No Barriers

In June of 2016, we held our eighth No Barriers Summit at Copper Mountain, Colorado. As I stood on the stage about to speak at the closing ceremony, I could hear the murmur of the audience in front of me, a thousand people of diverse backgrounds and circumstances: people with physical disabilities, as well as those who struggled with obesity, brain injuries, and PTSD. There were those who’d survived cancer, strokes, addiction, and physical and emotional trauma. Surprisingly, lots of ordinary families had also joined our community, as well as CEOs and corporate leaders, who had taken the No Barriers principles and were applying them to their teams and organizations. Lastly, there were everyday people who just felt lost, or suffered from fear, anxiety, and self-doubt.

I could feel the energy under the Colorado sky as I began to speak: “It was while climbing a desert tower years ago with Mark Wellman and Hugh Herr,” I started, “that I first asked myself, is there something that unites our experience? Whether you’re blind, missing legs, or unable to walk—like the three of us—or whether you’re a veteran who comes home feeling alienated and depressed, or a parent struggling to lead her family, or a kid whose barrier is that he’s never been more than a mile from his house, or a teen in the suburbs who has no idea how to impact her world, or someone trying to grow a new idea into something magnificent. What is the glue that binds all of us together, every human who lives and breathes? Are there tools, ideas … is there a mind-set, a light inside that we can all access—to equip us for that journey?

“The answer has led us all here, to this movement that we are building. And what is the fundamental message of this movement? I wish it were as simple as a motivational slogan like, ‘If you believe it, you can achieve it,’ but life is not a storybook, and its lessons can seem shifting and contradictory. Our paths can lead us toward suffering, yet sometimes, toward the beginnings of change.”

The wind picked up and blew down from the mountain slopes and through the village. I could hear the No Barriers flags, hung from the stage, fluttering in the breeze.

“When I first started paddling into whitewater rapids, they appeared to me as utter chaos, but I found that if you pay close attention, and listen very carefully, you can discover a hidden map. Kayakers call this the line. It’s hard to read and decipher. It’s even harder to navigate. But if you manage to follow it, or even to get close, you can find a way through. That map, that line, that discovery, is what we call ‘No Barriers.’”

After the closing ceremony, I said good-bye to hundreds of friends, and when it all quieted down, I sat on a bench, facing the Rocky Mountains. I could feel the morning sun on my back. I said a quick prayer for my brother Mark. “I hope you’re proud of what I’ve tried to build,” I said. “For you.”

Then my mind scrolled through the last week of the Grand Canyon expedition. After a lot of internal angst, I’d decided to try Lava Falls again. My second run wasn’t dramatically different from my first. I paddled just beside the right eddy line and hit the same boils, braced as I’d done before. I felt myself going over. This time, though, I consciously willed myself to lean and lift the edge of my kayak. I bobbled for a precarious second and then shot by into the entry waves. Again, the V-Wave knocked me backward. I flipped but stuck my roll, angling farther out into the river to line up against the next test. My entry into the Big Kahuna waves was far from ideal. I didn’t quite get around and got slammed sideways. I rolled up, enveloped by collapsing water and foam, and was knocked over again. But this time I stayed calm, closed my eyes, and surrendered to the chaos as the roiling forces flipped and spun me around. “Eisenhower Tunnel,” I repeated several times as I felt my oxygen waning. Then the water stilled around me. My roll came easily, and I felt myself bobbing down the bottom of the Big Kahunas with Harlan’s jubilant voice yelling, “You’re through! You’re through! You did it!”

That night, one of Lonnie’s guides, Seth Dahl, presented me with a drawing he’d been working on at various camps. He described it to me as a dark river cutting through a deep canyon. “The boils,” he said, “often the worst when least expected, represent the unpredictability and hardship of the expedition. The imposing walls, massive and confining, forced us to confront our greatest challenges and our greatest discoveries.”

Penned across one of Seth’s canyon walls was a poem, written by Katie Proctor, one of our AzRA guides. She read it aloud:

Each stroke leaving a wake of inspiration behind like currents expanding out to distant shores.

You will not be eddied out in your quest for experiencing the fullness of current.

Strange how having the courage to live from a place of nonsense can lead to the living of your wildest dreams.

