I grew up in a world where people, by the time they were 30 or 40, were old. They got caught up in their jobs and were basically just turning the crank…biding time until they died. It was an eye-opener that I didn’t have to go down that road. 

When Doug Chabot and I were on the Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, the weather was turning bad and I didn’t feel that good, so we decided to descend and come back up the Shell Route. We’d been talking to Steve [House] and he’d said, ‘There’s fixed lines; you don’t need anything to go down that route.’ So we thought, we’ll leave our rope, stove, food, and fuel here at 7,000 meters and grab this stuff when we come back. But the snow slope turned into a ridge and this big rock arête...There were no fixed ropes, just a drop-off. What we finally came up with was, on the way down we saw a little piece of rope sticking out of the ice, so we spent about three hours chopping 70 feet of rope from the ice. By then it was late in the day; we made an open bivy on this ridge. In the morning, we started downclimbing with the rope. We ended up making about five little rappels... 

When I talk to high-school age kids who are interested in climbing. I tell them about how when I was their age, I was really passionate about climbing so I ordered this big-wall rack from Chouinard Equipment. I didn’t have a car, so I got my buddy to belay me so I could climb up the telephone pole in front of my house. I had all these blades I was pounding into the wood, and I had my aiders out.

When I was about two-thirds of the way up, my dad comes home from work. He’s a really nice guy but didn’t know anything about climbing, and so he pulls up in his pickup, gets out, and starts yelling at me, ‘What the hell are you doing? What kind of stupid stunt is this?!’ He told me to get down immediately, but I said, ‘That’s not a good idea,’ explaining that I can’t lower off these body-weight-only pitons. I told him I needed to climb up to the timber crossbar and put a sling around it and rappel off that. My dad was a mechanical engineer for Boeing, so he understood what I was telling him. Back in those days, you usually just did what your Dad said without a lot of questioning, so it was kind a teenage rite of passage to reason with him and have him agree with me. Those kinds of climbing experiences helped me grow up and be more independent. Seeing the old sling in the crossbar of the telephone pole helped me make the right decisions for myself later on.