Jeff Evans and Bud Brutsman recount their 2015 Everest rescue of Chetna, an Indian climber left half-frozen at 28,500 feet amid 30-40 mph winds, saved by Sherpas despite extreme conditions. Evans, who microdoses mushrooms daily and occasionally uses psychedelics like Chibichu, contrasts modern climbing’s commercialization with Ueli Steck’s legendary free solo speed—like Alex Honnold’s El Capitan ascent—and the risks of descending exhausted. His medical work in Nepal (2015 earthquake) and Mosul (ISIS front lines) treating trauma, including a critically wounded Iraqi soldier named Haseeb, underscores his dedication to high-stakes environments over first-world trivialities. Evans’ past—arrests before 18, van life, and mentorship from Boulder climbers—shapes his future expedition plans, where he seeks purpose through shared struggle, gratitude, and service, framing extreme experiences as antidotes to emptiness. [Automatically generated summary]
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Thank you, thank you for joining NPR. Please, no, I don't want to do that.
Bud Brutzman, Jeff Evans, Bud Brutzman, good friend of mine, next door neighbor, and Jeff Evans, his buddy, who apparently has lived a fucking crazy life rescuing people off of Everest, traveling up there, and Bud told me we were at this little carnival with our kids, he's like, gotta get this guy on, gotta talk to him, so no pressure.
Front and back, and they had, you know, these earpieces, and, you know, he asked me to go, but I'm like, that's, I'll climb Everest, but I sure as fuck ain't gonna take you down the Grand Canyon.
Yeah, I mean, they were telling us before we went up there, like, you know, blind dude's gonna die, and when he dies, what'd you think was gonna happen?
You've got to put in the work, but it's so commercialized that it's been diluted to a certain extent.
I am a Sherpa advocate to the core.
You know, these guys do the work.
I mean, they put it in every single day.
They're humping the loads.
They're cooking the food.
They're setting the lines.
They're taking the biggest risk and then allowing, you know, other folks to move through a little bit more effectively and faster and, you know, not have to expend as much energy.
So, we kind of got in there in 01 towards, I think, ahead of the curve just a little bit as to when it started to The face of Everest changed a little bit.
But it also adds that they're dangerous, because if I was looking at it, it's sometimes more dangerous now because there's lines.
There's sometimes 300 people, 600 people in a line, and you're waiting for some asshole who didn't train, and you're watching him try to climb up this little 20-foot cliff, and they don't know how to work a jumar, they can't climb.
But people go up there, and when we were up there, They had people, they literally, without talking shit about trekking companies, there were some companies like, all right, we're going to show you how to put your crampons as you're going on the icefall.
We had to, Jeff, not me, Jeff had to risk his life in helicopters going to high, high altitude to pick up people who shouldn't, no business on the mountains.
Because, you know, nowadays, the commercial component allows folks that have enough money to pay and then show up and get guided, basically, to the top.
So, back in the day, you know, if you didn't have your teeth cut, you know, it was on you.
And nowadays you can just show up and generally someone will be taking care of you, whether it's a guide or whether it's a Sherpa.
And so it's changed.
But I don't want to take anything from the folks who still go out there.
It's a dream for so many people.
It's still an aspiration and a life goal for a lot of folks.
And so, for instance, last year, we just saw, I mean, we saw a really nice cross-section of skilled, experienced climbers trying it, but then we saw a shit show.
You know, we saw a lot of folks who should have been on other peaks first, and then they weren't.
And I know we can buddy breathe, but let's pretend there's no buddy breathing.
And you're going to stick around and watch me die, and you're going to end up dying, or I'm going to grab ahold of you and grab your regulator, and we're both going to die.
You can't help anybody at that level.
You can't.
You're tired.
Your body is eating itself.
You're basically dying in the death zone.
He could explain that.
Basically, if your wife says, I'm sitting down.
I'm going to get up in five minutes.
You go ahead, and she's got a Sherpa with her.