On September 27, 277 miles after putting in at Lees Ferry, our team rounded the final river bend, and I could hear the canyon walls shrinking and widening as the Grand Wash Bluffs gave way to the Nevada desert above Lake Mead. My mind swirled with conflicting emotions and memories from the river as our paddle strokes cleaved the smooth water. Harlan called out his final commands to me, “Small right. Hold that line,” and I heard his voice crack a little. I thought he might be crying. Then my boat touched the shore, and, as I climbed out onto the sandy beach, I heard soft, smiling voices.

“Arjun? Emma?” That’s when I began crying too as I reached out and swept them up in my arms. Ellie then stepped forward and joined the embrace, her warm voice whispering congratulations in my ear. As an extra surprise, a fourth familiar voice came forward, gravelly and accented. “Kami Tenzing Sherpa?” I asked incredulously. “Uncle Kami? All the way from Nepal?”

Then we were all hugging and swaying together. That’s when I understood the source of Harlan’s tears. He’d been bearing a lot during that last stretch as he saw my family waiting silently and expectantly on the beach. He’d also been carrying a burden throughout the entire project. He’d taken on the daunting responsibility of guiding me down a river that had once nearly taken his life, and he’d delivered me safely into the arms of my family, from his home, and now back to mine.

On the last night of our expedition, as I celebrated with my family at Pierce Ferry, I asked Ellie, “Where’s Harlan?”

Ellie put her hand on my shoulder. “He’s down at the river,” she said reverently. “He’s standing waist deep, and he’s letting the water run through his fingers.”

I remembered Harlan’s ritual, his pact: “I’ll come back someday, but for now, I’ve got some more life to live.”

Since the completion of the Grand Canyon expedition, the team had been charging forward in characteristic style. Lonnie “the LonDart” Bedwell outdid his accomplishment on the Grand Canyon by heading to Zambia with Timmy O’Neill and famous kayaker Eric Jackson. Together they paddled a twenty-five-mile section of the Zambezi River with rapids even bigger and fiercer than those of the Grand Canyon. When I asked him if he was scared of the crocs, he answered, “I wasn’t too worried. If one came at me, I was told to paddle straight at it, and they usually duck. Then, of course, you turn around and paddle like hell!”

Lonnie still hunts with the man who accidentally shot him, and he recently organized a turkey hunt in Indiana for blind and visually impaired veterans. “Hunting blind,” he says. “Why not?”

But topping all of his accomplishments, he finally took a leap and bought a cell phone. Although last time I called him, I got this voice message: “Hey, you’ve reached Lonnie. Thanks for calling. I’ll call you back as soon as I can see to find the phone.”

For Steven Mace, our expedition became a launching point. He distinguished himself as such a valuable hard worker, he was subsequently hired as a guide for Arizona Raft Adventures and now works in the Big Ditch.

When I asked Timmy O’Neill what he was going to do after the Grand Canyon, he said, “Continue to live a life of chaos, rebellion, mystery, and love.” For his fortieth birthday, he BASE jumped off El Capitan and Half Dome in one day, and he continues to push the boundaries of climbing and slacklining. In honor of his brother Sean who was paralyzed, he helped found Paradox Sports, with a mission of promoting adaptive mountain sports. Most recently he’s been volunteering with the Himalayan Cataract Project in developing countries like Ethiopia, assisting in eye surgeries to cure preventable blindness.

While poring over river maps of Peru, Rocky Contos made a remarkable discovery. The Apurímac in Peru had been established as the most distant source of the Amazon, but after careful examination, he determined that the nearby Rio Mantaro was actually eighty kilometers longer. Not wanting to miss out, Rocky scrambled to put together a plan and headed for South America. After hiking for two days to the headwaters of the Rio Mantaro, Rocky spent the next two months kayaking and traveling by boat, becoming the first person ever to complete the entire descent of the Amazon from its most distant source to the sea.

Rob Raker was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer in 2010, but he has outlived the initial prognosis and is still going strong. In February 2016, Rob was accepted into a clinical trial at the NIH, a treatment involving a genetically tailored vaccine that could help his immune system fight the cancer. Since February 2016, his PSA has stopped increasing.

