In Hillary and Tenzing's Bootprints

A f

ew years after I went blind at the age of 13, I sent away for a Braille book about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's ascent of Mount Everest. As I read, I imagined with fear and delight the two pioneers standing only 60 meters below the summit at the base of a 12-meter vertical rock face, later named the Hillary Step, desperately hoping it could be scaled. In 1953, so much of modern mountaineering was still to be discovered. Archaic clothing and tents made Everest's frigid temperatures lethal. Oxygen bottles were three times heavier than today's. Deadly altitude illnesses, little understood, caused brains to swell and lungs to fill with fluid. Because lightweight radios had yet to be invented, it wasn't until Hillary and Tenzing had descended to within a few hundred meters of advanced base camp and Hillary held up two fingers in victory that the world learned Everest had finally been conquered.

Over the next 50 years, top climbers from around the world converged on Everest's slopes to attempt their own groundbreaking firsts. In 1978, Reinhold Messner's ascent without bottled oxygen defied the conventional wisdom that time spent without artificial oxygen above 7,900 meters—in the "death zone"—would cause irreparable brain damage. In 2000, Babu Chiri Sherpa—the most famous Sherpa—climbed from base camp to the top of Everest in just under 16 hours.

In 2001, it was my turn. Although Everest had been mapped from summit to base camp, I felt like I was stepping into uncharted territory. Most of the world's experts thought a blind person had no business on the world's tallest peak, especially after eight climbers died in a storm now known as the "1996 disaster." But I had prepared for 16 years, learning to feel my way up mountainous terrain using ice axes and long poles. I finally concluded that when other people's expectations become barriers, the best thing to do is to surmount them.

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Still, there were many challenges I couldn't confront until I went to the mountain, such as the Khumbu Icefall: 609 meters of jumbled-up ice boulders—some the size of baseballs, others as big as buildings—constantly collapsing and exploding as the ice expanded and contracted. As I weaved through the labyrinth, I could hear huge ice columns groaning and cracking overhead. My first trip took a miserable 13 hours through a frozen maze, a blind person's worst nightmare. No two steps were alike as I zigzagged over thin snow bridges and leapt over deep cracks onto shifting ice boulders. Eventually, with the help of my team, I made it through the icefall 10 times, working the duration of each trip down to five hours.

I also worried about how I would function above 7,900 meters, where the brain grows foggy and just taking a step requires monumental effort. I feared that not being able to think, along with not being able to see, would be an overwhelmingly bad combination. However, extreme altitude slowed down my team, so I actually had more time to plant my axe and kick solid steps in the steep snow. On the Hillary Step, I finally felt in my element. Similar to Hillary's own description, I wedged myself in a crack, my gloved hands scanning for holds, my one cramponed boot biting the rock, and my other jammed in a cornice of ice. It was 40 minutes later, when my brain was barely in charge of my body and I felt like I was pushing through wet concrete mixed with anesthesia, that my teammate Chris Morris lowered his mask, wrapped his arms around me and whispered hoarsely: "Big E, I think you're about to stand on top of the world."

Many climbers argue that Everest is no longer an epochal achievement and that the conga lines of climbers waiting for a shot at the summit are degrading a once pristine environment. In Hillary's day, teams of top climbers were handpicked by prestigious bodies such as the Royal Geographical Society. Today, an overweight globe-trotter with more money than experience and a little-known blind guy have equal access. The door to Everest's slopes has been blown wide open, and some critics speak of the death of great adventures.

But Everest's history is the modern world's history, with all its challenges and abuses—and the unparalleled opportunities for human endeavor. To me, it's perfectly fitting that an adventure which began with élite climbers is undertaken by a blind guy 50 years later. We cannot step back and close the mountain, for retreat would annihilate the modern age's greatest gift to humanity: the freedom of an individual to choose his own path.