- 3 days ago
He’s standing on the summit of Mount Everest. But minutes later, he can’t see his own hands. It’s May 15, 2011. 29,032 feet in altitude. Brian Dickinson is completely alone and totally blind. This is The Wildest Everest Story You Never Heard About
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Watch More:
Everest's Most Impossible Rescue (Death Zone)
https://youtu.be/fMREK8UmZBM
Blinded At 29,000 Feet: The Death Of Everest Climber Peter Kinloch
https://youtu.be/8qKA34QLsCQ
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More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
--------------------------------------------------------
Watch More:
Everest's Most Impossible Rescue (Death Zone)
https://youtu.be/fMREK8UmZBM
Blinded At 29,000 Feet: The Death Of Everest Climber Peter Kinloch
https://youtu.be/8qKA34QLsCQ
--------------------------------------------------------
More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
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SportsTranscript
00:00He's standing on the summit of Mount Everest, but minutes later he can't see his own hands.
00:06It's May 15th, 2011, 29,032 feet in altitude.
00:11Brian Dickinson is completely alone and totally blind.
00:15His breathing is ragged, his hands are freezing, but there are two bigger problems,
00:20a 10,000 foot drop to his left and an 8,000 foot drop to his right.
00:25He can't see the ridge beneath his boots, he cannot see the fixed rope,
00:30and at this altitude, nobody can simply climb up and rescue him.
00:34Now, he has to somehow climb down from the highest point on Earth without seeing where his boots land,
00:40and nobody below knows what has just happened to him.
00:44This is the wildest Everest story you never heard about.
00:48Welcome to the extreme edge, where the stakes are high, but nobody is just a headline.
00:55Brian had only one hope left, the fixed rope.
00:58Right now, that thin piece of nylon was the closest thing Brian had to a safe way down.
01:05So he reached out, found it with his gloves, then slowly took his first step down.
01:11When you can see, you know exactly where your foot is going to land,
01:15you know, if the ice is solid or if there's a gap.
01:17Brian didn't.
01:18Was the ledge six inches below him, or was he stepping into an 8,000 foot freefall?
01:24He had no idea.
01:26And the crazy thing about this exact moment is that Brian shouldn't have been going through this alone in the
01:31first place.
01:32In commercial mountaineering, you don't climb the highest mountain on Earth by yourself,
01:37unless you specifically request to.
01:39Brian didn't.
01:41He was the client of a small climbing outfit that season called Mountain Gurus, run by a guide named Dennis
01:48Broadwell.
01:48And for this summit push, he was supposed to be guided to the top by a man named Pasang Temba.
01:55Pasang had three Everest summits under his belt.
01:57What he didn't have was a stomach willing to give him a fourth.
02:01Because several hours earlier, at around 28,000 feet, when they were both climbing up,
02:07Pasang had become so sick that he could not continue.
02:10He handed Brian his radio, left one of his oxygen bottles behind, and turned back toward camp.
02:16Now, it was the right choice, and under normal commercial guidelines,
02:21if the guide turns back, the client turns back.
02:24But Brian made a different calculation.
02:26He still felt strong, and the summit was only about 1,000 feet above him.
02:31And more importantly, Brian believed he had something most normal clients on Everest did not.
02:37Something that made him unusually confident he could handle himself alone up there.
02:41So, even as his guide started making his way back down toward camp, Brian kept climbing up.
02:48By early morning, he was working his way past the south summit,
02:51at 28,700 feet, with no partner matching his pace.
02:56At 4.30 a.m., he was at the Hillary Step,
02:59this nearly vertical 40-foot wall of rock at 28,839 feet,
03:05right below the top, with no one to encourage.
03:08And then, at around 6.30 a.m., by the team's clock, on May 15, 2011,
03:14there was no more mountain left to climb.
03:18Brian Dickinson reached the summit of Mount Everest alone.
03:22He had done it.
03:23His first move was to grab his radio and call down to his team at base camp.
03:28Calling all mountain guru camps, this is Brian checking in from the summit of Mount Everest.
03:34The radio crackled.
03:35They heard him.
03:36Their client made it.
03:38And for the next hour, Brian had one of the rarest experiences you would find today in summiting Everest.
03:45He had the summit entirely to himself.
03:47That had its own kind of majesty.
03:50Think about what Mount Everest looks like in the modern era.
03:54We've all seen the viral videos of hundreds of climbers packed shoulder to shoulder on the summit ridge,
04:00waiting in a massive, freezing traffic jam, all to stand on top for two minutes.
