LIVES OF ADVENTURE
For these alumni the call to life on the edge transcends “Because it’s there.”
Legendary Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson famously huffed that adventure, thank you very much, was what happened when things went wrong.
Jan Reynolds ’78 might have agreed when, in 1985, she stood in an open gondola suspended beneath a hot air balloon at 28,000 feet, screaming along in the jet stream in an attempt to make the first balloon flight over Mt. Everest. A second balloon had just plummeted after its burner flamed out, narrowly averting disaster when the burner relit at 1,000 feet. Now Reynolds’s craft suffered an even worse fate: it ran out of gas entirely and began a long, harrowing plunge toward the jagged mountainscape below. She and her companion pilot managed to execute a controlled crash, which saved their lives, but then the tumbling balloon and gondola caught fire. Entangled in ropes and lines, Reynolds’s companion would have burned had she not beaten out the flames with her bare hands and pulled him to safety.
Welcome to the adventurous life. Peril aside, many wouldn’t have it any other way; to tweak Socrates, the unadventurous life is not worth living. The University of Vermont may well attract more than its fair share of adventurers, which is not so surprising when you factor in the Green Mountain State’s abundant raw nature and something of a lingering frontier character. UVM alumni have distinguished themselves in many adventurous pursuits—sailing, climbing, skiing, motor racing, professional sports, and others. In this issue, we offer a glimpse of the lives of four who have found not only adventure in the wilds, but full-blown careers. A look behind the scenes of their endeavors reveals, at least partly, why some of us feel fully alive only in the valley of the shadow of death. It also reveals that, at its best, the pursuit of high adventure is about goals much loftier than adrenaline on the rocks.
JAN REYNOLDS ’78
Jan Reynolds is a tall, striking woman with long dark hair, freckles, and an incandescent smile. Born in Vermont, she has traveled widely in her post-UVM years but has always called Stowe home. “I was number six of seven children. Raised on a dairy farm outside Middlebury. We milked twice a day and didn’t travel much. Kind of the older Vermont upbringing,” she says wryly.
Reynolds majored in education at UVM, where she helped lead the women’s Nordic ski team to the Division I NCAA National Championship in 1978. After college, Reynolds did her graduate work at the famed Trapp Family Lodge ski school, where two life-changing events occurred. “I worked with instructors who also guided in Yosemite. In summer, they took me with them and I got a crash course in world-class climbing and mountaineering.” The other event was falling in love with the late Ned Gillette, a Dartmouth man, champion skier, and self-proclaimed professional adventurer.
Together, Reynolds and Gillette made the first linked traverse of the New Zealand Alps in 1979. The next year, China, where they climbed 24,757-foot Muztagata, and Reynolds set a women’s record skiing off the summit. 1981, the couple completed the first circumnavigation of Mt. Everest, climbing 23,494 feet Pumori in the process. Their resulting book, Everest Grand Circle, was a bestseller and Jan and Ned were morning show darlings for weeks.
In 1983 and 1984, Reynolds began charting her own course, skiing on the national biathlon team, the first United States squad to make the podium in World Cup competition. One year later, Reynolds went aloft on the Beyond the Summits Expedition where she met up with that darker definition of adventure posed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
But while she savored these adventures and accolades, something deeper was lacking. A unique odyssey clarified her vision. In 1986, working with National Geographic, she followed the route of ancient Tibetan salt traders, completing a solo traverse of the Himalaya. Along the way, she found her grail: “The salt road trip turned me on to vanishing cultures,” Reynolds says. “These cultures were so interesting. They live and work with such different attitudes.”
A passion for chronicling these led to her seven-book Vanishing Cultures series.
Researching the books, she lived with reindeer-herding Samis, Amazonian Yanamama natives, Mongolian herders, Tuareg desert nomads, Inuits, and Australia’s aboriginals. “These are people who have lived in harmony with nature for centuries,” she says. “There is so much to learn from them.”
Today, Reynolds is at work on her fourteenth book and at home in Stowe with husband Javin Pierce, UVM ’81, and their two sons, Briggs, 13, and Story, 10. Confronted with the inevitable query posed to those who step to the edge—“Why do you do it?”—Reynolds struggles briefly. “It all seems so long ago.” But then she laughs, “I’m just naturally curious. I just love it.” She can be forgiven, at 52, for not dwelling on the question much now. But once she did; in her book Everest Grand Circle, Reynolds nailed it: “I am forever wondering if I’ll measure up to my self-inflicted tasks.”
photo by Alain Denis
KITTY CALHOUN ’82
Few are as well-versed in the art of the “self-inflicted task” as Catherine Howell “Kitty” Calhoun, 48, who now divides her time between homes in Utah and Colorado. Calhoun is a compact woman with kind eyes and a sweet southern drawl. In the words of a friend, “she started climbing at the age of eighteen, and by looking at her you think that might only be last year.”
While Jan Reynolds’s adventures included deserts and jungles and balloons, Calhoun’s have been all about mountains. Born in South Carolina in 1960, she started downhill skiing while in high school and discovered rock climbing in a 1978 Outward Bound course. Skiing, though, was her great love and she thought Vermont’s ice would make her a better skier than puffy Western powder. She was also attracted to the University’s undergraduate recreation management program, one of the first in the country.
“UVM was great,” Calhoun recalls. And as things turned out, ice was important to Calhoun’s future, but not the Nose Dive variety. A friend in the Outing Club, Bill Menning ’81, got her into ice climbing with weekly winter trips out to Smuggler’s Notch. Calhoun worked for the OC to pay for technical gear, and ice climbing became, if not an obsession, at least a passion. “One year my index finger was swollen and purple all winter long from bashing ice,” she remembers. “It hurt like heck but didn’t make me stop.”
There’s an old saying, “Talent does what it can, genius does what it must,” and Calhoun’s ice work went way beyond mere talent. After graduation, her climbing genius led her on a remarkable, whirlwind chase through America’s greatest mountain ranges. “I finished school in December. Figured I’d live out of my car. Start in Colorado in January, do February in Wyoming, March in the Cascades, April in the Palisades.” After that apprenticeship, in 1984, Calhoun headed south to Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, a climbing mecca with more than fifty peaks over 18,000 feet.
Then, with climbing partner Colin Grissom, in 1985 she tackled Denali’s legendary and deadly Cassin Ridge. “We did OK until a storm hit us at nineteen,” Calhoun relates. They dug in to wait. “For five days we had two cups of water per person per day and no food. It was pretty scary.” (No doubt. In 1967, a similar storm killed seven good climbers at about the same altitude.) With clear weather at last, they struggled toward the summit. “I nearly went unconscious several times,” Calhoun recalls, but she pushed on to the top.
From there, Calhoun began guiding professionally and moved on to climbing’s Big Show, the Himalaya. In 1987, an early advocate of the emerging fast-and-light Alpine style, she was the first American woman to summit 26,810-foot Dhaulagiri. In 1990, climbing 27,825-foot Makalu via the vaunted West Pillar route, she became the first woman to summit that peak. Alpinist magazine (about which more later) noted, “Climbing any route on an 8000er deserves a tip o’ the hat, but Makalu’s West Pillar merits a full bow from the waist.”
Calhoun’s next step might have been onto Everest, and she did receive offers to join sponsored expeditions, but the large, siege-style efforts held no allure. Instead, she earned an MBA from the University of Washington, settled in Salt Lake City, co-founded a successful guiding business, and married frequent climbing partner Jay Smith. In 1995, they had a son named Gradey who, not surprisingly, is already an accomplished climber in his own right.
When it comes to mountains, the world cleaves neatly into two kinds of people. Confronting icy summits, one group shivers and says, “No way.” The other salivates and says, “I gotta go there.”
Calhoun speaks for the latter: “It’s one of those things you’re just drawn to, and I couldn’t really see any other thing I wanted to do.” For her, though, benefits are more important than rationales. “I like the challenges both physical and mental. Mountaineering can be like chess, a lot of strategy and judgment.” She credits climbing with other unanticipated gifts: “I never expected to be traveling all over the world, being exposed to different cultures, which has helped me keep a more open mind.”
And Calhoun points to one more gift from climbing, perhaps the most important of all. “I grew up as a Christian in the South, and alpine climbing has reinforced my beliefs,” she says. “Close calls have helped me realize that security is an elusive thing and that we can amass as many material things as we want, but it won’t save us.”
photo by Tim Nickles
CHRISTIAN BECKWITH ’91
Looking back on his upbringing, Christian Beckwith ’91, raised in a small midcoast Maine town, calls himself a “redneck farmer.” Becoming an accomplished climber and pioneering editor of Alpinist—a magazine dedicated to extreme minimalist climbing evoked through writing and photography that approaches art—didn’t seem likely future scenarios. But a post-high school/pre-college trip to Italy changed all that. “By the time I returned home my world view and perception of possibility had been irreversibly expanded,” he says.
Mountains would soon find their way into Beckwith’s life when he spent his junior year abroad. Climbing the gnarly crags of North Wales, he experienced one of two life-shaping epiphanies: “I remember topping out one of my first climbs above Eric Jones’s cafe in the cragging area of Tremadog,” he says. “The wet Welsh wind whipped my hair and face, and as I stood looking out at the stark green landscape I knew that something had shifted within me. I simply wasn’t the same person I had been before I began the climb.” Henceforth, life and climbing would be inseparable.
Later that spring, climbing Greece’s Mt. Olympus prompted a second awakening. The mountain’s beauty was ethereal, but he found it tragically and utterly befouled by humans. Beckwith describes the experience in an e-mail: “Trash was scattered on the ground: wrappers, sheaths of plastic, the detritus of our species. Something moved through me then, the most powerful sensation of my life, that this trash was a desecration of a balanced, perfect system, and that we were messing up the world. Suddenly I found myself sobbing. I knew then that I would need to spend the rest of my life trying to understand whatever realization had occupied me in those moments before the cistern. A few days later, when we walked down off the mountain, I felt transformed again.”
Jan Reynolds had discovered that chronicling endangered cultures would be the Yin to complement the Yang of her adventure seeking. On Olympus that night, in the cradle of modern civilization, Christian Beckwith united with his fragile planet in a way he had never imagined possible.
He graduated from UVM a seeker with two goals: travel and “not to get a real job until I was thirty.” Travel he did, to places rich with adventure potential: Arizona, California, Thailand, Alaska, Sumatra. (For cash, he sold Christmas trees on the family farm back in Maine.) All serious climbers’ lives eventually lead to Jackson, Wyoming, home of the Tetons, and Beckwith, traveling thumb-class, arrived in March 1993.
Before long, driven by commitment to mountains and empathy for Earth, Beckwith started his own climbing club, the Wayward Mountaineers. He gave talks, brought in outside speakers, conducted seminars. He launched a quarterly newspaper called The Mountain Yodel, which published only articles about “pure” Alpine-style climbs. It was iconoclastic, sometimes strident, always opinionated.
Looking back on that startup, Beckwith credits a UVM course, “Writing The New Yorker” taught by Professor Toby Fulwiler: “When I began my first magazine, that seminar informed every decision I made.”
Though a relative newcomer to this cathedral of American climbing, Beckwith did not hesitate to preach to the Jackson choir about everything from environmentalism to bolting ethics to hairstyles. His upstart startup ruffled some traditionalist feathers, but he was doing something right because in 1996 legendary climber and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard recommended him for the vacant editorship of the hallowed American
Alpine Journal. The mountains were alive with praise as Beckwith became, at 28, the youngest AAJ editor ever.
After presiding over that publication for six years, during which he modernized its focus to include the pure, single-push climbs he so favored, Beckwith returned to Jackson, ready to tackle a new adventure. He didn’t have to wait long. A few days after leaving AAJ, he was contacted by a wealthy Chicago climber who wanted to start a magazine.
Six months later, Beckwith and his patron, Marc Ewing, launched Alpinist, easily one of the most beautiful outdoor magazines ever created. Filled with stunning photos, exceptional writing, and exquisite design, Alpinist’s subject matter was, given Beckwith’s predilections, as predictable as it was rarefied: extreme, minimalist climbs with stratospheric risk levels. Tongue only partially in cheek, Beckwith predicted a circulation of about fifty. That was actually OK with patron Ewing, who wanted quality, not quantity.
Turns out, Beckwith’s circulation estimate was off by many thousands. And despite being a perfectionistic, hands-on editor, he still adventures plenty, having climbed in Kyrgyzstan, Tibet, Scotland, Alaska, and, most of all, in his beloved Tetons. About those particularly beautiful mountains, he says, “This valley and its mountains have given me everything I’ve ever had. My livelihood as an editor and businessman and my constant inspiration…they are my everything.”
Beckwith, as fine a writer as he is deft a climber, has spent years mulling over the “why?” of adventure. In a thoughtful email, he confided, “I believe that in risk lies an opportunity to better understand oneself, and if all we’ve really got in this life is the opportunity to improve ourselves, we need such exposure to insight to become better people, which is the first step to improving the world around us.”
photo by Steven Alvarez
SAM MEACHAM ’90
Improving the world through risk is equally a driving force for Sam Meacham ’90. While Christian Beckwith’s work takes him up, Meacham’ s takes him down, down, down into deep, flooded Yucatan caves. His lauded cave diving explorations and research are all directed toward preserving one of Central America’s largest underground aquifers.
Meacham is one of many who come to Vermont with the need for adventure already in their blood. “I think my course was set even before I got to UVM,” he says. “I was not made for the 9 to 5 routine. I came to UVM and left UVM infected with wanderlust.”
Wanderlust, indeed. After UVM, Meacham lived in Berkeley, California for two years, working at an REI store to pay the bills. Crewing on a Jean Michael Cousteau research ship introduced him to expeditionary-level scuba diving, and Meacham went on to earn his “diving doctorate” with a project in British Columbia. BC’s rain drove him back south in 1994 to the Yucatan Peninsula, where he apprenticed with some of the world’s best cave divers. Looking back, he says, “If you had told me when I first moved here that I would still be here almost fifteen years later, I would have laughed.”
A self-taught expert in the region’s natural and cultural history, Meacham has led countless expeditions into Sistema Ox Bel Ha, the longest underwater cave in the world. Clearly, exploring such territory can be very dangerous business. Those who know it well often refer to cave diving as “cave dying.” Eight Yucatan cave divers died in the last five years alone.
But Meacham has been diving since he was seventeen and, echoing old Stefansson, asserts that cave diving, done properly, is not insanely dangerous: “We are risk managers, not risk takers… Our training and our equipment configuration, not to mention the planning that goes into the dives we do, could be likened to the preparation that goes into a space shuttle launch. We reduce the risks to an absolute minimum thus making the chances of anything going wrong close to zero.” As proof, Meacham points out that “we have spent thousands of hours performing thousands of cave dives and our group of divers has never, ever had an incident of any kind that was life threatening.” And he adds: “I am more terrified to go on the local highway here than I am to go cave diving.”
Meacham’s diving, then, is more about aquifer-saving than adrenaline-seeking. In 2000, he founded his own organization, CINDAQ (Center for Investigations of the Aquifer Systems of Quintana Roo; www.cindaq.org), which works with other government and scientific organizations to explore and conserve Quintana Roo’s aquifer. Key funding for CINDAQ comes from The Nature Conservancy and the National Geographic Society.
Meacham has become something of a media maven, even earning an “Indiana Jones” tag from one journalist. In 2004, he co-starred in the BBC documentary Secrets of the Maya Underworld. That same year, he worked on “Episode 4: Caves”, of the acclaimed BBC series Planet Earth. When not cave diving, he travels widely, lecturing about his work. In 2000, the prestigious Explorers Club of New York made him an International Fellow, and in 2007, National Geographic Adventure magazine honored Meacham as one of fourteen individuals named “Adventurer of the Year.”
These days, his work has taken on an additional direction and new horizons in Belize, where Meacham conducts assessments of resident and migratory birds, including tracking harpy eagles, once thought to be non-existent in the area.
But cave diving, which remains his focus in Mexico, will probably always define Sam Meacham’s life. “To shine your light on a passageway that no one else has seen before is truly incredible. Compound that with finding relics of the ancient Maya civilization and it is electrifying. The real satisfaction for me is the advances we have made in taking the incredible story of the cenotes [flooded caverns] and underground rivers to change public opinion in this area and effect positive change.”
[VQ ONLINE EXTRA]
RISK IS RELATIVE
It is completely understandable that most people would shy away from what I do and think that I am crazy for doing it. I am in no position to encourage anyone to take up cave diving. It is a choice that I made, and I am very happy with that choice. However, there is a common misconception that those of us who cave dive are a bunch of cowboy adrenaline junkies out there rolling the dice, leaving it to chance, cheating death on every dive.
As far as the people that I dive with are concerned, this could not be farther from the truth.
We are risk managers, we are not risk takers.
The fact is, our team of divers could be used in a case study for risk management. We can sometimes be, and I am not exaggerating here, miles from the nearest entrance. That is miles from the nearest entrance, in a dark, completely flooded, extremely complex labyrinth (Sistema Ox Bel Ha now has more than 172,000 meters of surveyed passageway) that is marked with a thin nylon string and plastic arrows. There are no air pockets above us. We take our life support in with us and we are, for all intents and purposes, measuring time in breaths, not minutes. We are on constant alert, monitoring our gas supply and switching through tanks and scooters as the dive progresses, monitoring our depth, monitoring our decompression obligations, assessing our environment and the other members of our team and ourselves for the slightest sign of anything out of the ordinary.
On top of that, we are task loaded to the hilt; constantly equalizing our air spaces to compensate for changes in pressure, holding a light in one hand, adjusting our buoyancy, running the exploration line, surveying, observing, running a scooter... all with, in some cases, hundreds of pounds of gear strapped to us. Sometimes the environment conspires against us with reduced visibility, unstable cave ceilings, high water flows, restrictions. We cannot leave anything to chance. We have years of experience and advanced levels of training far and above the normal recreational diver. We have dedicated our lives to this (I have been diving since I was seventeen, I am now forty-one) and are continually in a process of reassessing the ways in which we approach our dives.
Take the analogy of driving a car. I can drive a car, you can drive a car. But put either one of us behind the wheel of a Formula 1 race car and we are going to be in way over our heads. I would not even consider switching the engine of that F1 on because I know I would not be able to make it go very far. You would think that people would apply that same common sense to diving in an overhead environment, however, the majority of fatalities of divers in the overhead environment involve people who lacked common sense, training and the proper equipment who, in the end, made a horrible decision that ended their lives and, in many cases, the lives of others. It is through their poor judgment and the analysis of their bad choices that the golden rules of cave diving were born. It is a shame that they had to die in order for us to dive more safely. The irony of that last sentence is lost on no one.
Our training and our equipment configuration, not to mention the planning that goes into the dives we do, could be likened to the preparation that goes into a space shuttle launch. We reduce the risks to an absolute minimum thus making the chances of anything going wrong close to zero. Should something go wrong, our training and advanced equipment configurations are there as a backup. Our group dives in teams of two to three divers, which also brings more redundant gas supply and equipment into the equation. Everything should be, and is second nature to us but that does not make us any less vigilant. This is no room for complacency. As a testament to this, we have spent thousands of hours performing thousands of cave dives and our group of divers has never, ever had an incident of any kind that was life threatening. So diving in this environment is extremely dangerous If you don't know what you are doing and approach it with the wrong attitude, nothing, and I mean nothing, replaces training and experience.
In my own experience as a cave diver, I have been fortunate to have been taken under the wing of some of the best cave divers in the world. I have learned valuable lessons from them and from things that have no relation whatsoever to cave diving and have slowly, over the years built my level of confidence to a point that I continually surprise myself.
I think one of the hallmarks of an excellent cave diver or anyone involved in extreme endeavors is that they know their own limits and know when to pull back and say enough is enough. There are so many cases of ego taking over in the decision making process at the peril of the mission and the lives of those involved. There is no room for that in cave diving exploration. One of our steadfast rules is that 'Anyone at any time for any reason can call the dive, no questions asked.' As you gain experience and confidence your limits are pushed further and further along at a pace that is almost imperceptible. That is, until you realize, “Holy cow I just did that and I never thought I would be able to!” and you realize that you have done it with ease.
For me one of the highlights of a long penetration dive is to look over at my dive buddy beside me and know that I have the utmost confidence in their ability as a diver, and know that they are thinking the same of me. Which I guess brings me to the real question behind the question: Why on earth do you do this? For me to think that I can say that I am an explorer in the twenty-first century is a kick. This is some of the last true physical human exploration on the planet. And we are not just planting a flag on some lone mountaintop and then flying home. We live here, we are part of our community and the work that we are doing is significant to the future development of an area that generates 12 percent of Mexico's GDP.