Just before Rob’s sixty-first birthday, his dear friend Steve Edwards died of cancer. Steve was a fitness legend who helped develop P90X and was known for creating grueling birthday challenges. To honor Steve’s life, Rob devised one of his own:

Harlan Taney spends as much time as possible in the Grand Canyon. Based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, his company, 4 Corner Film Logistics, has worked with the BBC on a reenactment of the Powell Expedition, a production on the condors of the Vermilion Cliffs, and projects to save the Grand Canyon from proposed mega-development. “It’s a wild and sacred place,” said Harlan, “one of the Natural Wonders of the World, and I intend to keep it that way.” Recently, while working on a conservation film in the canyon, Harlan had a revelation. “The Grand Canyon,” he said, “is only one of countless threatened environments around the world, and media content could be a powerful tool to preserve them all.” As a result, he recently founded an organization to capture video footage of natural habitats that are endangered worldwide and archive them in an open-source database—all to create awareness for their protection. As Harlan excitedly told me the news, I remembered the story of his first trip down the Grand Canyon as a little boy, and I pictured other children tossing sticks into other sacred and wild rivers, watching them drift away, and having the chance to dream about where they go.

Besides my kayaking team, there were so many others whose lives had intersected with mine over the last fifteen years. It was quite a list. Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg, from our Tibet expedition, expanded their Dream Factory by moving to Kerala, India, where they created Kanthari, a training center to help visionaries learn the skills to start their own social change projects throughout the developing world. A kanthari is a small but spicy chili that grows wild in every backyard of Kerala. Sabriye said that a kanthari is also a symbol of a new kind of leader, from the margins of society, who has the guts to challenge the status quo, who has fire in the belly, and innovative ideas to make a difference. Since its founding in 2009, they have trained one hundred forty-one participants from thirty-eight countries, resulting in more than eighty-five social projects that reach thousands of beneficiaries.

The Tibetan students were faring well too. After graduating from Braille Without Borders, Kyila completed Kanthari leadership training and founded Kiki’s Kindergarten in Lhasa, where blind and sighted children play together and learn skills that prepare them to attend elementary school. Sonam Bhumtso graduated from high school and was one of the first blind students in China to pass her gao-kao (university entrance exam). She now studies Tibetan medicine. Gyenshen leads the Braille printing press that produces all the textbooks and materials for Braille Without Borders. Tenzin and Tashi run their own medical massage clinic with ten masseurs. Tashi also teaches Chinese at Braille Without Borders. Dachung started a medical massage clinic and was so successful he opened two more. After selling all three, he learned to play the flute. He did that well too and was soon the leader of a professional orchestra of blind Tibetans performing traditional Tibetan music.

Mark Wellman now works with veterans and disability organizations, traveling the country with his portable twenty-four-foot climbing wall, conducting adaptive climbing seminars. “Some of the participants,” Mark said, “may not be able to dress themselves, or feed themselves, but if they can move just one finger, we can get them out of their chair and up on the wall. They can climb.” And some of the results are profound. “I had one guy last year,” Mark said, “who was born with spina bifida. He was obese and had to use a power wheelchair. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. We got him up on the wall, and a year later, he shows up again. But this time, he’s lost a hundred pounds. He’s using a hand-crank chair. He’s looking me straight in the eye and smiling, and the best part—he’s got a mohawk.”

For Kyle Maynard, making history on Kilimanjaro wasn’t quite enough. On February 21, 2016, Kyle crawled to the summit of Aconcagua, at 22,841 feet the highest point in South America.

Mandy Harvey admits she’s still “afraid of nearly everything.” Despite that, in 2016, she released her first full album of original songs, entitled This Time. As for writing and performing music she’ll never hear, she does it to tell stories and give encouragement. “What’s the point of having gifts,” she says, “if you don’t share them and use them to love others?”

Ryan Kelly, who helped me understand the nature of post-traumatic stress, is a playwright and novelist. All his works have centered around our nation’s wars, but, now back from Iraq for ten years, he says he’s finally ready for a new kind of book, this time a comedy. He describes it as “a story of hope.”

At fifteen, Emma continues to volunteer at a rescue organization for stray dogs and cats. She’s now fostered and found homes for seventy dogs. Her last, whom she named Duncan, was cracked in the head with a mallet soon after birth by his owner and thrown in a trash can. Somehow he lived. When Emma received the dog, he had a dent in his skull and stared straight ahead. Duncan had to be guided to his food and water dish. Yet with love and care, one week later, his tail was wagging, and he was running and barking in the backyard. Emma said, “Hey, Dad, Duncan is a No Barriers dog.”