And then you go, I go ahead.
And you get back to Camp 4, which is exactly what happened.
Get down to Camp 4 and look around.
Your wife's not there.
Holy shit.
And then they call us.
And they wake Jeff and I up, and we're like, you're going to what?
So I was with her, right, at base camp when we delivered her to her husband, and I was trying to gauge, like, is he going to be one of these guys that's like, oh my god, I'm so glad you're alive, or holy shit, she's alive.
So what had to happen is Jeff and I and our base camp manager, Anthony, had to take four Sherpas from Camp 4, took two Sherpas and then two more in the middle of the night.
So 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock at night, the most dangerous start.
Winds are blowing 30, 40 miles an hour.
It's 20 degrees below zero.
Nobody, nobody's ever done it.
You don't do it.
And we sent them up there and we said, can you go get her?
The fluid in your body starts to go to places it's not supposed to go.
Think about that.
So it goes up in your brain, and you get cerebral edema, and you make bad decisions, and you get a headache, and you lose your vision, and then you get pulmonary edema, your lungs fill up with fluid, and you drown in your own fluid.
This is like stepping out of the spade capsule at Mars and going, I wonder what this is going to do to my body, and you step out and shit starts popping.
Yeah, so the year we were up there in 2000, the year before, the fall before, there was a British guy, I can't remember his name, but he got caught up in the ropes, descending from the summit down the Hillary Step and got caught.
And there was nobody there with him.
And he got caught, caught, and he got stuck in perpetuity.
So we thought...
That, for sure, the first people that were going up in 01, that were a few weeks before us, had to cut him free.
Because we were speculating, like, if we're the first group that gets up there, we're going to have to scoot around this fellow, you know?
That is a very bad man right there, because they went out with some hobnail boots and some marginal equipment, and everybody was telling them that they were going to be dead for sure, and they said, we're going to charge ahead.
Well, and that's one of the reasons why we went out there.
We saved more Sherpas, and we pulled a lot of Sherpas off, because more often than not, They don't have helicopters and they don't have helicopter insurance.
And so we would go and I would pay for it.
They would go, there's a Sherpa who's really sick and he's going to die.
And then Jeff and I would just decide to pull him off.
The other thing they don't have is they don't have life insurance.
And you can imagine.
So a lot of these families, a lot of the Nepali and the high altitude workers' families, they lose their only source of income when these guys get killed.
So actually a friend of mine, Melissa Arnott, who was the first American woman to summit Everest without oxygen just last year, she started a fund called the Juniper Fund.
And it actually compensates the families when their loved ones are killed on the mountain.
And we're tracking and we're trying to talk to them.
They get her down to Camp 4, which is that track that you saw.
Then the trickiest part, as he'll tell you because I can't tell you, Camp 4 to Camp 3. Yeah, camp 4 to camp 3, and then camp 3 to camp 2, which they didn't even do.
They couldn't get to camp 2, which is straight on the Lhotse face.
Now, when you see it, the incredible thing about it is you're at this six-degree pitch, ice walls, he's at 26, 27, you know, 23,000 feet, and he's just going bang.
Once they summit, once the climbers are, and it's just, you know, humans in general, these climbers do it, then they want to find a more difficult route, or they do it without oxygen.
Well, I just read something today, this morning, about...
That there could be some emulators.
Who knows?
There's other super tough, badass climbers that are out there that are also freestyle on and doing shit without ropes, but he's at another level and everyone knows that.
That was the iconic image on Nat Geo, on National Geographic Magazine, of him standing just in his plaid short shirt, like on the ledge, you know, leaning back.
Well, I think there's just a few guys doing their own thing, and it happens to be free soloing.
And, you know, he's the pioneer.
There were other guys before him.
There was a guy named Peter Croft that was out there for many years, sort of.
You know, he did a route called Astro Man in the valley that was...
