TEDxMileHigh 2022

Read The Script:

When I was young, I had an experience that marked the beginning of my life at the same time as nearly ending it.

I was on a trip in Colorado and had only been rock climbing for about a year. I was fourteen years old. This one day, we were going to climb in this sandstone canyon with red and orange cliffs rising hundreds of feet above a small creek. As we were gearing up at the car, I realized I had forgotten my harness. Since not climbing wasn’t an option, we made a harness out of webbing, the kind of webbing you might tie a kayak to the car with. We looped the webbing around my waist and legs and called it good. Just so you know—you shouldn’t do this, except in a dire emergency. This was not a dire emergency. This was, in fact, a terrible idea.

Hours later, we were a few hundred feet off the ground, and I offered to take the lead. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I quickly got off route and kept climbing until I couldn’t any longer. And so, perched on a small ledge, I froze. I tried to yell down to my partners, but they were far below and completely out of range. It was a scorching summer day. My fingertips were as if dipped in butter and sweat stung my eyes. Then, my makeshift harness, made of that shit webbing and irresponsibly tied around my waist in the parking lot, fell to my ankles. That’s when things got serious. 

To salvage my life, I had to stand on a four-inch ledge on a vertical face hundreds of feet off the ground and somehow shimmy my harness back up, without tipping back. Then I’d have to downclimb something I had barely been able to climb up. This would have been hard if I was two inches off the ground. I hesitated for obvious reasons.

Standing there, I saw my body tumble down the cliff with remarkable clarity. I could feel it…the fall, the air, the closing of consciousness. 

It was not morbid. It was enlightening. 

I’d found in this moment not a shot of adrenaline, but an ocean of lucidity. And I haven’t written about it much, despite being a writer for the past 25 years. I had gone to church all my life, but, if religion is a way to explore our own mortality, that was the first time I had actually gone to church. I had an insight. 

I matured years in those ten minutes. 

Not long after, I’d quit drugs for climbing. 

I’d devote my life to it.

I’m still climbing.

That moment though, when I was 14, I had held my life in my hands, without fear, without distraction, without compromise … or any fantasy that my life wasn’t mine. It wasn’t graceful, but I’m here. Not everyone is going to take the risks I do. But you cannot take the risk out of life. In fact, you need to walk toward it. That’s what I’m going to defend today—the ability, and necessity, to live without guardrails. Not just in the mountains, but in our hearts and minds.

We are becoming a risk-averse society, and the impulse towards safety and certainty is now being extended to our parks, wild places, and psychological landscapes in between. We are killing the very thing we love about the mountains … and nature, for that matter.

National parks are seeing record numbers of visitors. The influx has introduced a novel problem—do we keep the wild wild? Or do we change the landscape so that they become extensions of urban environments? It seems we are moving toward the latter.

Increasingly, national parks are being sued for not making wild places safe enough.

• In the Pacific Northwest, a mountain goat attacked a 63-year-old man while he was visiting a national park – so he sued. 
• And you can read about a handful of lawsuits brought on when trees fell in the woods and hurt people while they were camping. 
• It’s happening on private property too, but with a twist—a suit was filed against Disney World when a wild, migrating bird injured a woman on Disney’s property.

For these cases, it was said:

• The park service should have removed the aggressive animal. 
• They should have cut down the dead tree.
• They should have managed the wild bird.

Really?

What’s next—someone sues the state of Maryland if they hit a deer when driving home from work?—” Well, you know, judge, I expect the state to have trained our wild animals better.”

But because of these lawsuits, many parks have resorted to this extreme version of coddling:

• There’s a sign in Death Valley that cautions people of extreme heat danger…with nothing less than a road sign in the middle of the trail…to speak nothing of blending urban and wild space. As if the name—Death Valley—or the suffocating heat, isn’t a strong enough clue.
• There are signs that say, “Don’t feed the grizzly bears” and “Wet rocks are slippery.”
• One of my favorites is a sign cautioning that branches break on trees.

All cases illustrate we are out of touch with natural environments. 

