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Hilaree Nelson, Captain of The North Face Athlete Team and 2018's National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, is the first woman to summit two 8,000 meter peaks, Mt. Everest and Lhotse, in one 24-hour push. Her grit and skills in mountaineering are world-renowned. She climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with a broken leg, skied from the summit of the world's sixth-highest mountain, the 26,906-foot Cho Oyu, without supplemental oxygen, and returned to the 27,940-foot Lhotse a second time to ski from the summit.
Outside Magazine has named her "one of the most adventurous women in the world of sports" and Men's Journal called her "one of the most adventurous women of the last 25 years." Her feats on some of the world's most remote mountains have also been featured in several documentaries, including Lhotse, Down to Nothing, The Denali Experiment (directed by Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk), and K2: The Impossible Descent.
Hilaree is also a leading environmental activist through her work with Protect Our Winters. She has been described as a “role model and mentor to other women adventurers, [who] continues to push the envelope of not only geographical exploration but an exploration of our human capacity to challenge social norms."
Breaking barriers, not just for herself but societal. Truly to be celebrated.Valerie Kelsick
As a mother of two boys, I really appreciate how Hilaree is balancing her professional and family life.Nas Panwar
Hilaree, you are such an honest person and hearing you is so inspiring and relatable.Anuradha Khanna
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Hilaree Nelson on the topic “Seeking Your Greatest Adventure”.
What would life be like if you followed your heart in the pursuit of exploration and adventure? If you made a habit of stepping out of your comfort zone every day? If every project you took on required remarkable courage, humility and laser-sharp focus? If one wrong move could make the difference between success and failure, between living and dying?
The episode "Seeking Your Greatest Adventure" offers key insights on:
Greetings friends! Warm welcome back to Intersections. For those of you who are here for the first time, I am Hitendra Wadhwa. In addition to my teaching at Columbia Business School and the running of Mentora Institute, I run Intersections, where our aspiration is to bring life together with leadership, for us to be able to blend all kinds of contrasting energies into one space where we can explore the highest in human potential, the inner and the outer, the East and the West, science and spirituality, profit and purpose.
Today, I have a very special guest. Someone who has blazed an incredible tale at trails, in some ways that represent the aspirations and hungers that you and I and we all do from time to time, which is a certain kind of heroic quest that defines not just a few recreational moments in our life, but that defines our life itself.
Without further ado, let me introduce to us the wonderment and the exemplary record of the individual who is going to be with us today, Hilaree Nelson. She is a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and has been the captain of the North Face Athlete team. She is the first woman to summit two 8000-meter peaks, Mount Everest and Lhotse in one 24-hour push. Any one of these would be an adventure notable enough to have us tell stories of all through her life. Here she is, not just having summited both these peaks, but having done so in one 24-hour push.
She returned to Lhotse, a second time to ski from the summit in fall 2018. Skiing from up there on high. Can you imagine what that just must be like? She is the most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation and has received great accolades from a number of notable press in the mountaineering and the outdoors sports world. Outside, for example, calls her one of the most adventurous women in the world of sports. Men's Journal has called her one of the most adventurous women of the last 25 years. She has appeared in several documentaries, which I encourage to scout around and look for. When we get up to the show Hilaree, we would like to know from you where we can find some of these so that people can continue their exploration of these ideas and experiences with you.
She is an inspiring storyteller and speaker, very active in the environmentalist movement through her work with Protect Our Winters, a role model as well to other women adventurers. She has been a pioneer in bringing more of the face of women into some of these sports. On that note, let me warmly welcome into our midst Hilaree Nelson.
Good morning.
What a joy to have you in our midst. Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for having me. I'm honored.
Where are you today?
Right now, I'm in Telluride, Colorado. I've lived here about 20 years, but I grew up in Seattle, Washington.
All right. We want to go into the larger arc of your life and your pursuits. Before we do that, given that we're all living in very unique times, how has the last year impacted you, especially given that you're in a sport that is very travel intensive?
Well, I've been spending a lot more time in front of my computer than I would normally otherwise. I have two kids. Even today, they were supposed to both be at school. They're both home for reasons of Covid getting into the school. That just happened yesterday.
In some ways, it plays into my strengths of being up for things changing on a daily basis, but in other ways, I am a traveler. I'm a wanderer. I seek adventure. I dream about it. I've had to figure out how to do that within my backyard versus throughout the globe. That's a very small problem given what's going on in the larger scheme of things. But, I've had a lot of time to reflect on my identity and how I see myself moving forward.