At the time, and I remember, you know, I was in my, I think my early 20s when Peter did that, and I remember reading about it and thinking, no, like, what?
How does one want to do, and I was just really getting into climbing a lot.
It didn't compute.
But Peter Croft, I think, and guys like him and like Alex just have a wiring that's very, very different than the rest of us.
And it seems reckless to many, many people.
But what I do seems reckless to many people.
So it's so relative.
And there's a scale.
And people that would look at Alex and be like, you're crazy, man.
And like you were talking about a little bit ago before we came on air was, you know, when you're stoned, you see the ball track better when you're playing pool.
You can get addicted to washing your hands if you're one crazy OCD guy.
I gotta wash my hands one more time.
You can get a mental pathway that's very destructive.
And you can call it addictive, but it doesn't demonize washing your hands.
I think his issue is when he doesn't take it, he says things aren't as fun, it doesn't feel as good, but I've been around him when he's taking it and he's 100% there.
He's like, wow, man, I can see your eyes and I'm thinking your eyes are looking at me.
He invented it when he was 14. He found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus, and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone.
He had a stone that he could look through to read these.
That dude bought it, and then he sold it to Larry Ellison, who just runs around in gold underwear and fucking has people carry him like he's an emperor.
You're walking and then you're looking for an animal that you're constantly using your wind checker, which is like a Visine bottle with talcum powder in it.
So you puff that in the air and you find out which way the wind is going.
My guide, though, he knew where the wind was going.
He just knew from his face and his neck and skin like he can tell like where's the wind blowing and he's like like this and he just puffed that smoke in the air and sure enough it was going exactly where it was shout out to Roman But his ability to sneak up on these animals is pretty fucking impressive, too.
You know, you do a lot of crawling.
Like, a lot of the grass is, like, waist-high, so you're doing, like, crawling, where you're moving, like, literally at a snail's pace.
Well, so the earthquake triggered a lot of glaciers that are hanging up around in that cirque and it released and a lot of stuff just blew through base camp and killed folks.
But throughout Nepal, throughout the countryside, I mean, we're talking villages that have stone huts and no mortar and no rebar and, you know, just...
So lots of devastation, lots of people dead, and lots of injuries.
So that day that happened, I knew I wanted to go to Nepal to help.
I'm a PA. I'm a physician assistant and I've specialized in emergency medicine.
So I knew I wanted to be there.
And more than anything, like focused on sort of Austere medicine, you know, like I want to go out there where shit's a little bit off and try and help the best I can.
So I went over there, I located an NGO called NYC Medics.
What's NGO? A non-governmental organization.
So not supplied or, you know, subsidized by the feds.
This is just like sponsorship, basically donation money gets you over there and you do your work.
So you're not under the auspices of the feds.
So I went over there with these guys, NYC Medics, which is a group of former New York City paramedics that realized they wanted to take their skills and go do some cool shit around the world.
So I found these guys.
I went over with them.
I was on the ground for a month way, way back, like in the way back.
This place called Dading Bessie, which is right at the base of the Ganesha Mall.
So this is a place that we landed in some helicopters and set up shop and there was a lot of these Nepalese that they're Tamang, Nepali.
That's their ethnic tribe, not Sherpa, but Tamang.
They see the helicopter come in and these white dudes get out of the helicopter and they're like, what the fuck?
We need help.
Are you here to help?
Yes, we're here to help.
So we had three helicopters worth of gear, downloaded it, set up our clinic, and we're there for a month.
We saw...
I don't know seven or eight hundred patients in the course of a month and it what started as trauma from the earthquake Sort of then segued into primary care Infections and yeah, I mean well and also believe it or not like a lot of You know Psychological pain.
Like, they were scared.
The earth was shaking still.
I mean, there was tremor after tremor after tremor.
I mean, every day, the earth would shake.
I got home, and for a month after I got back from there, I still felt the ground shaking in Boulder, Colorado.
Because it was just...
My body was still sort of...
The equilibrium was weird.
