Those words sank into my brain and rattled around. I was taken aback. I had just done something that many critics thought was impossible. They’d said I’d be a liability, that I’d subject myself to horrendous risk, that I’d slow my team down, that I’d draw the whole mountain into a rescue. They’d said a blind person didn’t belong on the mountain. The secret was that, at times, I had been one of them, doubting, wondering, and second-guessing myself. I was almost as bad as the naysayers themselves. The difference, however, was that I had managed to shove out some of that clutter, to train hard and move forward step by step, regardless of what my brain was telling me. And so I’d found myself at the summit with my team, standing on an island in the sky the size of a two-car garage.

It sounded like PV was trying to diminish my achievement before I could even fully feel it. What I could feel were the cuts all over my hands that had been oozing for the past two months. Above eighteen thousand feet, in the “Death Zone,” as they call this part of the mountain, there isn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere for injuries to heal. My hands were so puffy that I could barely get them into my gloves.

Muscles suffer from lack of oxygen at this height, too. My legs felt like rubber bands that had been stretched too many times. Plus, my face was fried from the sun that, on the surface of the glacier, topped over one hundred degrees. My lips and tongue were blistered and swollen from the ferocious sun reflecting off the snow that had burned my open mouth. My cheeks and ears were also raw from the wind and temperatures that fell to thirty degrees below zero.

So I pushed PV’s words aside—for a while. I went home, spent the next six months in a constant blur of celebrations, media coverage, and speaking tours. But I realized that before I had climbed Mount Everest, people had constantly asked, “What’s next?” But now, after Everest, not many people asked me that. It was almost as if everyone believed that nothing bigger could be done.

It was at times like these that PV’s words came back to me. I knew he was right. There were bigger things to accomplish in my life—on and off mountains.

1

In 2002, I successfully completed my quest to climb the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents of the world. It is a feat that has been achieved by only a few hundred mountaineers in history—none of them blind.

Of course I did this because of my love of mountaineering and to prove to myself that I could. But I also hoped that I might inspire others to push through any barriers in their way in order pursue their dreams.