Ellie continues to be my greatest ally. Not only has she tolerated me over the years as I’ve delivered flowers with the petals all disintegrated after an unexpected downpour, washed dishes with syrup instead of dish soap (the bottles feel remarkably similar), or gone to dinner with one black shoe and one brown, she also pilots our tandem bike, guides me on skis, and, this summer, will once again be behind the wheel of a thirty-six-foot RV on another Weihenmayer family adventure. As a No Barriers pledge, Ellie started swimming again after a thirty-year hiatus and came away with a blue ribbon at the Colorado Masters Championship. Through our family’s Reach Foundation, Ellie administers several scholarships for children throughout Nepal. Recently, she read me a note from one of our girls, Apsara:

My school is very beautiful. There are big trees. There is a big playground. I study in grade 3, and I got distinction. I am toppest girl.

Ellie has also been instrumental in bringing animals to the No Barriers Summits, like Molly the pony, who had her leg chewed off by a dog after Hurricane Katrina and was fitted with a prosthetic leg. The bottom of her hoof is in the shape of a smile, so with every step, Molly leaves a trail of joy. “We should all try to do the same,” Ellie says.

After playing in a recreational soccer league for a season, Arjun made a bold decision to pursue a spot on the A team again. At the tryouts he made several textbook crosses that resulted in goals. Ellie said the three coaches were observing and scribbling notes in their booklets. A few days later, Arjun was invited on to the A team, where he excels. This winter, in his indoor league, he scored a hat trick! As far as Arjun’s Nepali mom, Kanchi, last year, we set her up with fuel, wax, and wicks to start her own candle business. Because of Kathmandu’s frequent power outages, candles are in high demand. She makes about fifty pounds of candles a day, and when she sells it all, she makes much more than she did working construction. When Arjun turns sixteen, we plan to visit her in Nepal.

Recently, I was in Boston for a speaking event and visited Hugh Herr at MIT. He was excited to give me a tour of his new endeavor, the Center for Extreme Bionics, one of the most advanced research centers in the world. Hugh and his team are building bionic prosthetic ankles, knees, and hips, as well as exoskeletons that expand human performance and surpass what nature intended. The tour included equipment so sophisticated, it was hard to fully understand: treadmills surrounded by multiple cameras, computers, and pressure-monitoring devices able to record and map the human walking gait, and wheel-shaped devices that measured tissue properties in biological limbs to make socket molds and prosthetics much more comfortable than ever before.

After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2015, Hugh took on a project to help a professional ballroom dancer, Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who’d lost a leg in the terrorist attack. Hugh and his team spent over two hundred days studying dancers with biological limbs, recording how they moved on the dance floor and the forces that they applied with their legs. Then the team programmed that intelligence into the computers within a bionic limb. One year later, Adrianne showed off her new prosthetic on the TED stage by dancing for the first time since her injury. She received a standing ovation. Inspired by this, No Barriers joined Hugh in a partnership to build specialized prosthetics to help other survivors run, bike, swim, and even dance again.

Most impressive of all, Hugh told me that he’d been working on “neural implants,” a way of connecting bionic prostheses with the human biological nervous system, which will allow the user’s brain and nerves to simultaneously coordinate knee and ankle joint movement. “In six months,” Hugh said, “I’m scheduled to undergo surgery to become the first human test subject.”

Finally, Hugh showed me some shelves, right next to the treadmill, that held numerous prototypes of prosthetic devices that had failed. “What happened to this one?” I asked, holding a metallic knee joint in my hand.

“I guess I had a brain lapse that day,” Hugh said, chuckling. “You have to understand, most things in the lab wind up not working. So you deal with failure most of the time.”

Hugh called it his “Shelf of Shame” and then laughed again. “Although I guess we shouldn’t be ashamed of our scars,” he said. How rare and lucky he was, I thought, to have a physical trail of his mistakes, ideas that hadn’t turned out as he’d expected, yet had still shown the way.

I thought about his philosophy that it’s important to reach and explore, “and if the world turns out to be different than you expected, to view that as adventure, not failure.” Kayaking had validated that concept for me. Heading into every rapid, I’d desperately tried to stay on the line, knowing it was the clearest and cleanest way through. However, sticking the perfect line was a rare occurrence, and more often, the forces of the river had thrown me into wild and unexpected places. Perhaps that map, I thought, wasn’t all about staying on course, but equally about falling off the line. It was in that turbulence where the greatest discoveries seemed to be made.