So, tremors every single day.
So, these people needed...
You know, anxiety medicines, you know, to be able to take the edge off.
So I was over there for a month.
We saw a bunch of people and it was very worthwhile.
So got connected to this organization and became good friends with all the folks who run it.
They do amazing work.
And so I got a call in January from one of the heads of the organization that says, We got this kind of kooky thing that we've been asked to do by the World Health Organization.
So he frames it up for me and he's like, listen, here's what's going on.
We've been asked by the World Health Organization to go in and be a trauma stabilization point in Mosul.
Which means you will be as close to the front line as possible, embedded with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces.
And your job will be to lead a medical team of, we had nine of us, within 2,000 meters of the front line.
That was the way it was framed up, and that's what we all sort of signed up for, and that was the agreement with the World Health Organization.
So we would be the first point of contact as these Iraqi special operations guys were going in and putting the fight to ISIS to liberate Western Mosul.
So, you know, Eastern Mosul had been liberated, you know, months before.
So that's all eastern Mosul on the east side of the Tigris.
And then on the west side, you know, ISIS was still sort of dug in right there.
And they were ready to put the fight down.
They wanted to get after it and save, you know, that's where their caliphate supposedly started or was settled.
And so our job as the TSP, this Trauma Stabilization Point, was to be as close to the front line as we could be, and this was the kicker, you know, within a margin of safety, but still be close enough to where we could receive the casualties.
As quickly as possible, stabilize them, and then get them to a forward operating suite, which was typically run by Allied forces, so our guys.
So, I said yes before I asked my wife.
Now, in retrospect, probably wasn't the best strategy because she was not super stoked, but I pitched it to her.
I've got an 11-year-old kid, and she gave me, I think, the least amount of pushback as anybody around me in my close network.
I mean, a lot of my boys were like, What the fuck, dude?
What are you thinking, man?
What's your point?
What are you doing this for?
What's your intention to go over there to a war zone, to a combat zone, volunteering, you know, and helping a group of people that you have no affinity for?
Yeah, and she knew what she signed up for when she married me.
So she knew she was kind of getting a little bit of a wild buck in her hands.
But this was different.
I can go climbing.
I can set my sights on this and that.
Get out there in the mountains or do adventure races and stuff.
And all that's cool.
But then...
Mad respect to the men and women that serve in our military, man, and put it out there every day.
But I've never been in a combat zone, and that shit is crazy, man.
I mean, it was real.
And I have no, you know, predications that I had any experience close to what our men and women have experienced.
But from a medical perspective, it was...
Intense, to say the least.
I mean, it was a mind-bender.
After the first three days, I remember texting my wife just saying, like, I don't know if this is sustainable.
Like, just this, my emotional state.
Because every day was immense volume of profound penetrating trauma.
I mean, never was there, very rarely was there a guy who had one gunshot wound.
Typically, seven or eight or nine, they were leaking from lots of places.
These dudes were getting shot up.
And then the IEDs would blow these guys up, and we would get them.
The ambulances would just scream in and drop these guys off.
And then five minutes later, another ambulance would come in with two other dudes, and it was just constant, constant.
And we would do the best we could to stabilize them or call it.
And the ones we could save, we'd package them up and stabilize them, try and control the bleeding.
We'd intubate them if we needed to and put chest tubes in and crack them in some cases and stabilize their extremities and patch their hulls and then send them on.
Like, if I would lay down, we were sleeping on the floor on these, you know, these racky blankets, you know, and we would just lay down on this.
So we'd go into these abandoned homes, and we'd set up these trauma bays, and we'd sleep in a room off the trauma bay.
And so, you know, we do our day.
I very rarely wasn't dressed and ready to get up and go.
Because at any time, the head logistician would be like, patience, you know, and everybody would pop up and...
And get ready, didn't go out, and the ambulance would throw people on, mostly during the day, but fighting would generally subside at night, and we'd get a little bit of rest, and then I'd write, and I'd write.