04:05Brian didn't have that.
04:07The mountain was empty.
04:08He could actually take a moment just to stop, breathe, and take it all in, at the absolute limit of
04:16the earth.
04:17But being alone up there also brought its own profound loneliness.
04:21There was nobody to celebrate with.
04:23And most importantly, there was nobody to take his picture.
04:27He needed to show his corporate sponsors he actually did it.
04:30He needed pictures because he had partly financed this massive $50,000 expedition by securing corporate sponsors and taking unpaid
04:39leave from work.
04:40So, Brian spent a large part of his time on the summit, trying to rig up a makeshift tripod in
04:46the snow to get a self-portrait.
04:48And at some point, he looked around, squinting in the snow.
04:52His goggles had a problem.
04:54A small crack.
04:56Small enough that he decided it wasn't worth turning back for.
05:00A decision that would later turn out to be the most expensive oversight of his life.
05:05But for now, Brian kept taking pictures.
05:08With that, he had done all he came here to do.
05:12So, at around 7.30am, he packed his camera and turned around.
05:16It was time to go home.
05:17But as he began to take his first steps down from the summit, something started to feel wrong.
05:23The light all around him felt too bright, like he was standing in a parking lot with the high beams
05:29on.
05:29At first, he brushed it off.
05:32Everest was covered in snow and ice, so he expected a glare.
05:36He simply kept moving.
05:37But that light got brighter and brighter, until the brightness wasn't just around him anymore.
05:43The edges of the rocks began to blur.
05:46The rope in front of him became harder to make out.
05:49The white snow started bleeding into the white sky, until the whole mountain seemed to lose its shape.
05:56Brian stopped and blinked at first, but nothing changed.
06:00His glove and the rope in front of him looked hazy.
06:02If he brought something close enough to his face and squinted hard, he could still make out a shape.
06:08Then, his eyes began to burn, like somebody had poured sand into them, and then pointed a bright light directly
06:15into his face.
06:16And within minutes, all Brian Dickens' eyes could see, no matter how hard he strained or blinked, was a wall
06:24of solid, searing white.
06:26He was blind, in the most hostile place in the world a man can be blind in.
06:31And he had no one to rescue him.
06:34Nothing had hit him.
06:35Nothing had exploded in his face.
06:38And yet, here he was, completely blind, with no obvious cause, and no time to ask why.
06:45Now, I don't know about you, but if this were me, my brain would shut down.
06:49I'd probably drop to my knees, hug the mountain, and wait for someone to save me.
06:54But this is the death zone.
06:56Up here, there is no rescue squad.
07:00Helicopters can't fly this high because the air is too thin for their rotors to catch.
07:05Sitting down and blindly waiting means you die of cold instead.
07:09And if you panic, well, it spikes your heart rate and immediately burns through whatever tiny amount of oxygen you
07:16have left in your tank.
07:17Panic makes you breathe faster.
07:19Your heart starts racing.
07:21Your body suddenly demands more oxygen at the exact altitude where oxygen is the one thing you do not have
07:28enough of.
07:29And Brian should have done that.
07:31I mean, the man's vision and his guide were gone.
07:35Safety was thousands of feet away.
07:37And he had no idea whether the next step was safe.
07:40But this was where Brian's strange confidence suddenly started to make sense, because Brian Dickinson was not a normal commercial
07:48client.
07:49This wasn't even his first big mountain.
07:51Long before he ever set foot on Everest, he had already stood alone on the summit of some of the
07:56most brutal mountains on Earth.
07:58Like Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Southern Hemisphere.
08:03He had summited Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, three times.
08:08And yes, experience doesn't guarantee survival.
08:12But it does change what you believe you can handle.
08:15But his ability to stay calm in the death zone didn't only come from climbing.
08:20Way before he ever took up climbing, Brian had spent six years in the United States Navy as an aviation
08:26rescue swimmer.
08:28And part of that job involved learning how to function when your body was telling you to panic.
08:33During training, Brian had been strapped into mock helicopter cabins, flipped upside down underwater, and forced to find his way
08:41out.
08:42Sometimes even blindfolded.
08:44The training instructors drilled one lesson into him over and over again.
08:49Control your breathing.
08:51So the first thing Brian did was slow down, got his breathing under control, and reduced descending the biggest mountain
08:58on Earth to one step at a time.
09:01He didn't have the luxury of wondering if this sudden darkness was a stroke, extreme altitude sickness, or something worse.
09:10Diagnosing the medical mystery wouldn't keep him alive right now.
