Weihenmayer and his guide dog, Uri, at home in Golden, Colorado.
the left or a foot to the right, it’s the difference between getting through a rapid or getting hammered. If I don’t brace at the right moment or if I don’t charge at the right moment I’m going to get flipped.
That’s a huge challenge for them—but it also demands immense trust from you. I’ve learned a lot about trust from the mountains and the rivers. These are places where you have each other’s lives in your hands, you build bonds that you can’t in any other way. My climbing partners and I are like brothers, more like family than we are friends—and we built these con- nections through our experiences in nature. You know, I had wrestled and done lots of sports as a blind person by the time I graduated from high school. And wrestling is a wonderful sport, but you walk off the mat either a winner or a loser. Part of the sense of adven- ture in outdoor sports is that everyone wins. You’re helping each other to reach the summit. You’re helping each other to get down the river. And you’re having all these awesome moments along the way.
What do you think makes a great team? I know when I’m in the mountains or on the river, I’m not going to be the best climber or kayaker, I’m not going to be the fastest or the strongest. But I can still look inside myself and ask, how do I get my team a little farther up the mountain, a little farther down the river every day? What am I doing to help this team? What I think makes a great team is not the fact that
every person on that team is great. All of us have our weaknesses; it’s about getting people with different skill- sets to help each other and believe in the outcome— believe to the summit. I have great friends and I’ve been able to surround myself with people who believe in me. A lot of the challenges I’ve taken on have been because of people planting seeds in my head, people who said, you know, I think you can do that.
And in turn, you’re inspiring others. In turn, yeah. I have a friend named Kyle Maynard who’s a quadruple amputee. He told me he used to see a poster of me on the summit of Everest and think, wow, I want to be like that guy. And a few years ago he went out and in just ten days he reached the summit of Kilimanjaro without INSIGHT · 31
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