And it was important, I think, to sort of, you know, percolate that shit out a little bit and let it sit.
So, we were in this one place for a couple weeks, and then came the request from the head of ISAF, Special Operations General Abbas.
And he came to our head logistical gal, and he's like, listen, you know, as the front line is moving forward, we would like for you guys, if you are up for it, to move forward as well.
The only problem is it's not going to be within that 2,500-meter cushion from the front line.
It's going to be more like 500 meters from the front line.
That's really close, especially since the front line's pretty fluid anyway, right?
And this isn't conventional warfare, right?
ISIS was reinforcing these vehicles and steel-plating them up and then taking civilians and handcuffing them to these steering wheels and telling them you best drive.
And they'd drive and then they'd be packed full of explosives and C4 and they'd blow them up.
Our guys, Iraqi dudes, would be trying to pelt him to take the dude out.
Shit was really archaic, but effective.
So they told us, we'd like for you to move.
And then our head logistical gal, Kathy, she came to the whole team and she said, this is our option.
You don't have to do it.
No one's obligated to do it.
Y'all are volunteers.
And by the way, we were close to begin with.
I mean, it was constant every day, just mortars and small arms fire, and there was a bunch of artillery that was set up all around us, outgoing.
So we got used to the sound of outgoing artillery.
We didn't hear a lot of incoming because they just had pushed them back.
So, okay, we all said, let's do it.
You know, if we can create positive impact and we can save more lives by being closer, let's do it.
So we all got in this big Oshkosh and Humvee convoy and...
And drove down past the airport.
And I think a lot of military folks that listen will know that airport in West Mosul very well, probably.
We drove right through the old busted up, you know, it was just rubble.
The whole airport's rubble.
It's just completely, it looks like fucking, you know, bedrock Flintstones, you know, it's just a mess.
Drove all the way through there and then went to this house.
And we set up our clinic on a street corner, covered by a corrugated metal roof.
And we put six trauma beds and got our trauma sleeves up and everything was ready to go.
And then we set up our residence across the street.
At some other abandoned house.
And we're down in this sort of concrete bunker, so to speak.
And we started seeing patients.
And, you know, day one, shit ton of people and lots of things happening.
I mean, I'm talking dozens and dozens of, you know, multiple gunshot wound patients.
Multiple careers that I experienced in that month of just the flow of volume of penetrating trauma.
So then...
It was day two or three, all these displaced locals basically got released.
So they've been holding them at a checkpoint, fingerprinting the fighting age males, making sure they're not on a record and, you know, making sure everybody's not strapped and letting them through.
So on day three or four, they just let this flow of humanity started walking down the street about 60, 70 yards from us, from where we were set up.
And they'd see the Americans, and they'd see the stethoscopes, and they'd just start running towards us.
Because these people had been captivated and held captive and hiding out in their basements, eating grass.
You know, trying to find any fluids at all to drink.
There's no rainwater.
You know, there's some fucking rain there.
And just eking by.
And little kids.
I mean, these are civilians.
These are little bitty kids.
And they're hiding out in these homes.
And they would just run.
They would just take off running and get to these checkpoints.
So on day three or something, this flow of humanity comes by.
These guys are starting to sort of bum rush our spot.
And everybody starts to get a little bit panicked because we weren't quite sure what was, Turns out a lot of bad things could happen, you know, in that situation.
So we sort of get our security detail to keep everybody away and we treat a shit ton of people.
Day four rolls around.
And we wake up that morning and the first patient I have is a five-year-old little girl that had been just absolutely like homicide, like killed, shot right in the head, assassinated.
75, 50, 25. So we didn't know it at the time, though.
But yeah, you're right.
We did not know this at the time.
So that one obviously got everybody super tingly.
But there was still a shit ton of people coming in.
We had patience.
I mean...
We were working and we had our Kevlar vests on and we were trying to, you know, stay.
