Erik Weihenmayer

Erik Weihenmayer was born September 23, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey. At 15 months his parents noticed something off in his eyes; he was diagnosed with juvenile retinoschisis, a rare condition that progressively splits the retina. The expected outcome was full blindness by age 13, and that is exactly when his sight gave out. He spent his early teen years fighting against using a cane, against learning Braille, against accepting what was happening — he wanted to hold onto the sighted world as long as he could. He lost that fight, and started over.

He found wrestling first. He captained his high school team in Connecticut and represented the state at the National Junior Freestyle Wrestling Championship in Iowa. At 16 he tried rock climbing and found something he was natural at — climbing by feel, hands and feet looking for holds, was a different game where his blindness was much closer to neutral. He went to Boston College, became a 5th-grade teacher in Phoenix, and started piecing together expeditions on weekends. He summitted Denali in 1995. From that point the project was clear: climb the Seven Summits.

On May 25, 2001 he summitted Mount Everest as part of a 19-person team led by mountaineer Pasquale Scaturro. He was 32. Time put him on the cover. The film of the climb, Farther Than the Eye Can See, won 21 international film festival prizes and was nominated for two Emmys. He completed the original Seven Summits in 2002 with Mount Kosciusko in Australia, and in 2008 added Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia for the more rigorous Eight Summits version. His climbing partner Pasquale told him after Everest: “Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do.” He has spent the years since trying to live up to that.

Other expeditions: the first blind ascent of the 3,000-foot Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite, the kayaking of the entire 277-mile Colorado River through the Grand Canyon at age 46 (2014), the first blind person to complete the Leadville 100 mountain bike race (2010), an alpine ascent of Alpamayo in Peru, and a 700-meter frozen waterfall climb in Nepal. He has carried torches at both Summer and Winter Olympic Games. In 2005 he co-founded No Barriers, a nonprofit that runs adaptive expedition programs for injured veterans, deaf and hard-of-hearing youth, and people with disabilities of all kinds. The organization now serves 10,000 people a year. His books — Touch the Top of the World, The Adversity Advantage, and No Barriers — anchor a speaking career that has taken him from a Presidential Inaugural to Fortune 500 boardrooms across four continents.