May 25 marked 15 years since I became the first blind climber to summit Everest. It is still what I am most famous for, but in many ways the most influential moment of that trip happened after my descent. 

When you get down from Everest, you’re worked. Your legs feel like rubber bands that have been stretched too many times, you’re coughing, you’re totally wind-burned and sunburned. I even remember my tongue was swollen. People dream of different things in those situations, but as a blind guy, I was dreaming of smooth sidewalks—just being able to walk down a smooth sidewalk and not trip over a rock. 

On my way down, at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall, I stepped over the last little rivulet of water, and someone handed me a beer. I just stood there, thinking, Wow, everything’s good. And that’s when our team leader and guide, Pasquale “PV” Scaturro, sat me down and said, “Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do.” 

I thought it was really inopportune timing. “What the heck? Let me go enjoy the sunshine in Colorado and lay in the park and hear my daughter,” who was one year old at the time, I thought. I just wanted to relax. 

When you come home from Everest there’s a lot of fanfare. I was the grand poo-bah at our town parade in Golden. You get a lot of attention. But the whole time, I was thinking about PV’s words and trying to figure out what he meant. Soon after my return, PV and I went climbing together in Clear Creek Canyon. He was belaying me, and I asked him about what he’d told me. He said, “The biggest problem with Everest is that you finish and you get all your awards and pictures, and you put them up in your room, and then that room sort of becomes a museum—or, at its worst, a mausoleum”—where your life dies afterwards. He was telling me not to stop living just because I reached the top of the world.

At first I didn’t know what I wanted to do after Everest. I kept climbing and went on to finish the Seven Summits in 2008. People were writing me letters, saying, “Hey, I’ve got this great thing for you to do, I’m going to shoot you out of a cannon.” But I didn’t just want to be the blind guy finding the next stunt; I wasn’t going to live my life as the blind Evel Knievel. 

Then I got a letter from a blind German lady who was living in Tibet named Sabriye Tenberken. She was running a training center for blind kids who got spit on and were seen as the scourge. A lot of times society doesn’t know what to do with blind people. In Tibet, they can’t watch the yaks or do some of the physical labor, so they fall to the bottom of the caste system. But these kids were some of the most educated kids in Tibet. 

Sabriye invited me over to spend time with the kids, and I organized a climb on the north side of Everest. I took six of them up a 23,244-foot peak called Lhakpa Ri. We almost got to the summit, but it didn’t really matter. Then I got home and somebody said, “That’s really cool, but what about people with challenges right here in America?” So I started No Barriers USA with Mark Wellman and Hugh Herr, and we’ve grown tremendously. We have 30 staff members and we work with thousands of people: youth, folks with physical disabilities, veterans, as well as people who are just lost and looking for purpose. We try to give them a map for how to rebuild your life after you get beat down, which happens in lots of different ways.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű took many different forms for me after Everest. I started kayaking when I was 40, and in 2014 I kayaked down the Grand Canyon. I’m 47 now. I’ve been back to the Himalayas probably 10 times since 2001 to climb. Seven years ago, my wife and I adopted a little boy from Nepal, Arjun Lama Weihenmayer. Now I’m working on my third book, No Barriers, which is coming out next February, and pondering PV’s wisdom all over again. 

Everest still feels like it happened a moment ago. I’m glad I summitted at 32; I wasn’t so young and had more perspective to fall back on when I got home. The mountains are a beautiful place of solace, you get this great adventure and adrenaline, but they can also be an addiction, a way to avoid life. You keep thinking, How do I top this? But if you’re thinking it in the wrong way—like, What can I put on my resume next?—it sends you down a very dangerous path. And I don’t think that leads to fulfillment. 

The Sherpas always tell you the summit of Everest is only the “halfway summit.” “Full summit” is when you’re back down at Base Camp. I think of it like this: the summit was an incredible place, but the real summit is when you come home and take the gifts you earned by struggling on Everest and use them to do something meaningful.

What’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s ahead.