Then the third one hit and it landed right outside the door.
And it blew shit ton of debris.
I mean, we felt the blast.
And one of our medics got a big piece of debris in the back of his leg.
It knocked him down.
So we went into this bunker, basically the staging bunker, and we sat down in there.
And, you know, no matter what, we couldn't, we weren't going to go out into that.
But then 30 seconds later, one of our security detail dudes carried in our head of security.
And he was lifeless and dropped him on the table.
This is a dude we'd been, you know, eating cookies with and drinking tea with like a half hour before, you know, an hour before, you know, standing at the door in between, you know, ambulances.
This is our guy, you know, and he was dead.
And so we all looked at each other, and I was the team lead, and I tell you, man, I wasn't about to ask anybody to go out into that, and no one even hesitated.
Like, we went out and started working on Hasib, and we...
We got on him quick and he was out and I listened to his lungs.
He didn't have any lung sounds on one side.
I saw some penetrating entry wound in his chest, put a chest tube in his right thorax and about a liter of blood poured out from his pleural space just like that.
And as soon as that happened, he could inspire again.
So, you know, his whole body had shut down from, number one, from the shock blast, right?
And being hit that hard by a piece of shrapnel and just being that close to the impact.
But then also, you know, this penetrating piece of shrapnel went right through his chest and didn't hit any of his vital organs.
Cause this hemothorax, this blood to fill up in his plural space.
So, you know, I evacuated all that blood and he started to be able to breathe again.
So there he is.
He's back.
We get him out.
We go back inside the bunker there and a couple hours later we got out.
So we find out the next day That a dude, not of fighting age, a local guy, was a sleeper cell.
And that he had come back in the neighborhood and was three or four houses down and was communicating with his operatives and his ISIS bros, you know, two, three hundred meters away, and was releasing pigeons to identify our position.
So the way they figured this out, one of our security guys would see a pigeon go up, and he didn't think much about it, and then a mortar hit.
And then, you know, 10 minutes later, he's like, there's no pigeons around there, right?
Because, I mean, shit's crazy.
It's combat zone, and birds don't dig combat zones.
So, he kind of started to piece it together, and then he realized, on the third one, he's like, he saw a pigeon go up, and he goes, we're about to get hit.
Sure enough.
So, we got out of there.
Saved Haseeb's life.
He got out.
And they went and found this dude and got his phone.
And sure enough, he was doing all this and he admitted it.
Just can't imagine how much you know how that hurts and then go back to Kansas and they go to the grocery store Yeah, it's it's it's hard to fathom, you know, it's the black tar Tootsie Rolls Social black tar young kids It took me a little bit to roll out of that.
Thank God for my wife.
I came back and we went on a run up in the hills a few days later.
We got up to the top of this hill and I just cried on her shoulder.
I just let it go.
Since then I'm fine, but it gives me such a deep appreciation for how hard it must be for these men and women who come back from these deployments.
They've been a part of these things.
And been affected so profoundly, it's got to hurt, you know, on a very deep emotional level.
What a crazy life you live, helping people that are involved in traumatic situations over and over again, various traumatic situations, whether it's getting stuck on K2 or whether it's getting...
But now, you know, it's a matter of getting the right gear that works and you can rely on it.
You know, I mean, I don't want to be 20 miles back and, you know, in the backcountry hunting elk and have my thermorest have a hole in it so I sleep in the dirt for five days, which is what happened to me last fall.
I was by myself and, you know, it was way, way back in the first night.
You know, my Therm-Rest had a hole.
I didn't have a patch, so I just laid in the dirt for five nights.
So I got to get the helicopter, get the helicopter.
They risked their lives, they go up there, they get him, fly him down base camp, base camp to Lukla, where our air station was, get that helicopter, and I'll let Jeff take over.
I saw a dude on Denali do that at base camp in 1996 or 7. This dude shows up with a Boy Scout, old school Boy Scout, like Weebelo looking fucking thing.