09:13Only the descent mattered.
09:15First, he reached out until his glove found the fixed line.
09:20Lowered one boot beneath him, waiting for the metal spikes of his crampon to touch something solid.
09:27Only then would he move his weight.
09:29He couldn't think about the south coal 3,000 feet below him, or even think about the next hundred feet.
09:35All he could deal with was whatever his hands could touch, and whatever piece of mountain his boots could find.
09:41And even the rope wasn't as simple as holding on and following it downhill.
09:47For years, every spring, teams of Sherpas had gone up Everest before most climbers, and fixed long ropes along the
09:55route from the lower mountain toward the summit, like a handrail up the side of the mountain.
09:59And when it's time to climb, the mountaineers would wear a harness around their waist and legs, connect that harness
10:06to the rope using metal clips, and slide that connection along with them as they climb.
10:11Now, this rope cannot pull anyone up Everest or stop them from getting tired, but it does give climbers something
10:18solid to stay attached to.
10:20Right now, that thin piece of rope was the closest thing Brian had to a safe way down.
10:25But the problem is, even this rope does not run in one unbroken line.
10:32Every so often, it was tied to a metal anchor.
10:36Basically, a strong metal point fixed into the mountain to hold the rope in place.
10:40And when Brian reached those places, he had to stop on whatever patch of ice that was under his boots,
10:47unclip himself from the rope above the anchor, feel around for the rope below it, then clip himself back in.
10:54So, hundreds of times during this descent, there were a few terrifying seconds where Brian was completely unattached from Mount
11:02Everest.
11:03If anything, and I mean anything, went wrong in those seconds, that was the end.
11:08But somehow, nothing did.
11:10And he did this over and over, entirely by touch, until he reached the biggest problem on this mountain for
11:17a blind man, the Hillary Step.
11:19Up until now, Brian's feet had stayed on the ground the whole way down.
11:24Even blind, he could feel the snow with his boot before he stepped on it.
11:28But the Hillary Step is a 40-foot wall of rock and ice.
11:33If Brian could see, he'd find the rock holds and climb down it like a high indoor wall.
11:38He didn't have that option.
11:40All he could do was hang from the rope, swing his boot into the dark, and listen to what the
11:46impact sounded like.
11:48Sometimes, on the way down, his boot would slide across the rock with a scraping sound.
11:53That meant there was nothing there to hold him up.
11:55If he put his weight on that spot, his foot would slip right off.
12:00Other times, his boot would hit with a hard crack.
12:03That sound meant the spikes on the bottom of his boots had dug into real ice that could actually hold
12:09him.
12:10Every time he heard that crack, he would put his weight down and lower himself a little more onto a
12:16spot he had never seen.
12:17Then kick his other boot out into the dark and wait to hear it again.
12:22That's how he got down that wall.
12:24His ordeal should have been halfway done, but it turned out to be the least of his problems.
12:30Brian still had thousands of feet of Everest beneath him.
12:33And as he continued down, something else inside his body started to fail.
12:38See, staying upright is actually a three-part system.
12:42Your eyes tell your brain where the ground is.
12:44Your inner ear tells it whether your body is upright, leaning, or spinning.
12:49And the nerves in your feet, muscles, and joints tell it where your arms and legs are without you having
12:55to look at them.
12:57Normally, those three systems work together.
12:59So when your eyes close, you can still walk because the other two compensate.
13:04Brian had already lost his eyes, and he still had no idea why.
13:09But right now, that was the least of his problems.
13:12Because at nearly 29,000 feet, the air pressure is roughly a third of what it is at sea level.
13:19Even with supplemental oxygen, Brian's brain was getting far less oxygen than it normally needed.
13:24In order to maintain the parts of the brain responsible for judgment, coordination, and balance.
13:31This created a terrifying problem for Brian.
13:34He was already depending on touch to know where the mountain was.
13:38Now, his brain was becoming less reliable at telling him where he was.
13:43Brian began to stagger.
13:45His descent became random and uneven, like a drunk man getting home after a heavy bender.
13:51It wasn't because he was doing anything wrong.
13:54It was because the part of his brain responsible for balance was starving right along with the rest of him.
14:01And then, on a stretch of ice tilted so hard it was almost standing straight up, just below the south
14:07summit,
14:08Brian's luck finally ran out.
14:11He took a step, but his coordination wasn't working right anymore, so his foot didn't land where it needed to.
14:18The ice gave way under his boot, and his legs shot out from under him.
