The next morning, we took turns pushing Kyle up the steep dirt road in his wheelchair. When the road ended, we wrapped all four of his stumps with bath towels to provide a thick padding. Knowing it was going to be wet and muddy, we covered the bath towels with the plastic grocery bags and then taped everything down tightly, wrap after wrap, until it created a strong armor around his stumps. He hopped down and started crawling. Kyle had been moving through the world for twenty-five years on his arm and leg stumps, and he was surprisingly fast.

For the next ten hours, I hiked right behind Kyle as he scurried upward. Sometimes, he had to drag himself through deep snow with his jeans and shirt getting drenched and cold. When he got to a wall of boulders, he performed a cool acrobatic cartwheel over the jumble, landing on the other side.

Finally, we were standing together on the high, broad expanse that marked the top. Kyle said his jeans were wet and caked with mud and grass. “But it was worth it,” he said, his voice beaming. The shopping bags were now ripped, the packing tape shredded. I knelt down and put my arm over his shoulders for a few summit photos. Then we both sat silently, catching our breaths. For Kyle, the view was visual, but for me, I could hear and feel the ground giving way to air and space that seemed to swallow me, spreading out into a massive expanse of sky. It seemed limitless.

Kyle began to tell me about why he had really come to the No Barriers summit. He had a goal. He wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

“My dad was in the military,” Kyle explained, “and I always felt guilty I couldn’t serve my country. I was feeling kind of depressed sitting in the airport on a layover when these two servicemen came over and introduced themselves to me. They were MPs who’d both suffered severe burns in Iraq. They told me that as they lay in their hospital beds after being ambushed, they made a suicide pact with each other. But on the day they made that decision, they happened to see me on a TV show. After watching, they decided not to go through with it. I managed to keep it together while I was talking to them, but when I got to my hotel that night, I broke down and cried for hours. I think about those guys almost every day.

“I want to climb Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa,” he said, “to send a message to those guys in the airport, to all our vets, and to kids with disabilities, that regardless of our challenges, no obstacle is too great.”