You know, like made of cotton, I guess.
You know, with like some weird synthetic shit.
And he asked me for a knife to be able to cut the plastic off of it.
You know, and I'm like, man, that's not a good idea.
Where are you going?
And I didn't want to I should have questioned him.
Two weeks later, we get a call and have to go up to 17,000 feet for a guy who had broken his ankle.
So we land the helicopter down at 17, and he runs towards the helicopter, which everybody knows is you don't run towards a helicopter.
I'm telling you, man, like a lot of people just tap out and because they know there's an infrastructure around that will pull them out instead of being accountable for themselves.
So we pulled this guy off and we interviewed him and then Jeff goes, the nicest thing he says, have a nice life, walks up and just starts cussing and piss.
When you do all these really high-stressful, high-danger sort of situations, you're constantly around people that have this extremely high threshold of For the extremely high tolerance, to discomfort, to pushing your endurance levels, overcoming obstacles.
You're around people that are really solid human beings.
We're talking about people that are willing to summit Everest, people that will rescue people that summit Everest, people that are willing to do These medical stations 500 yards or 500 meters from the front line.
I mean, you're talking about some really solid human beings.
Very, very unusually solid human beings.
When you come back from that and deal with people like, oh, my fucking cell phone's such a piece of shit.
That was part of the discomfort I had when I came back from Iraq, specifically, was the delay in flights and just how pissed businessman Bob gets.
I like Louis C.K. bit about, you know, you're not fucking walking, you know, like 13 of you are dead when you get back, you know.
No, I'm just, I've been on a gratitude tour since I got back.
Like, I'm just grateful for everything.
I'm so grateful that I was born by random stroke of luck.
You know, in Roanoke, Virginia with good parents and a good family structure and was given all the opportunities that I was given.
And I wasn't born in Mosul and hiding in a, you know, a cellar from the most evil dudes on the planet.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's great.
So I've come back and instead of getting mad at those people or frustrated with those people, I just try and smile through it and just think, You know, to myself, like, man, I wish you could taste what I tasted just not that long ago.
You know, like, it really recalibrated me, where it just doesn't, you know, I just let it Teflon off, you know, to a certain extent.
And with regards to the people that I work with, I tend to, I think, gravitate towards people who like these chaotic sort of environments.
And I got turned on to this thing, this concept, this acronym that the American Military Academy kicked off a few decades ago.
30 years ago or something.
And they started referring to working in these VUCA environments, right?
And also why people do gravitate towards those environments and what they get out of it and how this life in these intense environments sort of magnifies so much of what it means to be human.
And how many people live in environments where they don't know their neighbors, there's no danger, there's no excitement, there's no nothing, and they live this muted, terrifying life.
In a lot of ways, it's terrifying because there's nothing there.
It's empty.
There's a void.
And it's not how human beings are supposed to be.
We're supposed to be confronted by a certain amount of difficulty.
I did run for my life just a few months ago, you know, and I, you know, I look back now and that was, that's the fucked up thing that I think so many military folks really struggle with.
And that's what Younger talked about in that book was, how would you find the, you know, the environment you were in was so precarious, and it was just so tenuous, like, it could be wiped out in any second.
And yet you want to go back there.
I got an avalanche on that mountain, almost dead, but turns out I want to go back.
Why?
What is that wiring that makes you want to...
But you know why?
Because they want to be with their boys and their gals and in it, connected, feeling like our shit is tied together.
Why do I want to go back in the mountains?
The same reason, because I want to go with the same boys and get the same...
Sort of, you know, intense experience and I think that we miss that.
Because that was the foundation of my relationship with my blind buddy.
I was a selfish dirtbag climber in J-Tree, you know, in the mid-90s.
And I met this blind dude who needed an ally.
He needed a friend.
He needed a guide.
Not just a guide, but he needed a teammate.
And not somebody that he could trust, but somebody that would eventually trust him.
