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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.
I spent the next few years concentrating on family—among other things, Ellie and I had decided we wanted to adopt a child and were doing research in earnest—and cofounding the No Barriers organization, which included annual conferences we called summits. Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a guy named Dave Shurna who ran a travel program for teenagers. Teams of kids would spend a school year learning about an area. They’d study the environment, the animals, plants, rocks, and trees. They’d study the history and its people, and then, with all the prep complete, they’d be rewarded by traveling to that place and embarking on a big adventure.
Dave told me about his dream to add a program for blind teens to the roster. The group had a new partnership with the National Park Service and Dave was excited to test out a new location: a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. “We’d just do the first half,” he said, “some of the easier rapids, and then hike out of the canyon after a week.”
He wanted me to help kick-start the blind teen program and first rafting trip. I was a mountain guy and knew absolutely nothing about rivers. They were mysterious to me, yet intriguing. The Grand Canyon, I learned, is known for over 150 named rapids. And while there’s a universal rating system for the difficulty of rapids everywhere else that ranges from Class I to VI, the Grand Canyon rapids have a unique rating scale. Each rapid of the Grand Canyon is rated from 1 to 10, with the 10s being some of the biggest rapids in North America. It was not a typical setting for a blind kids’ field trip.
“Sign me up,” I said.
Over the next six months, we put the word out through rehabilitation centers and organizations like the National Federation of the Blind, and kids from around the country began signing up. We assembled our team of blind as well as sighted teens and met up in Flagstaff, Arizona.
It was an impressive group of recruits. There was a blind girl from Kansas, the valedictorian of her class; a kid who’d gone blind at six years old from ocular cancer yet had wrestled and been elected to the student council; another who was on course to compete in the Paralympics as part of a crew team. On the other side of the spectrum, there were several kids who had hardly been off the pavement, let alone hiking canyons or rafting white water.
The first morning we spent packing the rafts and going over safety training. “These aren’t life vests,” the trip leader, Marieke, stressed, holding up a personal flotation device (PFD). “They won’t save your life. They only help you float. Find the four clips and pull the tabs tight. If you swim, a loose PFD could lift up over your face and actually suffocate you.”
Next, the river guides called us over to the rafts lying on the beach and showed us our various positions. The teens lined up three on each side in a raft, and we practiced paddling coordination while still on land. The guide called out steering directions from the back.
“Left paddle!”
I heard paddles clapping together, even on the right side.
“Left back!” This meant for the kids on the left side to paddle backward while the kids on the right side paddled forward. I heard more clanging.
“All paddle forward!” Now I heard the loudest crashes of all.
“Let’s rearrange the order,” I suggested. “Let’s have the blind kids in front. You’ll get the brunt of the waves, and it will be more pressure to get the commands right, but this way, the sighted kids can watch you and paddle on your rhythm.”
When we tried that the banging subsided—a little.
Next they simulated various scenarios, like “high siding,” a situation when a raft hits a rock and gets stuck. All the water pouring against that rock will flip the raft in the blink of an eye, so everyone is supposed to dive to the downriver side of the boat and redistribute the weight.
“High side!” Marieke yelled repeatedly, and eager bodies pitched across the raft, shoulders colliding and bouncing off each other. It all seemed counterintuitive; it would make more sense to dive away from the rock, not toward it. The river seemed like a foreign land, with a foreign language. Like with mountains, I was learning that a river had its own complex vocabulary to decipher, and it was mysterious and overwhelming to me.
We also simulated an accidental swim, in case a person got thrown out of the raft. Each kid would stand thirty feet away from the raft while another threw the rope bag their way. For the sighted swimmers, the bag could land nearby and they were supposed to swim toward it. But for the blind kids, the rope would actually need to make contact so they’d know where to grab. For the next thirty minutes, bags soared through the air, clocking blind kids in the chests, heads, and groins in a human target practice.
As blind boot camp continued, the kids developed their skill, and then, it was finally time to push off.
Copyright © 2019 by Erik Weihenmayer and Buddy Levy
Foreword copyright © 2017 by Bob Woodruff.