Seeming to corroborate that argument, a couple of years after our No Barriers Cotopaxi trip, I got an unexpected e-mail from Matt Burgess. At first, I was just relieved it wasn’t from his lawyer. He wrote, “Erik, when I reached the top of Cotopaxi, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. I look at that moment in a picture hanging on my wall every day.” Matt went on to describe his dog, Brinks, whom he’d trained as a service dog. Matt suffered from sleep apnea and used a CPAP machine, but sometimes he ripped it off in his sleep and stopped breathing. When that happened, Brinks would lick his face and wake him up. But Matt noted that many veterans and special-needs children couldn’t afford the training service dogs required. So, inspired by Brinks’s love and dedication, he made a decision to found his own organization. Freedom Fidos would select dogs from local shelters and train them free of charge, and he had already successfully placed twenty-three dogs, with a waiting list of over a hundred. He was now raising the funding to build a first-class facility to increase his impact. Matt told me his dogs had been responsible for stopping suicides, empowering veterans to get off psychotropic drugs, and contributing to hundreds of lost pounds.

Cotopaxi was a huge catalyst that put me on this journey. It propelled me to have the confidence to start Freedom Fidos. The mountain is a metaphor of life and it can teach us so much. So many times now, there are mornings I wake up feeling totally unprepared, totally unqualified, but I can reach out to the past, to something I did on that trip and grab on to it. So much of who I am today and what I believe about myself is because of those experiences. Some days now, I feel crushed, but no matter the snow or rain or ice, I can keep putting one foot ahead of the other, or as Charley says, “little by little, we go far.” On the climb, about 75% of the time I wanted to quit. And there were times I broke down and wept. But while standing on top of Cotopaxi, seeing for miles around, feeling exhausted, sick, hungry, and flooded with emotions-what I will never forget was feeling that light. Now my greatest prayer is to live within its glow, and help others live there too.

The impact of No Barriers continues to grow exponentially. In 2017, we’ll provide transformative experiences for nearly 5,000 diverse youth, more than 3,000 individuals at our Summits and events, and almost 300 warriors with disabilities. Our annual operating budget has nearly tripled since 2012 to $6 million per year. We have expanded to thirty full-time employees, more than fifty seasonal expedition leaders and a board of thirty visionaries. Most importantly, we are changing lives in ways Mark, Hugh, and I only dreamed of. After our recent Summit, a participant wrote, “Last weekend was BEYOND amazing and life changing! I didn’t say this to anyone, but I’ve really been struggling to find a purpose in my life. Outwardly, I look very positive, but I had given myself a deadline: Find a reason to keep living, or I’ll end it … Last weekend made me realize I have potential, and purpose, and I finally feel excited about life again—truly FEEL it, and not just putting on the outward mask for others. Words are inadequate to express my gratitude for giving me the opportunity to participate. I hope to be involved in every No Barriers for the rest of my life, and I’d LOVE to become more actively involved in putting it on and helping others gain the same experience!”

Yet, we haven’t been able to save everyone. Marine staff sergeant Dan Sidles was a member of our first No Barriers expedition who reached the summit of Lobuche, and was a mentor on the second trip to Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Dan had been instrumental in helping Matt Burgess stick it out and not quit the program. While in Iraq, Dan was wounded twice and received a Purple Heart, but he’d told us the real war began when he got home. In the spring of 2016, Dan Sidles lost his battle with PTSD and took his own life. I attended his memorial on a windy yet brilliantly sunny day in the mountains above Winter Park, Colorado. The honor guard marched, and two buglers played taps. A soldier in full dress uniform laid the American flag over his urn. The ceremony ended with a group of bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace.” It was the second time in three years I’d heard this song. The first was listening to Adrian Anantawan play his violin on a mountaintop above Telluride. It was a moment full of hope and possibilities. But this time, it was to say good-bye to Dan. The commander in charge read a passage from The Grand Army Songster and Service Book:

The march of our comrade is over and he lieth down in the house appointed for all the living. This grave reminds us of the frailty of human life and the tenure by which we hold our own. In such an hour as ye think not, the final summons may come which no one disobeys. It seems fitting that we should leave our comrade to rest under the arching sky, as he did when he pitched his tent or laid down in days gone by, weary and footsore by the roadside, or on the field of battle. Our departed comrades no longer hear the sound of waves or float upon the bosom of the deep, no longer sail beneath peaceful skies, nor are driven before the angry storm. May each of us, when our voyage and battles of life are over, find a welcome in that region of the blessed where there is no more storm-tossed sea, nor scorching battlefield.

