Blind climber scales Everest

The debate has perhaps simmered down, but is far from over. Perhaps history will never be resolved regarding who was the first Filipino to reach the summit of Mount Everest. But here is a story that may perhaps give us a different perspective on the matter.

When Erik Weihenmayer was six years old, he was diagnosed with retinoscheses, a disorder which doctors said would gradually destroy the retinas of his eyes, rendering him completely blind. He grew up not knowing the privilege of eyesight would not be his for long. By age 13, he went totally blind.

That was indeed a turning point for him, but not how you would think.

"All my life, fear of failure had nearly paralyzed me," Weihenmayer once said. The operative word there is "nearly".

"Most people don’t take risks because they are afraid to fail, to embarrass themselves," declares Erik’s father, Ed. "Erik has the courage to fail. That’s why the near impossible has become routine for him."

And he’s had more to overcome. The same year he became blind, Erik’s mother died in a car crash.

"If I had gone blind a thousand times, the pain would have been nothing by comparison," he said. "If I could have died that day by only choosing it, I would have died instantly. How could it be, the person who had savagely protected me all my life was gone?"

Since becoming blind and losing his mother, Weihenmayer, a former middle school teacher and wrestling coach, threw himself completely into taking on the most daring adventures even sighted people would rarely consider. Including climbing Mount Everest.

"I love the beauty of it. I love the feeling of the rock under my gloves. I love the idea of adventure. I love figuring things out. And I like strategically surrounding myself with good people who make me stronger," Weihenmayer explains.

"He’s one of the top mountaineers in the country," says Gavin Atwood, who trained for the Everest climb with Weihenmayer and trekked with him to the Everest base camp. "He got that way by confronting his fears and learning from them."

But on a previous climb, Weihenmayer faced a challenge that he had trouble overcoming, one that – ironically – did not involve eyesight at all. On Mount Rainier, the blind athlete had trouble pushing a pole through one of his tent’s sleeves because his thick gloves got in the way. Unwisely, he took off his glove so he could feel the pole.

"But sharp splinters of sleet pricked my skin bare, and it went instantly numb," he recalls in his book "Touch the Top of the World". "I stuffed my lifeless hand back inside the glove and beat it against my knee. When it came back to life, the pain was so intense I almost vomited from nausea."

The physical pain he felt was nothing compared to the frustration and embarrassment of having failed, of needing his teammates to pitch the tent for him. He spent the next weeks practicing pitching the tent on his own.

"The temperature was more than 100 degrees," his father remembers. "Erik put on the thick gloves, and over and over and over he practiced setting up the tent. He did not want to ever be the weak link on the team again."

Being blind, Weihenmayer had to change the way he climbs. When rock climbing, he rakes his hand across the surface of the stone to feel for possible handholds. On mountains, he plunges his axe into the ice to listen to the sound and discern hard ice from soft ice. In other areas, teammates shout out warnings.

On May 25, 2001, Erik Weihenmayer, then 32, joined a team of 12 climbers who made it to the top of 29,000-foot Mount Everest, becoming the first blind man to scale the legendary peak, five years before any Philippine expedition. And on September 5, 2002, when he stood on top of Mt. Kosciusko in Australia, Weihenmayer completed his seven-year quest to climb the Seven Summits – the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, joining only 100 mountaineers who have accomplished that feat. At age 33, he was also one of the youngest. He has also scaled El Capitan, a 3,300-foot overhanging rock wall in Yosemite, as well as Polar Circus, a 3,000-foot ice waterfall in the Canadian Rockies.

He hasn’t stopped. A year later, Weihenmayer joined 320 known athletes from 17 countries in the Primal Quest, the richest and toughest multi-sport adventure race in the world. It covered 457 miles through the Sierra Nevadas in a grueling nine straight days. Averaging only two hours of sleep a night, his team, No Boundaries, crossed the finish line on Lake Tahoe as one of the 42 teams to cross the finish line. Thirty-eight of the teams didn’t even finish.

After his Everest climb, a school for the blind in Tibet invited him to teach their students how to climb. The result: a successful ascent of the Rombuk Glacier, 21,000 feet high, on the north side of Everest, higher than any other blind person (except Weihenmayer) has climbed.

Weihenmayer has totally outdone himself, not to mention the rest of the "normal" world. He has already climbed three of the highest mountains in the world. Aside from being an outstanding climber, he is, in all regards, a world-class athlete: acrobatic skydiver, long-distance biker, marathon runner, ice climber, rock climber, skier, scuba diver, paraglider, and member of the College Wrestling Hall of Fame. The film of his success on Everest, Farther Than The Eye Can See, has won first prize in 17 film festivals all over the world. A feature film is now being made on his exploits. He has been on all the highest-rating news and talk shows in the United States.

Today, he speaks before multinational corporations all over the world, literally helping them see things in a different light.

"I look for people who have an unrealistic optimism about life," he elaborates. "I hear people say, ‘Seeing is believing.’ I want people who believe the opposite, ‘Believing is seeing.’ You’ve got to believe first in what you’re doing and be sure you have a reason to believe it. You can tell who those people are. You say, ‘Hey, want to climb Everest with a blind guy?’ Pretty quickly, you’ll figure out who’s a believer."

Erik Weihenmayer has made believers of those of us who can’t see in our own darkness.

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Catch tomorrow’s episode of The Basketball Show on RPN 9 at 2 p.m.