Word: climbers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...knobs, edges and ledges, converting all of it into a road map etched into his mind. "It's like instead of wrestling with a person, I am moving and working with a rock," he explains. "It's a beautiful process of solving a puzzle." He is an accomplished rock climber, rated 5.10 (5.14 being the highest), and has led teams up sections of Yosemite's notorious El Capitan. On ice, where one wrong strike with an ice ax can bring down an avalanche, Erik has learned to listen to the ice as he pings it gently with...
...Many pros wouldn't go near Erik's team, fearing they might have to haul the blind guy down. "Everyone was saying Erik was gonna have an epic," says Charley Mace, a member of the film crew. (Epic is Everest slang for disaster.) Another climber planned to stay close, boasting that he would "get the first picture of the dead blind...
...typical assault on Everest requires each climber to do as many as 10 traverses through the icefall, both for acclimatization purposes and to help carry the immense amount of equipment required for an ascent. After Erik's accident, the rest of the National Federation of the Blind (N.F.B.) team discussed letting him stay up in Camp 1, equipped with videotapes and food, while the rest of the team and the Sherpas did his carries for him. No way, said Erik. No way was he going to do this climb without being a fully integrated and useful member of the team...
...physical pain, boredom, bad food, insomnia and tedious conversation when you're snowed into a pup tent for a week on a 3-ft.-wide ice shelf at 20,000 ft. (That happened to Erik on Alaska's Denali.) On Everest, toughness is perhaps the most important trait a climber can have. "Erik is mentally one of the strongest guys you will ever meet," says fellow climber Chris Morris...
...Argentina, among other peaks, and, in the words of his friends, "running up 14ers" (14,000-ft. peaks)?Erik viewed Everest as insurmountable until he ran into Scaturro at a sportswear trade show in Salt Lake City, Utah. Scaturro, who had already summited Everest, had heard of the blind climber, and when they met the two struck an easy rapport. A geophysicist who often put together energy-company expeditions to remote areas in search of petroleum, Scaturro began wondering if he could put together a team that could help Erik get to the summit of Everest...