When he saw Erik Weihenmayer arrive that afternoon, Pasquale Scaturro1
began to have misgivings about the expedition he was leading. Here they were
on the first floor of Mount Everest, and Erik—the reason for the whole trip—
was stumbling into Camp 1 bloody, sick, and dehydrated. “He was literally
green,” says fellow climber and teammate Michael O’Donnell. “He looked like
George Foreman2
had beaten him for two hours.” The beating had actually
been administered by Erik’s climbing partner, Luis Benitez.3
Erik had slipped
into a crevasse, and as Benitez reached down to catch him, his climbing pole
raked Erik across the nose and chin. Wounds heal slowly at that altitude
because of the thin air.
As Erik passed out in his tent, the rest of the team gathered in a worried
huddle. “I was thinking maybe this is not a good idea,” says Scaturro. “Two
years of planning, a documentary movie, and this blind guy barely makes it to
Camp 1?”
This blind guy. Erik Weihenmayer, thirty-three, wasn’t just another yuppie
trekker who’d lost a few rounds to the mountain. Blind since he was thirteen,
the victim of a rare hereditary disease of the retina, he began attacking
mountains in his early twenties. a
But he had been having the same doubts as the rest of the team. On that
arduous climb to camp through the Khumbu Icefall,4
Erik wondered for the
first time if his attempt to become the first sightless person to summit Mount
Everest was a colossal mistake, an act of Daedalian hubris5
for which he would
be punished. There are so many ways to die on that mountain, spanning