Word: erik
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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...
With his Germanic, sculpted features and light brown hair, Erik looks a bit like a shaggy, youthful Kirk Douglas. He is a celebrity now: strangers ask for his autograph, reporters call constantly, restaurants give him free meals. But is his celebrity the circus-freak variety--of a type with the Dogboy and the two-headed snake...
...worst, Erik fears, it is. Casual observers don't understand what an achievement his Everest climb was, or they assume that if a blind guy can do it, anyone can. And indeed, improved gear has made Everest, at least in some people's minds, a bit smaller. In the climbing season there's a conga line to the top, or so it seems, and the trail is a junkyard of discarded oxygen tanks and other debris. But Everest eats the unready and the unlucky. Almost 90% of Everest climbers fail to reach the summit. Many--at least 165 since...
Everest expeditions break down into two types: those like Erik's, which are sponsored and united by a common goal, and those like the one described by Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air, in which gangs of climbers pay $65,000 each for the opportunity to stand on top of the world. But as conditions become more arduous, these commercial teams start squabbling, blaming weaker members for slowing them down and sometimes even refusing to help teammates in distress...
...Erik, who knew almost as soon as he could speak that he would lose his vision in his early teens, excelling as an athlete was the result of accepting his disability rather than denying it. Growing up with two brothers in Hong Kong and then Weston, Conn., he was always an athletic kid, a tough gamer who developed a bump-and-grind one-on-one basketball game that allowed him to work his way close to the hoop. He was, his father Ed says, "a pretty normal kid. While bike riding, he might have run into a few more parked...