And that was pretty wild for him to ask at some point for a sighted person to trust a blind person on the side of a rock face or the side of a mountain.
Because, you know, it's hard enough with everything.
And you take away your vision and, you know, shit just gets amplified.
But to be honest with you, he'll be the first to tell you that kayaking in a boat by himself down the Grand Canyon was way scarier than anything he's ever done.
I mean if he was sighted he could have been like a pro ballplayer.
You know, he's just got that sort of body awareness and then so he's born with a degenerate retina disease so he was under he was blind Legally blind, but then his retinas unraveled.
And at the age of 13, it was totally lights out.
And then his mama got killed in a car wreck two years later.
And so he, I mean, it was step up.
Fortunately for him, his dad is, was a Marine fighter pilot.
Ed.
And Ed was not about to let his blind son sit back and let life go by.
So he grabbed him by the scuff of the neck and took him on all these around the world as he got stationed in different places.
And Eric just realized, like, pony up.
Ain't got time for sitting around, son.
Get up.
And he did.
And he found rock climbing, and then rock climbing turned into mountaineering, and that's when we met.
I think this is all very hard for some people to process, especially people that haven't experienced very difficult things or very scary things or dangerous things.
You know, that people would long to do this, to be a blind guy who's going through 270 plus miles of water in a kayak or to be someone who wants to summit Mount Everest or to be someone who wants to be a medic in a war zone or to be Sebastian Younger who's out there, you know...
And I think that maybe the general population might look at that and feel like maybe it's reckless or some are super inspired and like, man, that's so great.
And then others are like, yeah, I mean, I'm down, dude.
I'm psyched that you're out there charging because then that sets the template.
And what it does, I think, for a lot of people, it just says, oh, that blind guy can do it.
Well, then, that means I should stop feeling sorry for myself because I'm feeling low today.
I guarantee you, there's a lot of times when I don't feel like training.
I don't really feel like going out and doing something hard.
And then I'll think, I need to train harder to be strong enough that when shit goes sideways, I'll have his back.
You know, I mean two or three probably like big long days I try to you know get broke the fuck off at least You know a couple times a week, right where I'm like, okay, and are you carrying weight on your pack and Those days of carrying big heavy weight.
I've kind of stopped doing that and I just go Because I like to feel a little bit more free.
There was a time when I would put on a big pack and Just to feel that weight on my traps.
And so I failed out and then moved to Colorado in 1989. And moved to Boulder and it was just a bunch of hippies and like I was into the Grateful Dead and I was, you know, tapping into some good fun things and growing my head and I fell in with a group of climbers pretty quick off who were a couple years older than me and they basically took me under their wing and sort of gave me this apprenticeship and taught me how to not get dead.
I remember when I was a kid and we went from New York to, or from Boston rather than New York for some, I think it was for a karate tournament or something like that, but we were driving up the West Side Highway and you see the city looming in the distance like the Death Star.
And I remember thinking, what in the fuck is this?
There's an old power wagon, his old house in Boulder, an old power wagon with a snow plow, and there's a couple snow machines out there, and I'm pulling my...
There's something about that cold and snow, too, that's, like, really peaceful.
Like, there's something that people don't like.
I remember when I was a kid, one of the things that I really liked about snow is, especially when I had to deliver newspapers, is, like, I would have to be out there.
And you would hear nothing because the snow muffles all the sound.
So it's like you get a kind of peace and quiet that you don't...
No one's driving because, you know, there's two feet of snow.
So you're out there and it's just...
Nothing.
And everything's soft.
And you hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of your feet on the ground and that's it.
You know, it's like you...
And then I think people that live in those environments, like live in the cold, you appreciate summer for real.
And you go into Boulder, and on the CU campus, you know, like, you get a 60-degree, 50-degree day in the spring, and all the bitches just go down to their Daisy Dukes.
That's amazing that one person can change the course of your life that much just by existing and being around them and experiencing how they navigate life.