You are a product of your mountains

Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals
by Todd Skinner

(Page 3 of 8)

Each mountain you climb will change you, and the more challenging the mountain, the more you have to gain from the ascent. Your mountains include not only those you have climbed, but the mountains that others have climbed whose lessons you internalize; and the mountains you dream about climbing, which make you better before you ever set foot on them, and inspire you even if you never set foot on them.

"All our dreams begin in youth," wrote Heinrich Harrer in Seven Years in Tibet, to explain his passion for climbing mountains and exploring strange lands. I found the same passion in my own youth, and it continues to steer my direction and choices. We are all aware of the compass we carry that naturally points toward what we value, giving us at least a sense of direction, but how do we refine that direction to get the most return on our investment? It often seems like direction is a matter of circumstance, dependent on the people and events that have shaped our course along the way. Because outside forces can so powerfully affect us, it is helpful to examine the past to understand what has bumped us on and off course.

When I look back carefully at my own life, I realize much of what I believe and value was influenced at an early age. My father, Bob Skinner, and his five brothers started a wilderness school for youth in the mountains of western Wyoming in 1956, two years before I was born. They taught survival skills, like how to build a shelter in the wilderness when you had none, or a log raft without nails, to navigate wild rivers. But more than anything they taught self-reliance how to recognize what needed to be done and find a way to do it.

They also taught the fundamentals of climbing mountains. My dad pioneered climbing routes in Yosemite, and British Columbia's Bella Coola Range in the 1950s, while working as a survival instructor for the Air Force. In the mountains, my dad always carried an old army-style backpack that would have killed a modern backpacker an eighty-pound load slung on a short frame with narrow leather straps over the shoulders and no waist belt, called the "Mountain Mule." I was five or six when I first slid into the harness and tried to stand up. Talk about aspiration!

Every summer my dad or his brother Courtney would lead a month-long expedition to walk the spine of the Wind River Mountains and climb Wyoming's highest, Gannett Peak. I was eleven years old when I first climbed it in a grueling fourteen-hour ascent. While no one that young had ever climbed Gannett, my dad simply assumed I could complete the ascent, and because of his assumption, I could.

While my dad was herculean and pragmatic, Courtney, six years his junior, was a boundless dreamer, and eccentric enough to capture my imagination. Not only did Courtney dream in a way that often didn't adhere to logic or limitations, he had the ability to sell the dreams and make others believe. Pie-in-the-sky ambitions could come true, I found out, and I learned from Courtney to ask, "Why not?"

These two helped shape my youth, one by teaching skill and discipline, and the other the adventure of great dreams, and they illustrate how important heroes can be. We are always seeking the heroic in people, and the more we look for and believe in heroism, that ideal of greatness, the more we are likely to find it. Because we are all in a position to be guides as well as seekers, it is important for us to be mentors to someone else: a nod instead of a frown, the time spent teaching a skill, a hand held out to someone all can make the difference in a life. We gain most not by reaching our destination, but by bringing others with us on the climb.

While people can affect the course of our lives, experiences are also critical in shaping who we become. The more mountains we climb, the more we learn how to climb successfully. Every challenge, even if it is unpleasant or unwelcome, has something to give us, and rising success is a matter of recognizing the value to be extracted from each climb. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, they say, or, more accurately, what doesn't kill you has the potential to make you stronger, and after many hazardous undertakings, "I lived to tell about it" is one of my favorite expressions.

The mountains that influence your direction can also include ones that others have climbed, when you learn about them and internalize the inspirations they offer. For example, because my uncle Courtney spent five years in Antarctica with an American research team in the 1960s, I devoured every saga of polar exploration I could find as a kid, like Captain Robert Scott's grueling race to the South Pole. He was beaten there by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and died of exhaustion on the way back, pinned down by a blizzard only eleven miles from his next supply depot.

And the story of Ernest Shackleton and his mates, whose ship, the Endurance, was caught in pack ice and slowly crushed. They were set adrift on floating pack ice that split beneath their feet and lived off seals and the supplies they had salvaged, drifting for six months toward the islands off Patagonia with no chance to be saved by anything but their own tenacity and ingenuity one of the most gripping adventure tales you could ever read.

But the most horrific story that stayed in my mind was that of Australian Douglas Mawson, who went exploring the inland coast of Antarctica southwest of Australia in 1912. He left his camp at Cape Denison with three dogsleds and two companions. Six weeks and 320 miles out, one companion who was driving the sled with their tent, and all but a week's worth of food, broke through a snow bridge over a crevasse the others had just crossed and disappeared, dogs and all, into the icy abyss.

During Mawson's desperate return voyage, the remaining dogs collapsed one by one and were cooked and eaten as they died. One sled was abandoned, and soon there were no dogs left to pull the second. After three weeks of toil with little food, Mawson's other companion died. Left alone to drag his sled over wind-honed ridges of ice, Mawson began to crawl on his hands and knees. He fell repeatedly into crevasses that split the glacier into shards, saved only by the rope connected to his stubborn sled. After ninety days' absence, Mawson stood unsteadily on the edge of the polar plateau overlooking his camp, only to watch the relief ship that had come to pick him up sail out of the harbor without him.

These were the most grueling experiences I could imagine, and they went a long way toward helping me understand what people are capable of enduring. That insight would serve me in the future, for one of my uncle Courtney's dreams was to stand on top of Gannett Peak on New Year's Day in the first winter ascent of the 13,804-foot mountain. While Gannett is not the highest peak in the Rockies, it is the most alpine in nature, with five glaciers sliding down its sides, and a remote and difficult approach.

Courtney convinced seven of us that his dream could be accomplished, and just after Christmas in 1978, we set off on skis to plow twenty miles into the wilderness dragging hundred-pound sleds. I was nineteen years old and had just finished my third semester of college at the University of Wyoming studying business and finance.

We had actually attempted the climb the year before, but an endless blizzard and minus fifty-five degree cold drove us back before we reached the mountain. It was an extreme goal, we all knew, but the magic of a winter Gannett ascent was that it condensed all the elements of a major expedition the logistics, moving large loads through difficult terrain, a strenuous climb, and a long retreat into the short frame of ten to twelve days.

To climb Gannett from the western approach involved ascending a steep, thousand foot high notch in the dividing rampart, called Bonney Pass, descending that thousand feet to cross a mile-long stretch of crevasse-filled glacier, then climbing up rock and ice two thousand feet to the long snow slope of Gannett's summit. That was the climb I knew in summer.

Copyright © 2003 Todd Skinner. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Todd Skinner, a Wyoming native, has established new climbs at the highest levels of difficulty in more than twenty-six countries. His experiences have been described in National Geographic and Life, and his expeditions to places as exotic as the Amazon and Timbuktu have been featured in nine documentaries. He is also a popular speaker at business events around the country.