*As told to Devon O'Neil

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șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű recently published an article called “The 10 Greatest Moments On Everest.” Naturally, the list includes Tenzing Norgay and Ed Hillary’s first ascent and Reinhold Messner’s solo ascent. But my ascent is fourth on the list! That’s quite an honor to be included with those greats, as well as Tom Hornbein, Willi Unsoeld, Apa Sherpa, and Göran Kropp.

However, it’s important to remember that I couldn’t have reached the summit without my dedicated teammates. Being blind, I knew that no matter how good of a climber I had become, I wasn’t going to get to the top of Everest alone. After an ascent of Denali, I was fortunate to meet Pasquale “PV” Scaturro at the Outdoor Retailer trade show. Full of bravado, PV is a modern-day swashbuckler. He approached me and said, “I’ve heard about you. Have you ever thought of climbing Everest?” And in the next breath he asked if I wanted him to lead the expedition.

Assembling the rest of the team required careful selection of climbers with the right background and a high level of trust. We turned down a couple of amazingly talented climbers who we felt would interfere with team cohesion.

Once the final selections were made, we decided to climb Ama Dablam to test our skills and build our team strengths in a real Himalayan environment. From the start, our climb was plagued by terrible weather. Though we got close to the summit, we ultimately decided to retreat.

During the descent, Eric Alexander took a 150-foot tumble that banged him up badly. Although we were all good climbers, as yet, I didn’t have any indication that we were prepared for Everest. But when Eric fell and went into shock, the team really stepped up. First, our laid-back doctor, Steve Gipe, kicked into gear, retrieving the cache of oxygen bottles we had set aside for emergencies, racing back up to Eric, and slowly nursing him down the mountain. The rest of us, much higher up, worked through the storm carrying down loads. Without any prompting, different team members took turns guiding me down the icy ridge in the darkness and wind, and around 1:00 a.m. we straggled into Base Camp thoroughly spent. Surprisingly, that crisis didn’t shut us down. Instead it catalyzed us, from a group of individuals into a real team.

A month before we were ready to leave for Everest, Eric was still having lung problems from his injuries that had developed into pulmonary edema. He hadn’t been able to train most of the year. He told me I should kick him off the team. “Eric,” I said, “people have been counting me out my whole life. If I did that to you, what kind of hypocrite would that make me?” He thought a moment and said, “Damn. Then I guess I’ll go. I don’t think I’m strong enough to get to the summit, but I know I’m strong enough to help you get there.”

On our summit day, two of my teammates, Brad Bull and Jeff Evans, were out in front and were faced with a dilemma. At the base of the South Summit, they looked up to see two sets of fixed lines. On the left was a relatively easy route for sighted climbers, but climbing jumbly, unconsolidated rock is a lot harder for me. The snow slope on the right would be a lot easier for me, but that rope was buried a foot under from a recent storm. Instead of ascending the rock, Brad and Jeff spent two backbreaking hours pulling the ropes free, exhausting work at 28,000 feet.

For me, what was even cooler than my reaching the summit was the fact that 19 of 21 of my teammates reached the top that day, the most climbers from a single team to reach the summit in a single day. Lots of “experts” said my climb was a big mistake and would result in a disaster. Instead, we made history. Guys like PV, Eric, Brad, Jeff, and all the rest of my friends stepped up in a hundred different ways that made the difference. More than 10 years later, I still look at this team as the best I’ve ever been a part of.

And by the way, each team member has used that experience to do great things in the world. Luis Benitez went back to climb Everest six more times. PV rafted the Blue Nile from source to sea. Our base camp manager, Kevin Cherilla, led a quadruple amputee to the top of Kilimanjaro. Others have climbed Himalayan peaks with blind Tibetan teenagers who were ostracized in their society because of their blindness. Right now, teammate Charley Mace, is attempting Everest’s West Ridge as part of a team sponsored by First Ascent. Go get ‘em, Charley.

Last year, we all got together to celebrate our 10th anniversary by taking a team of soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq up Lobuche, a 20,000-foot peak near Mt. Everest. We’ve just recruited another team of injured military to take part in the second Soldiers To Summits program. You can learn more about this work at .

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