We are predominantly urban dwellers—83% of us live in urban places. We believe that natural environments are extensions of our urban environments.

For example, in 2018, a French mayor in the climbing town of Chamonix did something that hadn’t been done before. Ever. He required anyone going up Mont Blanc to carry specific gear if they were attempting to summit the mountain, the highest peak in Europe.

Whereas before, it was ok to climb the mountain with the gear you saw fit, now you could be fined and face legal consequences if you didn’t have the right equipment. The mayors’ rationale was that Mont Blanc had become an “urban space of commerce.”

The decision prompted some excellent protests. My favorite was by the legendary mountain athlete Kilian Jornet. Though I’m not sure I’d recommend it…

But here’s the problem with reactionary policies like these – if park managers are required to make the parks safe, in order to keep us safe, then we’ll soon wake up to find that the things we can do in these places will be extremely limited. 

And the places themselves will be fundamentally changed.

And the wild will, in a sense, completely cease to exist.

For instance, in 2018, six people died on Capitol Peak—a 14er near my hometown, a peak I’ve climbed solo, and considered to be the deadliest in the state. The majority of accidents happen in the same spot, and often in the same manner. On the descent, people are tired and think they see a shortcut down to the lake below, where their tents are, but in reality, you end up “cliffed out,” as we climbers call it when you can’t go down anymore because of a cliff. Most involved in accidents there realized it was too late when it was too late. 

After an accident occurs on the peak, public outcry is loud and primitive. Politicians call the situation “out of hand,” and demand more safety protocols, such as signs, spray paint on the talus fields, and placards. “Just put a goddam sign up,” is the collective sentiment. But I disagree.

As the former Editor-in-Chief of Rock and Ice and Ascent, two of the best magazines that have ever been published in the climbing world, I have lost numerous friends and colleagues to the mountains. I have written about climbing accidents for years. I have interviewed fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters, park rangers who had to pick up the pieces, literally, and best friends who saw it happen. In writing these reports, I’ve had to act like a detective, inhabit the scene, put together the clues—all so I can write about it and help other climbers avoid accidents like these. The people who died in these accidents haunt me to this very day. I dream about them.

After the accidents on Capital Peak, I spoke to Scott Fitzwilliams, the supervisor of the area where the mountain resides, and he was clear—once you start guardrailing the sides of mountains, you remove the wilderness experience for everyone.

• This thrust to make mountains safer is not coming from the climbing community … just as surfers are not requesting the ocean floor to be engineered for safer waves.
• It is not coming from the vast majority of families and friends who have lost loved ones there.
• It is not, in general, coming from the park service.

While all this is a novel debate for the mountains, it is an old question, framed by Alexander Hamilton in 1787 as that between “liberty and security.” Hamilton said of his fellow Americans: “To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” Notice how, for Hamilton, the real risk is being “less free.” 

If we start to view natural environments as extensions of the city, we will have redefined what the mountains have been for centuries. They have been places where we encounter and overcome adversity. Where risk is woven into the fabric of the landscape. What concerns me is that if we succumb to the trends, we will have redefined ourselves in relation to fear. We will have smothered the organic, and creative, uncertainty that life provides.

In order to protect free speech, we have to tolerate dangerous speech. Not because we like dangerous speech, but because if we only allowed safe speech, then we’d undermine what a free society looks like. Likewise, we need to make a space for risk, in order to protect our freedom.

Freedom can only be defined by what we are free from. In the mountains, we are free from productivity, from prying eyes, from street cameras, from aggression, from have-to-dos and shouldn’t, from the assumption that we are being looked after, that life is comfortable and predictable, that all will be fine if we just wait. 

But that’s never true. 

Safety is an illusion. 

And it is only in the process of radical freedom…when we sober up…that life’s grandest illusion is removed.

I’m going to continue to seek out these moments of lucidity … and while I don’t need to climb in the remote wilderness to find it … though I prefer that … it sure is nice we all have the option. Keeping the wild, wild, ensures that option. It also ensures we can find the wild in us.

In these places, we are free to hold our lives gently in our hands. And that’s as it should be.

Thank you.

Watch The Video: