My first thought was that I had to pull loose my spray skirt. But the weight of my body was enough to free the skirt, and in a second, aided by my life jacket, I was on the surface, one hand on my paddle and the other on our turn-turtled boat. Doug surfaced, and somehow he still had his white cap on his head. We looked at each other, and I could see in the set of his eyes that he had the same thought I did: in a matter of seconds everything had changed, and now we would be fighting to stay alive.
I moved to the bow, and on a one-two-three we flipped it upright. We worked our way back to our respective cockpits. A yellow dry bag that held my journal was floating near the boat, so I retrieved it and threw it in the cockpit. We were on opposite sides of the boat, and on another one-two-three we pulled ourselves back up on top of the boat. We both sat up, straddling the boat. We still had our paddles, and, struggling to maintain balance, we started to dig our paddles into the water.
With the wind fully on my torso, I felt the cold even more than when I had been in the water. In only two more seconds, another wave hit and again the boat turned over.
Once more we flipped the boat, crawled on top, and sat up—only to be knocked over again. It seemed like our only option, so we tried it again, and again the waves knocked us over.
Our situation seemed not just grim but near hopeless. Even though the profile of the upturned kayak was not that far above the water, it was exposed to the wind enough that it was propelling us even faster toward the center of the lake than the current alone. The point was still close—maybe a couple hundred yards—but we were quickly being carried away from it.
We held onto the boat. We had been in the water for a few minutes. How much longer did we have? Fifteen minutes? A few yards away I could see the dry bag with my journal, the journal I would add, when the year ended, to the shelf of journals I had kept since I was twenty-five years old. But it was too far to retrieve.
Would anyone ever find it? Would anyone ever read the entry I made last night, about the beautiful sunset? We both let go of the boat. I started to stroke, but it was difficult with my life jacket. I turned over and backstroked. That worked better, although the waves kept washing over my face.
I stopped to catch my breath and saw Doug on his back trying to use his paddle to backstroke. Maybe I should have kept my paddle? Concentrate on swimming. Backstroke is best. Kick, pull with my arms. Another wave, close my mouth. OK, now swim, hard. Another wave.
When I caught my breath, I decided to try the breaststroke again, but it was difficult with the life jacket. The life jacket. Try holding my breath and stroke with my face in the water.
Two strokes, three. Up for a breath. Back down. Up, breathe. Many credit Ridgeway for defining an era of adventure and exploration, setting the bar for future generations. Ridgeway invited Chin on his first National Geographic expedition and showed him how to film and tell a good story.
Chin says,. The One Earth Newsletter showcases innovative projects from around the world led by individuals and community organizations who are making the vision of a green, resilient future a reality. Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map At the beginning of his page, fully illustrated book, Ridgeway calculates that he has spent over five years sleeping in tents in faraway regions of the world.
Rick says, Many credit Ridgeway for defining an era of adventure and exploration, setting the bar for future generations. It was a nightmare. Shortly after his arrival, Ridgeway's stuff sack was stolen. Locked in a cell all day, he was pretty sure that his cellmates were to blame. But there were seven of them and only one of him. He had to stand up for himself. He zeroed in on the cell's ringleader and decided to strike. Leaping from his bunk, he rushed the ringleader.
The other six piled on. After the guards finally peeled back the brawlers, the ringleader hissed, "Once you go to sleep, you're dead. He and Candy were released about a month later, only after the schooner's owner turned himself in to the Panamanian authorities. Ridgeway, deeply shaken by the ordeal, decided to alter his life's trajectory. So while Candy thumbed her way south, he enrolled at the University of Lima to study writing, and within a semester, his diploma arrived from Hawaii.
Throughout the early s Ridgeway spent his winters in the Andes, where he learned high-altitude glacial mountaineering, and his summers in California, where he painted houses, rock climbed, and surfed. But even with his vagabond existence, he was showing hints of his future ambition. He'd begun writing freelance climbing stories for magazines.
In he was accepted, with full funding, to a five-year Ph. But after Ridgeway had signed the admittance paperwork, his climbing partner, Chris Chandler, called to offer him a shot at his childhood dream: a spot on the second ever American ascent of Mount Everest. He walked away from academia for good and boarded a plane for Nepal. The expedition was only partly satisfying. Two climbers, including Chandler, reached the top, and the team arrived home as heroes.
But Ridgeway had not been selected for the summit team. What's more, he'd taken note of the film crew that had been hired to chronicle the climb. I was helping him when it dawned on me—the obviousness of it still startles me—that we were doing the exact same thing. The camera guy was having every bit of the adventure I was, except he was getting paid for it.
I thought, a guy might actually be able to make a living out of this. After Everest, Ridgeway settled down to write a book on the climb. The Boldest Dream sold well. He also taught himself to use cameras, both for still photography and documentary films, and his media career was launched. In Ridgeway and Chandler were invited to climb K2 on a team organized by Ridgeway's idol, Whittaker.
Chandler accused Ridgeway of selfishness, fell into a funk, and ultimately quit the expedition. The remaining four climbers were bogged down by storms, and finally, after 68 days on the mountain, trudged to the summit. Ridgeway cast aside his oxygen tank—not to maintain an alpinist's purity, but because in his exhaustion he couldn't get the thing to work. His dream had come true: Like Whittaker, he'd carved a place in mountaineering history, even landed on the cover of National Geographic.
But his friendship with Chandler was dead, and he would always regret what the peak had cost him. Ridgeway's face and toes were blistered and blackened from frostbite after five months in the Himalaya, and he wore the only garments he'd carried home: flip-flops, an aloha shirt, and a pair of linen pajama pants from a Pakistan bazaar.
As he shuffled onto the stage looking like a cross between a hobo and a clown, Brokaw stared at him slack-jawed and, as Ridgeway remembers, said, "In all my years of television, I've never had anyone on the show who looked anything like you. Ridgeway's next book, The Last Step, came out a year later. Unlike many previous mountaineering tomes filled with platitudes about camaraderie and grand vistas, Ridgeway's account of the K2 climb was startlingly frank.
He depicted the pettiness, envy, bickering, and betrayals that had dominated and almost derailed the expedition. He judged himself and Chandler harshly for their inability to make amends. Ridgeway was learning that the telling was in some ways as important as the doing. But there was a rub: His cottage industry of adventure tales required a continuous inflow of dangerous adventures.
And the risks were catching up. In he, Chouinard, and a photographer named Jonathan Wright were attempting an ascent of China's 24,foot Minya Konka, now called Gongga Shan, when they kicked loose an avalanche. In just a couple of seconds we were in the middle of an exploding sea of ice. All I remember is looking around and seeing the guys with me: arms, legs, and then only ice boiling all around.
The snow swept them gasping for air for 1, vertical feet, during which Ridgeway had time to realize that this was it—he was going to die at the age of But after they tumbled to a stop, the climbers were still alive, though Wright was barely conscious.
Ridgeway started rescue breathing, feeling a pulse. Then his friend's heart stopped. Jonathan Wright died in Ridgeway's arms, leaving behind a wife and a baby girl.
It wasn't Ridgeway's first loss. His mentor Ron Fear had drowned on a river in Peru in His climbing partner Mike Beach had fallen to his death from El Capitan only weeks earlier. In a Kathmandu hotel, just weeks after the avalanche, Ridgeway met Jennifer Fleming, a young widow who had survived a tidal wave that had smashed her sailboat and killed her husband. Finding a bond in their respective grief, the two were married and expecting a baby within the year. Over the next decade, Ridgeway found himself backing away from the summit of Antarctica's Vinson Massif because he didn't trust his footing.
Filming a documentary on Everest, he didn't climb above 8, meters. Afraid that it was his ego that had led him to the tops of mountains, he retreated from the spotlight and spent the next decade behind the camera, starting a photo business and raising his three children. In nearly all his books, Ridgeway struggles with survivor's guilt.
He has written that a mountaineer, like a combat soldier, goes through three stages: thinking death won't happen to him, thinking it could happen, and knowing it's only a matter of time before it will happen.
In his estranged friend Chris Chandler died of altitude sickness on Kangchenjunga. In Disney president Frank Wells, whom Ridgeway had led up several of the Seven Summits, died in a helicopter crash on a skiing expedition. Then in , Alex Lowe, with whom Ridgeway had made first ascents in Antarctica, was killed in an avalanche.
That's what it was: a blank abyss. I knew that in my gut. Things just stop and you rot away. My life had been reduced to a handful of seconds, and now I had millions. I realized that everything I was doing had a freshness to it. A magic. In Ridgeway set out with Chouinard and a small team of climbers on a National Geographic expedition to summit Gangkar Puensum, the highest peak in Bhutan. The Himalayan nation was almost completely unknown to Westerners.
There were no published maps, and not only would Ridgeway's crew attempt the first ascent, they would be the first American climbers of any kind in Bhutan.
But after weeks of crisscrossing the storm-draped mountain range, they couldn't even find the 29,foot Gangkar Puensum, much less climb it. When they did finally locate the peak, they'd run out of time and supplies and had to turn back. Ridgeway had been commissioned by National Geographic to write about the expedition. Another team member was drawing maps to accompany the magazine feature.
But on the last night of the trip, around a campfire, Chouinard made a passionate plea, arguing that these maps would deprive whomever came next of true wilderness and adventure.
Shouldn't they leave Bhutan in its wild and uncharted splendor? The rest of the crew conceded Chouinard's point, and the maps were flung into the fire, ensuring that Bhutan's shroud would remain intact for at least a few more years. Ridgeway liked this decision so much that he employed it as the finale of his story, which he sent off to the magazine upon his return. After an anxious wait, he received the marked-up manuscript in the mail.
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