Thank you for sharing that. I think this is a period where so many of us are getting that same invitation silently from life to look within and connect with our own deepest self. Thank you for being open to doing this at a time when there's so much responsibility that you're taking on with the kids at home.
When did that spark first come to you, that this is a quest you wanted to go after?
Lhotse in particular?
Well, let's make it even broader. The quest to climb the world's highest peaks and to merge that mountaineering with skiing?
I think it probably came when I happened to go on my first expedition in 1999. I just got the bug. There's a saying in my line of work that if you go seek out one mountain and when you come home you have 20 new ideas to go on new expeditions. It was probably 20 years ago that I really had that first experience in big mountains and just found myself really passionate about it.
Hmm. You mentioned getting the bug. I think that would be a powerful little phrase for us that so many of us could perhaps reflect on, when have we gotten the bug and have we paid attention to it? Have we leaned into it? Have we invested further? Have we gone beyond? In your case, there was something that made you pay attention to it and to have the courage to keep going on that path.
Yeah. I think in my whole childhood, sports was something that really validated with me and with my parents. When I ventured out on my own, I did it very intentionally. Generations of my family, cousins, everyone stayed in Washington State and I was very intentional about leaving home. I didn't go far at first, I went to Colorado and I studied at university there. Right after I finished university, I moved straight away to Europe and lived in the Alps for 5 years in France. It was there that I started going on bigger expeditions.
I think part of it was I had that validation and also I was good at it. I skied my whole life, but I only discovered the uphill part of it probably when I was 19, 20, 21. By the time I was 25-years old and living in Germany and France, I was good at it. I wanted to see that through to the end and I didn't quite know the path that would take me down but. It's been a very interesting path, quite a wild one for sure.
Where can we go to access some of these documentaries?
Most of them you can find on the North Face YouTube channel. You'll find Down To Nothing, which is another 20-minute film about an expedition in Myanmar from 2014. The Lhotse one is from 2018. There's quite a few other films in there that are even shorter.
Wonderful. I like the fact that some of these are short forms. Sometimes one has a little window of time with the family to sit down and have a beautiful shared experience and it's good to know. We have a library of these to go after.
What have been some of the defining moments in your career so far? Sometimes from the outside, we define people on the basis of their most visible and highest accomplishments as we see it from the outside. But I also notice sometimes from the inside, in that individual's journey in pursuit, there are some invisible moments which the world may not otherwise publicly know of, but which really molded them and woke them up to something. Would you be open to sharing a little bit of that sort of personal journey of Hilaree Nelson with us?
I guess the one journey that stands out the most would be an expedition that I did quite early on in my whole direction turning this into a profession. That was the first trip I ever organized and led.
It was all women. There were four of us. We went to Western Mongolia to try to climb and ski the Five Holy Peaks. That borders right up with Russia and China. We thought, "Oh, gosh, we're going to go. Hopefully we'll climb the highest peak in Mongolia and be able to ski it. And if we're really lucky, maybe we'll get two or three of the five peaks." At the end of our stay, we managed to climb and ski all five of the Holy Peaks. We were the first people, male or female to ever ski any of them. We did basically all new routes.
It's a story that nobody knows. It was never published anywhere. We have very few photos of it. We didn't have satellite phones. We had no communications. We just really dug deep and pushed through all kinds of adversity and had great success. I think that trip, especially more than any other trip, really gave me the mental and physical foundation of strength that I was able to draw from throughout plenty of other adversity moving forward on expeditions and in life in general.
That's beautiful. Is there any story or memory that stands out from that time that you can share?
Yes. After we had finished the fourth peak and we were kind of running out of time, we were completely out of food. I remember sitting in the tent, myself and another girl, we were like, "All right, everybody. Let's empty your pockets, go through every pocket. Let's put all the food we have in the middle of the tent and see if we can actually scrounge up enough like little candies or a hot Ramen soup or something so that we can go for the fifth and final peak." We emptied every pocket through everything in the middle, divided it out equally and we're like, all right, let's do it. The next morning we set out and it was an 18-hour day and we summited and skied.
On the way out, we were like, "All right, well, how much food do we have left?" We all looked in our pockets and none of us had eaten anything. We had saved. It is kind of survivor mentality that we all were hoarding what we had so that in case something happened, we would have that food. I've experienced that on subsequent trips. It was just wild. We just did this whole last peak basically on zero calories and we had it in our pockets. Spoke to the team I had, we were just so in tune with each other and how passionate we were about just being adventurous would be the best word, not success so much, but more just adventurous and seeking our full potential. It was amazing. So that was probably my best story from that trip.
That's beautiful. You mentioned how much you got along with each other. I imagine that must be so critical to any of these expeditions, the chemistry, the attunement, the connection that you have with your partners in these enterprises and perhaps the opposite too, when those relationships are not like in a good place, how does that impact your sense of fulfillment and your capacity to really operate at your full potential?
Well, I think having a team that works together means that at the end of the day, whether we were successful with our real goal or not, I can come home and still feel this fullness, this satisfaction, this accomplishment, and when you turn that around, even if you have a team that doesn't mesh well, I feel like it's a lot more dangerous. The other is, I come home feeling defeated regardless of the success or failure of the expedition. So, I think the lesson from that is, that a lot of that feeling of success is keeping a cohesive team that works together. Obviously, different expeditions require different sizes of teams.
Early on, I did a lot of all women's expeditions in bigger groups. Now, like Lhotse, it was really just my life partner, Jim Morrison and myself, we envisioned this thing and planned it together.
Another story from that Mongolia expedition was that, we almost reached the summit and we un-roped because there are a lot of crevasses from glaciers around. But we thought we were above all of them. One of the girls, she took two steps away from where we stopped to have snacks and she opened up a massive hole in a crevasse and she fell in it. But she had skis on her back and they threw her forward and she was able to throw her axes into the other side. If she'd gone in, it would have definitely resulted in death. We worked together to pull her out and what really stuck out to me from that trip was that we spent two days discussing that poor choice that we made up there and how we subsequently were able to rectify it. It wasn't until we talked through it that we were able to continue on with the fourth and fifth peaks. It just made us stronger. We obviously were very lucky. Those wrist slaps, when you are able to walk away from them are very important learning moments.
The foundation of a good team to me, is recognizing mistakes, talking through it and moving forward.
Yeah, it's beautiful. I'm hearing a few things there, which I think can be broadly of value to any or all of us in our own pursuits, whether they're in the arena or mountaineering and skiing or beyond. One is the value of teamsmanship and the power of one plus one being much more than two.
What did you say in the beginning? I haven't captured the phrase, but something about how there's some kind of sense of expansion or something of your consciousness into more of a collective rather than an individual. If I could get that?
Yes, for sure. Especially if you go into the climbs I've done of late with my partner, Jim, you get to this level of functioning together where it's outside of one plus one makes two. We can work together without even verbally communicating a lot of times. It's more body language. It's reading expressions to understand where our risk-taking, acceptance is, our fear level etc. It's truly one of the reasons why I love these expeditions and these big objectives so much is because of that human dynamic. That partnership that's formed and it's very intense. It can be very intense, bad too. So, there are two sides to every coin, but the good intense is pretty incredible.
Wonderful. I also hear you mentioned the two days that you took to analyze it as a group to see what we did wrong. There's something that I've been studying about those who pursue an expert kind of mastery over a certain discipline and how they just keep growing and growing, so they may attain a certain level of accomplishment. But they're always then looking at ways to adapt further to new conditions and to every Nth new variable in a situation that they may not have in the past been focused on. For example, someone in music might be wanting to master Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. But if they're really an expert, they'll actually go into the concert hall where they're going to present tomorrow and spend some time in the concert hall and actually play the piano there and just sense the acoustics in the room and the particular instrument they're playing to see if they vary a little bit.
I'm hearing that same sort of idea play out in what you just shared, which is to look at even the smallest little bit of wrinkles in one's game in the context one is thrust into and always be ready to iron those out because you just never know which small wrinkle can take you away from perfection.
Yes. I think with any profession, obviously, what I do has a level of life or death to some of that decision making, but I feel like it's ironic that I'm still a professional athlete at 48 years. But I feel like in what I do, there is so much history that goes into making those decisions, so much experience that builds up over time that I'm still just learning how to push that envelope and how to get better and be better, be a better partner, be a better climber, etc. Within that presence, it's almost like slowing time where I can really see those wrinkles that you're talking about. I can read a snowflake. I can read a subtle change in aspect. It doesn't make me bulletproof, but it fascinates me. To be in that moment is very rare and it's fascinating. I don't know another word to describe it, but that just comes from like that 10,000 hour rule. If you do something enough you get this ability to really hone in on the time and your own particular vision of what you're seeing, does that make sense?
That's beautiful. You're reminding me of a quote from Einstein. He once said, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those for whom nothing is a miracle and for those whom everything is a miracle." You have developed the capacity to feel that sense of miraculousness and awe from these aspects of nature that many of us might just glance at and leave behind. That is beautiful.
It sounds like a spiritual experience. Is it something that has brought you a bigger understanding of the ineffable?
Yes, especially with high altitude climbing. Because time, externally and internally changes.
I have said for many years that I'm not a spiritual person. I don't particularly believe in God, if you will. But that has changed for me over time. In high altitude and that effort that you're putting in and that added suffering, it's a very spiritual experience. It is very much a reason why I go back to high altitude, especially because I feel like the world becomes very thin and I can almost reach through it and experience something that I don't experience anywhere else.
Again, that's quite a lot to answer that question, the short answer is very much yes.
Well, it's really important something that you just said here, which is you're not really a spiritual person. You don't believe in God and or you haven't and that's changing. Then there's this piece that you're starting to observe that there's something beyond what meets the human eye, isn't it?
I just want to maybe just use that as a way to just encourage us to think about spirituality in a little bit broader than the more traditional lens that religion at times provides us. Some of us have had positive and some of us have had not so positive experiences, perhaps with a church, a path, a religion or a tradition or something that maybe at times has been perhaps imposed as they've grown up. Here it is, we're living through a time when a lot of folks are, on the one hand, wanting to choose their own destiny, wanting to actually affirm their own beliefs. But in doing so, while they may be moving away from some of those traditional pursuits of certain practices or church dictated norms, they're actually rediscovering in some ways from within a certain sense of awe and mystery and the ineffable set of feelings and experiences that they're going through from within. Maybe that's a whole new way of pursuing spirituality in one's life.
Yes. I think even if you approach spirituality with that attitude, whether you necessarily believe in one entity over another, it helps you be open minded to other people's beliefs. Especially today, I think that is incredibly important. For me, a lot of it comes from Mother Nature, I've seen things that just really can't be explained. It goes back to that sense of awe, that sense of seeing a miracle in everything.
Most definitely, I went through a phase in my life where I didn't see that. Things are a bit darker. I was maybe going on expeditions, not for the right reasons, but as a way to escape. But I've come full circle in that. Now I would go into the mountains and every day is different. You can climb the same mountain a hundred times and every single time it's going to be different. To me, that's just a miracle. It's an incredible way to take care of oneself, especially in these times where perhaps you can't go far from your home. It's great to just go outside for 10 minutes, go outside in the pouring rain or when it's sleeting and bundle up. What does that feel like versus the warm sun?
All of those experiences I think, whether it's 10 minutes or 10 weeks, like some of my trips, it kind of gives you a chance to get out of your own way.
Well, I am so hungry to want to be able to walk in your shoes and I wonder if you could give me and our audience the gift of a few more stories of some of those moments that have lived on for you, maybe moments that have just made you look back and laugh at something silly or perhaps just a breakthrough of some kind that was achieved or a setback that was overcome. I just want to stimulate in your mind this moment, memories from the past that you can recount for us.
One comes from an expedition that I went on in Pakistan to Gasherbrum 2. It was the first trip I'd done after having my first child. It was really hard to be away. I was so stressed out that I had lost 15 pounds off of my already fairly slim size and so trying to climb an 8,000 meter peak, when you don't have any fat, your stress is not good. I just remember the cook that we had with us, he took pity on me and he gave me this 2 pound can of butter that I carried with me. We ultimately weren't successful, but we made it quite high. 7,500 meters. I took this tin of butter basically all the way to the top with me as far as high as we made it. I would just eat it with a spoonful. I'd put it in my coffee in the morning. All I needed was fat and it was pretty gross. But it was sort of a good example of doing what you have to do to survive.
Fortunately, I can still eat butter. I still like butter. It didn't turn me off of butter forever, but that's one example. There was another trip in Burma that I did in 2014, again, where we ran out of food. All my stories seem to have to do with food, apparently. We ran out of food and this is just an example. We were walking through an incredibly impoverished area in the northern mountains of Myanmar, all the villages were really small, they had pigs, they had corn, very little food. I just remember coming back down into these villages that we passed on our way up and just these people offering us everything they had and being completely humbled by that experience. We did our very best not to take anything, we knew we were on our way out and we'd survive off of a couple of bowls of rice and be okay. But the offering was there and it was just incredible, the kindness that's out there.
That's such a sweet story. In our conversations before, you've mentioned how you have felt so heart-warmed by just discovering some of these local communities who are walking such a different path in terms of how they live versus what we are used to here in the West, since you've traveled to so many of the developing nations as well. Can you just talk for a moment and share some of the things that surprised you about experiencing local communities?
One experience would be on Papsura, it's called the peak of evil, which was in the northeastern part of India, the Himachal Pradesh state. It's the peak we climbed and skied in 2017 and that was where I got the Adventurer of the Year award from National Geographic. It was my fifth trip there. I had never summited a peak in India until this trip. I had a lot of times where I've turned around. On this particular trip, we had probably 15 porters coming from the local villages that were helping us get our stuff up to base camp. Once we got to our base camp, these guys, this was their backyard, but they'd never been up to this particular part of the glacier. Their smiles, their joy and their excitement to be a part of this trip was overwhelming. They wanted to continue to help us and so they ended up climbing all the way up to 16,000 feet to our second high camp. They've never seen anybody ski before. So, we were kind of skiing down and trying to explain what it was like and all the equipment.
These are people that lived in the villages just not far below and their excitement just was infectious. We were having so much fun with them and we didn't speak the same language. It was all just through like high fives and touching different pieces of equipment and showing them stuff and backpacks. That was one of the cooler experiences I've had with a local population that lived at the base of these mountains but often doesn't get to explore those peaks.
I love the story of human-to-human connection. Even without much in common, a different language you speak and then the connection being catalyzed by a connection with nature around you as well. How beautiful!
How do you reconcile the high level of risk with your family and how do you know when to stop pushing? Because we had some painful stories of people who have pushed a little bit too far, right?
Yes. I did know Ueli Steck and it's hard not to admire and respect his skill set. I don't know if it's just rationalizing my decisions, but I don't ever solo anything, I always am with a partner. That's not to say I haven't chosen to solo sections of a mountain with a partner, but we're not tied in, which still leaves you kind of at the same risk. I also like to only climb things that I can ski down. That inherently takes that verticality from 90 degrees to overhanging to like something that you can ski down. So, you're looking at like 45-50 degrees. In the case of Papsura, maybe it was 55 degrees, but you don't really get much steeper than that.
My kids are older now, they're 11 and 13. I talk to them a lot about some of these trips. I've taken them with me. I'm afraid to say too much about how I rationalize it, because I'm not bulletproof.
I had an experience when my second son was seven months and my oldest son was just two years and I went back to work as a Helicopter Ski Guide and on that first day, I had a really tragic accident with a client where she fell backwards. She wasn't even skiing. She just fell backwards into this really shallow river and her head got stuck with her helmet underneath this undercut bedrock. In under a minute, she drowned and I wasn't able to save her.
That greatly affected a lot of my decision making moving forward. It affected my spiritual beliefs, it affected some of that risk that we were talking about in terms of my kids and that I feel like death is everywhere, and it's not something we do a very good job of talking about in the United States. I think other countries handle it much better than we do. So, I try to talk to my kids about it and the last thing I want to do is die on any of these expeditions. But I do feel like it happens and it happens randomly and it happens sadly, tragically, it happens when you're 95 years old, when you're supposed to pass away. I think discussing it is a big part of how I handle the decisions I've made with my kids.
That's really powerful. I don't know Hilaree, you're probably not aware of this, but one of the previous episodes of Intersections was 'What death can teach us.' The reason for that was because, I very much hold the same conviction as you arrived at, which is that it is such a living everyday possibility around us. When death comes knocking on anyone's door, that to ignore it, hoping that it will ignore us is not a very smart way of thinking about it.
My question on this on this front, on harmonizing one's relationship with this inevitable ultimate sort of final moments and whatever it is that lies on the other side has been to look for the opportunities in that, to look for how is it that it can make even more sanctified, more rich and more purposeful, the moments that I do live in? Has that been part of the impact that perhaps a moment like that might have had on your children or on you?
Yes, it took me a while to get to that point of understanding and acceptance. But, yes, very much so. I define it as being a yes person. In terms of going down a path of opportunity or trying something different or pushing into something that scares me. Saying yes to that means, I'm living and I'm still open to learning that, being a risk taker is very closely tied to taking advantage of every day for me and that definitely has come from that accident.
Thank you for sharing something that must have been so challenging and yet so defining for you with us.
You've talked a lot about team spirit and it is so meaningful at a time when we as a world family are going through what we are. This team spirit is so needed today, to make a strong global team.
The idea that it's not just in your mountaineering or skiing or each of us and our own teams at work or beyond. But we are a team, as humanity. And what could be better evidence of that than whoever knows where this Coronavirus came from? But don't we have to be so much more aligned, harmonized, coordinated, co-operative, supportive to live through this moment, not just cloistered in our own little homes, but actually collectively in doing the things we have to? Isn't it?
Yeah, it's been quite an experience. I think this is fairly unique that it is a global pandemic that we're all having to find a silver lining to find a way to still find connections with people, find a way to be positive, find a way to get our kids through this, to get our aging parents through it.
I will say that a lot of these expedition experiences I've had, these teamwork things have helped me over the last 10 months to figure out how to be quarantined in my house with the kids and have patience, compassion and empathy. It's been a wild year.
I hear you say that the journey that you've been on has helped you in these last 10 months, patience, compassion, empathy. If I hear you correctly, you're saying that there were certain strengths you developed, certain experiences that are actually being put to good use in another arena right now. That's just a good lesson for all of us to take from this, because I'm always looking out for these ways for us to gain inspiration and learn from your life, Hilaree and others that we bring onto the show. Maybe one simple thing that you're saying here is, "Guys, look back at what you've been doing over the last several years." You've been pursuing some part of your own passions and they're probably things there that you've done, honed and strengthened yourself. Those can be put to good use in a time like this, even though it's a very different arena.
Right. I guess one specific example for me is, and we talked a little bit about this before, but it's sort of this technique that I use when I'm climbing something and I start getting too afraid. That fear turns into panic. I've developed over 40 expeditions. The way to calm myself down is to change what I'm looking at, to step away from the exposure.
When I'm home with my kids and they're driving me crazy, was to step away from that exposure, take a few minutes to visualize something different and breathe through it. That typically pushes that fear ball back down and makes it more manageable. I've used that a hundred times over the last ten months. Just take a second to walk away from something, whether it was more work that I was supposed to do being canceled and I'm worried about X, Y and Z because of that, or kids getting sick. I feel that impatience welling up and I want to explode and scream. Then I'm like, "Okay, just step outside, step out onto the front porch, look at the mountains, take a few deep breaths and then re-engage." So, that's a very specific technique and it has helped me a lot over the last few months.
It's a beautiful gift to give us. It's as though there are these two versions of us. The more centered, the more high-performance core that we have and then there is this disturbed, agitated, upset version of us. To have that awareness to know when you move from one to the other and then to have the capacity to make a small intervention, which you can practically just step back and take a few deep breaths and turn your attention away from that can bring much more wisdom, grace and strength back to that battle.
Yes, grace is a very good word. It's amazing what 30 seconds can do and stepping away from a situation that's starting to turn into that frustrated, impatient, not graceful situation is really beneficial to everyone, I think.
Yeah, I love that phrase. It's amazing what 30 seconds can do. That's going to be my key takeaway from our conversation today. Let's do this, before I move on to another topic, which I'm really intrigued about, is your role in this sphere of human pursuit as a woman.
Hilaree, it's not lost on me that the arena that you've been invested in, even while you mention, for example, some of these pursuits that you've done with a five women crew. In general, historically it has been a very male dominated pursuit. What has it been like for you to come into this with that identity as a woman? And has it been a very salient part of how you've seen yourself or how others have received you and seen you? If so, has it posed any complexities or impediments, as some have experienced in other pursuits as well?
Yes, to all of those things, I guess. There have been a lot of opportunities for me because I am a woman in this profession. Early on, in 1999, 2000, 2001 when I was really getting started, I was invited on a lot of expeditions, primarily because I was a female and a lot of team sponsors at that point were really looking to have that one woman on a trip because it added to the story. It's ironic, of course, those beginning years, I had the least experience. And I have had so much more experience now. But it got me started. It gave me that sort of platform to sink my fingernails into and hang on.
I have had incredible male counterparts who've had more experience than me and have taken time to really teach me things and really see the potential that I had, not the potential that I had as a woman, but the potential that I had as a person vesting this effort into climbing.
I have had the opposite where I've seen the less fun side of being the only woman on a trip and sometimes that culminates in sleeping in my own tent or making sure there was another woman on the trip so that I could have that security of a tent partner that I didn't have to deal with in other ways. I'm leaving that vague.
What I have noticed moving forward, going through and having kids and having my sponsors stick with me after kids, is that now we're getting to a point where my main sponsors are no longer writing pregnancy into an athlete contract as an injury. Now, if you are pregnant, we are going to give you a contract for a year to figure out if you want to move forward with this or not. That is a massive change, and that has just happened in the last five or six years.
Right now, on The North Face Athlete team, for example, there are six of us from professional rock climbers to professional endurance runners to ski mountaineers. We all have kids. That was unheard of 15 years ago.
At least, in this little micro world that I'm in, it is changing. Women, especially, are now looking at things like, "Oh, there's more than room for just one of us on top." I think this applies to business as well. That's where the mentorship starts coming in. If you were the woman on top, you weren't willing to mentor the women below because there's only room for one of us. I think that's changing and we're able to reach out and bring more of us up and create a platform in which people will look at my accomplishments and be like she was the first female to do that. It's going to be more like she's the first person to accomplish this. It's sort of ironic that we're looking to get rid of that female sort of disclaimer. Moving forward with confidence, with grace, with the skill set to embrace being female and bringing what that means into a group dynamic and having a lot of us there.
That is so inspiring. There are so many dimensions to your story that I think we could pick and analyze. That dimension itself of just the gender stereotypes and limits of the past that you are charging forward and blazing through and destroying is so beautiful to see.
We've talked in part about your quest of getting to be a lifelong learner and advancing to your full potential at every stage just learning more. I'm also wondering if that same dynamic is applied to humanity at large as well, society at large as well, that we have so many of these limitations in our mind about what we think we can achieve collectively as a group or as a demographic or a society. In part, what you are doing here is actually opening us up to the realization that some of these are inner limits, not outer limits.
Yeah. I think that's where at least I like to think I've gotten in terms of some of these more audacious goals in the mountains. I really like to get to this place where I've reached my physical limit and the only way I can continue forward or push through is drawing on something outside of physicality. That's really just mental strength and what my mindset can do, like how can I push myself to focus, how can I push myself through this physical adversity to not necessarily be successful in standing on top of the mountain, but to come home in one piece, to put in the effort that stays with me and fills me up. I don't like to use the word happiness, but gives me that sense of accomplishment, that sense of meaning. That comes for me more from when I have to push through when my physical body is tapped.
Hilaree, there is such a world of lessons that we are taking away from this conversation.
Hilaree, before we wrap up, there is one other learning that I would love to have, which I've received and I've been very inspired by which I'd love for you to be able to transmit to our friends as well. That goes back to the roots. That goes back to your formative years and some experience that you went through that made you even just that much more deeply invested in kind of leaning into the world at large, traveling, gaining new experiences. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of formative period and how you used this pursuit that you're on as a way to overcome and ultimately transcend?
I think a lot of those formative years growing up, I had an older brother and sister. I mentioned how sports was sort of that validation that I got from my parents. I didn't travel very much as a kid, so I imagined it more than anything. My dad, especially, spent more of our time on the water than in the mountains. We would go out on this boat that we had for weeks on end and we'd go all the way up until the inside passage in Canada. It was to me, very adventurous and had lots of wilderness and bears on the beach and bald eagles. I think that's where that sort of wild side kicked in for me.
Also growing up, within my family, my father especially, he kind of lived on this roller coaster of depression. At that time, it was quite before people were talking about it or knowing how to deal with it, and I just remember it very much affecting how I grew up. It always happened over like a 3 month period where there'd be highs and then it's slowly going down to a low. Then I would come back up. I think a lot of my motivation actually comes from that because I really convinced myself as a kid that it was sports and it was nature that would keep me from being affected by depression in my life, it seems like a very kid thing to think but as I grew up and moved forward, every time I felt sad, depressed or felt like there was some huge hurdle in front of me or something I couldn't get through, I would go outside, I'd go for a run.
I had this mantra that if I went 3 days without exercise, that was like the end of the world. I was all of a sudden going to be hospitalized for depression. I just took it to an extreme, as you can see, with what I do now. But that very much was the motivation. I think maybe it was not correctly thought out on my part, it has given me a lot of tools in life. I don't think I struggle with clinical depression like my father did. I think I have a different make up in that regard. But at the same time, life is hard and we have so many hurdles to overcome. To be able to have some tools to deal with that, that is what I take from those formative years growing up. However I came about it, I have it now. I know that through nature, through just getting my heart rate up, whether it's for 10 minutes or for 6 hours, it just really helps straighten me out and give me perspective.
I'm so grateful that you've shared that story. One of the guests we've had on the show is David Burns, who is a preeminent psychotherapist and a pioneer in cognitive behavioral therapy. One of the things I've learned from him over the years is that many of these mental states can be viewed as states rather than traits, things that we drift in and out of. Some of us perhaps spend more time on them than others or go deeper etc. But, there are tools available to us.
In your case, it appears that you have just basically self-architected your own set of tools to help you get to the other side of this. While that may be shifting and transforming you from within to move away from a depressive state in a certain moment, it has just led to an incredible adventure, an incredible contribution and inspiration both for yourself and for the world at large. And that has to be so exhilarating. For all of us here that when you think about some of the things we struggle with the most from within, meaning, within those lies the seed of transformation. Within those lies the seed of a hero's journey. Isn't that what your life represents to us?
Yeah, I think there's a good quote. I forget who said it. It said, "The only thing that you can control in your life is your attitude."
That's what I try to teach my kids. When my son wakes up and he's just in the worst mood and he just wants to go play with his friends and he can't because everybody is not allowed to do that right now. It's just your attitude. It's a choice when you wake up in the morning. I'm not perfect at it. I have plenty of days where I just have not gotten out of bed. If you can have that mindset "It's a state, not a trait." I've never heard that. That's going to be my takeaway from this call.
That's beautiful. Well, you're the one who's living the truth.
Hilaree, this has been such a joy. I'm so glad that we don't have to have this moment with you to just end in the present moment because you have pointed out to the North Face and how there are assets available there that bring us even closer to experiencing with you the kind of climbs and adventures that you've been pursuing. What's the next big project that we as a world will be able to see?
I noticed you told me that you were in another very special part of the world recently. Maybe we can just end with that last little update from you. Where were you recently and what might emerge from it that all of us could look forward to?
Well, the last real expedition I got to go on was in Antarctica. That was in January of 2020. I feel so fortunate to have kind of snuck that in because I have wanted to go there for so long. I've always been just really in awe of that entire continent. To be able to go and experience that place, the storms, the cold and the wind is just really beautiful! it's really an incredible place. I feel very fortunate to have been there.
Are we going to be able to see that in a feature film?
I don't know if we're making a film about it, but there have been a lot of photos. I was there with Jimmy Chin, who works with North Face. He also won an Oscar for Best Documentary 2 years ago for his film with Alex Honnold, Free Solo. He is an incredible photographer. There's some imagery from that trip that's really great. You can find that on the North Face's Instagram or my Instagram also on Jimmy's Instagram.
I'm really excited to go back to the Arctic and this speaks to Protect Our Winters. We're hoping to go in April to go back up to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and do some more exploring at the Brooks Range and sort of plateau up there. Hopefully, that will end up being a film.
Wonderful. That is a topic we didn't really get a chance to move into with the confines of the time we have, preservation of the environment. But Hilaree, that gives us an excuse to want to invite you back at some point later in the year.
Yeah, perhaps after that trip would be great. Plus, by then, we'll see where the policy is going to go in terms of Protecting the Arctic up there.
Yes with the shift in the administration. Thank you so much. That was such a joy. Thank you for the life you live.
Thanks for sharing all these stories. I've waited through a few of them and they're pretty amazing. thank you.
Awesome. All the best to you. Wishing you well in this year ahead Hilaree.
All right, folks, I really don't want to bookend this with anything more than just leaving you with those beautiful residual, sweet, inspiring memories from Hilaree and her conversation with us.
Let me just say, I'm looking forward to being back with you in a couple of weeks. I know this has been very meaningful for so many of us. Thank you for the lessons and insights that you have shared. Let's just all, for a moment, just close our eyes and just send a good wish and a blessing to Hilaree and her family for giving us such an inspiring story and an example of what a meaningful, rich, invested life can be about.
On that note, thank you. Godspeed. We'll see you in a couple of weeks.
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