As I went through the line to pay my respects, I reached out to touch the urn containing Dan’s ashes. Your struggle is finally over, I thought. Rest in peace.

As for me, that September, I helped lead our next No Barriers Warriors expedition culminating in an ascent of Gannett Peak in Wyoming. After all the training, we headed out on the long trail through the Wind River Range. Countless times, my guide would stop on the side of the trail and, in a quiet, humble voice, describe the huge expanses of forest, alpine meadows with herds of elk, and surrounding skylines of granite ridges—with the wind scouring the grasses and rocking the trees.

Arriving at camp each night, covered in soft pine needles and surrounded by ponderosa pines, we’d play games that the team called the Gannett Olympics. They’d consist of shot-putting boulders, throwing branches like javelins, and flipping fallen tree trunks. One evening as the sun set, we played a game of charades. Going blind so young, I’d never learned and was reluctant to join in, but a few soldiers patiently taught me the signals, how to pull my ear to say, Sounds like, and how to bring my thumb and forefinger together to say, Shorter word. I sat back in amusement as these veterans, often so stoic, came out of their shells to dance crazily on a pile of rocks trying to act out an ’80s TV show.

In the midst of the fun, the weight of the expedition was never far away. At each camp, our No Barriers flags encircled boulders and hung from ropes. Some soldiers had inscribed their flags with the names of friends, now deceased, with whom they were honoring this climb. Like Tibetan prayer flags, which send messages to the heavens, the flags flapped in the wind, sending tributes to the fallen. One night, a soldier awoke screaming, and it was a long time before many got back to sleep. I sat up too, pondering all the nightmares that sent the mind spiraling into an endless loop of pain and futility.

A few days later, I sat on the side of the trail, leaning against a tuft of grass, with Sergeant Paul Smith, a teammate who had been guiding me all day. Paul had a tough start to life. When he was a young teenager, his mother was raped and killed, and his father, completely overwhelmed, sent him off to military school. After graduating, Paul signed up for the army, serving his country faithfully in Iraq as part of the First Cavalry Division. But while he was traveling in a Humvee through Baghdad, an IED exploded, piercing him with shrapnel and burning him over 50 percent of his body. “There isn’t a place on me,” he said, “that isn’t pitted with burns and scars. But the physical stuff is secondary. As a kid, I’d watched old John Wayne movies with the First Cavalry coming to the rescue. They’re known as ‘First Team’—one of the most decorated divisions in the entire army. I said to myself, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do. That’s who I’m gonna be.’ And now I was being airlifted away. I wasn’t ready to go.”

The guilt of that day, the feelings of letting down his team, of leaving them behind, of not being able to fight anymore, sent Paul spiraling downward. “It was straight-up shame,” he told me. As a result, Paul’s family fell apart. Paul was involved in numerous car accidents and a suicide attempt. He abused drugs and alcohol. One of the anniversaries of his injury he spent in jail. “I’ve wasted a lot of time beating myself up,” he said. “But I feel like I’ve just woken up from a dream, and I know now, I need a life of purpose.”

The next day, the guides climbed from our high camp toward the top on a scouting mission. When they returned that afternoon, they reported grim news. It had been an unusually warm summer, and the route to the top, normally snow, had melted away. In its place stood a wide-open crevasse, and beyond, a steep, twenty-meter section of hard, gray glacial ice, crumbling and desiccated. Everyone had been prepped repeatedly that nature was fickle. Conditions changed, and there was value in the journey itself. But despite that, their heads hung low as they absorbed what this meant. A teammate banged rocks together, the auditory manifestation of the internal anguish everyone was feeling. My heart broke with the knowledge of how hard each had worked just to be here. Some had given up alcohol; others painkillers. One veteran had lost sixty-five pounds, and another had used the program to work through an ugly divorce.

