like an obsession. What I’d become known for, my form of expression, was climbing very difficult rock faces with little protection, where there’s a distinct possibility you’ll die if you fall. It’s an extraordinary mental stress to do those kinds of ascents, because you have to be perfect; there’s no option. Stage Fright had all those characteristics. It was hard to even find people to belay me—it was simply too terrifying for them to witness. The climb had a very difficult move at the top requiring a lunge—I’d have to leap in the air a few feet and catch a tiny hold. I worked on the route for three weeks, climbing up to the base of the crux over and over, staring up at it, studying it, trying to map it in my mind. I’d only have one shot.
“Finally, I found myself there. My legs were shaking—I could feel them vibrating—but I was committed. My left foot had a good hold; my right foot was on a tiny ridge, my right hand on a thin flake my fingers pulled on sideways. To make the pocket hold about three and a half feet above me, I had to push off and leap upward, letting go with both my left foot and right hand.” Hugh paused, reliving the moment.
Déséquilibre, I thought to myself. One foot on, one foot off.
“I sank down, lunged, and caught the pocket, locking my fingers. And then I was standing on top of Cathedral Ledge. Across the valley, I could see Mount Washington, where I had been lost and where my rescue had gone tragically wrong. I felt elation immediately, but really it was a kind of resolution in my psyche. It was as if I had gone up Mount Washington, but instead of continuing into the storm toward the summit, I descended, and Albert Dow didn’t die.”
I pondered how much courage that had taken. Not only the climb, but also facing the demons born in that raging winter storm.
“That’s a lot to deal with at such a young age,” I offered. “You were only what, nineteen?”
“Yes. And afterward I just broke down. It lasted for two days, like a nervous breakdown. I just locked myself up in my boardinghouse room, didn’t eat, didn’t come out; I just lay on my bed and cried. I knew when I finished Stage Fright, it would be my last ascent of that magnitude. Some said it was the hardest climb in the country.”
It was getting late, and we had a big climb in the morning. The wind was picking up again outside, rushing past the Rifugio in a mournful wail.
“What did you do afterward?” I asked.
“A few days later I returned to my home in Pennsylvania and enrolled in college at Millersville University,” Hugh said. “I didn’t know exactly how it would be expressed, but I was going to create something new. I believed that using every cell in my body to do something worthwhile would be a way to honor Albert Dow’s memory.”
Hugh rolled over on his bunk, exhaled, and went quiet, signaling that he was done talking. As I lay there dozing in and out of wakefulness and dreams, I could see strange distorted images of Andy Parkin shuffling toward the base of Makalu, like a large crab, his backpack stuffed with painting supplies. I saw Hugh, crawling on his hands and knees up the trail and heaving his legs at the rock face, that rage leading him back toward the mountains, until he stood atop Cathedral Ledge, his arms stretching toward Mount Washington with exaltation, but more so in atonement. In the end, they had both found their way home. But that seemed almost secondary, because along the way and through all that struggle, they had given birth to something new. It was like an unintended summit, like aiming for the top of Lhakpa Ri and discovering instead an Ice Palace.