The guides all left the circle and asked the team to figure out what to do. Some were adamant. “If we can’t summit, then let’s get the hell out of here!” But others weren’t ready to give up. An hour later, when the debate was finished, they’d made their decision. They’d climb Gannett as high as they could to celebrate their high point and conclude this experience with honor.

After climbing through the predawn and early morning, the team arrived at the crevasse. They gathered up and stared silently down into its depths. Their eyes rose up the wall that was blocking their way. “I’m tired of getting close yet falling short in my life,” Paul said. “I’m going to summit something … I promise.” A few war stories were shared around the circle. A lot of tears were shed.

Then another picked up a rock and threw it into the crevasse. It clattered on its way downward. “That rock represents my nightmares,” he said, “and I’m putting them behind me.”

Next, others began doing the same, picking up stones and chunks of ice and throwing their nightmares into the dark tomb.

“As much as I wish there was a way around this thing,” Charley said to the climbers huddling together, “this is as high as we can safely go today. This barrier is real, and it’s not going away. It’s not going anywhere. But we can. So take a good look around. Be content. Be proud of how far we’ve come together as a team. Let’s continue to honor the past, but now it’s time to turn around and focus on what’s out there.” He gestured toward the terrain far below.

As the group picked up their packs and got ready to leave, one turned back toward the face and called out a name: “Sergeant Glenn Harris—Third Ranger Battalion.” Then others began calling out, and the names of their fallen comrades echoed off the glacier and rang out over the mountains like a twenty-one-gun salute.

As Paul Smith carefully descended, he turned back and yelled a name as well. “Second Lieutenant James Goins, tank commander, Alpha Company—First Cavalry Division.”

On the way up, Paul had been forced to focus on his feet, checking every step, but now he paused for a moment to stare out at the Wind River Range and take in the view. He could see the sharp ridges and peaks below, capped with snow, thrusting out in different directions like shooting stars. He was so high, he could see over the ridges to the foothills far beyond that unfurled onto the Wyoming grasslands, and for the first time in a very long time, Paul could see his future. He took a last glance at the expansive amber prairie sweeping all the way to the horizon, swiped the tears rolling down his face, and headed down.

NO BARRIERS PLEDGES

Hello, I’m Joyce. I just turned sixty-seven this spring. My husband passed away ten years ago, and the last decade was an enormous struggle with grief and battling weight gain. I lost confidence and motivation. As time has passed, I am finally more at peace and want to move forward. My No Barriers pledge is to reclaim my life and the years I have left. I’ve always thought of myself as active and adventurous, and so as a start, I plan to hike across Scotland, a country that I love and a journey that I have always wanted to take.

Hi, I’m Amber. I’m a housewife and mother to four small children. I am lucky to have the luxury to be able to stay at home with my children while my husband works seven days a week to provide for the family. I am probably not your typical No Barriers person. I have no physical problems or challenges. But I am longing for meaning, adventure, and a team of friends. I often struggle with fear, but seeing all of the amazing people who are a part of No Barriers has inspired me. My No Barriers pledge is to be courageous and to teach my kids to be kind and brave as they grow up.

My name is Daisy, and I was tipping the scale at almost 250 pounds. In addition to knee and back issues, my doctor kept warning me about diabetes and other ailments associated with weight. I started taking care of what I was eating and trying to be active every day. Now almost four months later I have gone down to 216 pounds and have lost many inches. My oldest child will be getting married next year in December, and as the mother of the bride, I want to look and feel great for all the pictures. But most importantly, I want to stay healthy for my kids. So my No Barriers pledge is to get down to 175 pounds!

My name is David, and as a youth, I was constantly in and out of trouble. When I turned eighteen, I found a new life in the U.S. Army and served fourteen years as an infantryman. After getting out, I spent the next twenty years fighting with drug addiction and alcohol abuse. The good news is that this summer is three years of sobriety. My No Barriers pledge is to use my struggle to help other veterans who face depression, anxiety, and addiction by raising and then donating therapy dogs and running support groups.

To pledge, go to www.touchthetop.com

THE PLEDGE OF NO BARRIERS

I pledge to view my life as a relentless quest to become my very best self,

To always view the barriers in my life as opportunities to learn,

To find ways to build teams, serve those in need, and do good in the world,

To push the boundaries of what is possible,

And prove that what’s within me is stronger than what’s in my way.