14:23Brian began to immediately tumble head over heels, faster and faster, completely out of control.
14:30Somewhere below him, in the direction he was falling, there was an 8,000 foot drop.
14:35This was the end, or it would have been, if not for that rope running down the mountain.
14:41Brian was clipped into it this time with a thick harness wrapped around his waist and both legs,
14:47like a seatbelt for his whole body, and a metal clip connected that harness straight to the rope.
14:53So when Brian fell, he fell until the rope ran out of slack,
14:57and then it went tight all at once and yanked him to a stop, hard enough to knock the wind
15:03straight out of him.
15:04He hung there afterward, gasping, held up by nothing but that one metal clip and a length of nylon rope.
15:12But the rope itself was only as strong as whatever was holding the other end of it in place.
15:17And the other end was tied to a metal anchor, basically a giant metal stake, drilled straight into the ice
15:25above him.
15:26That anchor is the only reason the rope didn't rip out of the mountain and fall with him.
15:31Anchors like that fail on Everest all the time.
15:34This one, thankfully, held.
15:37So Brian got a hand back on the rope and pulled himself upright.
15:42He had fallen for roughly 20 feet.
15:44He got his feet under him and kept moving blindly.
15:48But a few hundred feet lower, a whole patch of snow under his boots gave way all at once and
15:54started sliding.
15:55It was a small avalanche, and Brian was riding on top of it with no way to stop himself
16:01and no slack left in his rope to catch him this time.
16:05He reached purely on instinct.
16:07He clamped his heavy gloved hand down onto the fixed rope and squeezed with everything he had.
16:13He gripped it so hard that the friction from sliding down the nylon line burned a deep groove straight through
16:20the thick leather of his mitten.
16:22But it worked.
16:23He was still blind and still didn't fully understand why.
16:27Heart hammering against his ribs, he was still thousands of feet above safety.
16:32And now something else was about to fail.
16:35Something that had nothing to do with his eyes or his balance.
16:39Here's how oxygen works on Everest.
16:42Climbers don't carry unlimited air.
16:44They carry a tank, and that tank holds exactly enough gas to get them up to the summit and back
16:50down again,
16:51with maybe a small cushion built in, in case something goes wrong.
16:55For a climber who can see, the trip down from the summit to the safety of high camp usually takes
17:01two to three hours.
17:02Their oxygen is measured out for that.
17:06Brian's trip down had already blown past that number.
17:09He'd been feeling his way down, inch by inch, blind, for almost seven hours now.
17:15Nobody's oxygen tank is built to last that long.
17:19And somewhere around 27,500 feet, at a spot climbers call the balcony,
17:25Brian breathed in through his mask, and nothing came out.
17:29His tank was quite literally empty.
17:32Without bottled oxygen at this altitude, suffocation would set in quickly, and he knew it.
17:38But then, through the fog of his suffocating brain, he remembered a detail from earlier that morning.
17:45Hours ago, when Pasang, his guide, had gotten too sick to continue to the summit,
17:50he dropped some of his extra gear at the balcony, right where he was.
17:55The gear included one full, spare bottle of oxygen.
17:59Now, Brian couldn't see, but he knew it was somewhere right there in the snow.
18:05He dropped to his knees and began sweeping his heavy mittens across the ice,
18:10feeling blindly for the shape of a cylinder.
18:13Miraculously, his glove brushed against cold metal.
18:17He had found it.
18:18He wasn't going to suffocate.
18:21Not today.
18:21With frozen, clumsy fingers, he unscrewed the regulator from his dead tank and forced it into Pasang's bottle instead.
18:30He turned the valve and took a deep, long breath, but nothing happened.
18:35No air came out.
18:37Not even a hiss.
18:39Way up here, the temperature drops to somewhere around minus 40 degrees.
18:44And at that kind of cold, the small rubber rings inside an oxygen valve that keep everything airtight can freeze
18:51solid and shrink.
18:52Or a bit of ice can jam the connection shut without warning.
18:56Whatever it actually was, the bottle in his hands was full of oxygen he couldn't get to.
19:03Now, Brian had climbed through blindness and survived falls that should have killed him and never let himself panic.
19:09But at this exact moment, with nothing left to try and no air left to breathe, he began to believe
19:16the end was near.
19:17He anchored himself to the mountain, dropped to his knees in the snow, and for the first time today, prayed.
19:24Then, with the same frozen gloves, he reached down for the same connection that had just failed him and tried
19:30it again.
19:31This time, the air came through, and that extra oxygen felt like fire running through his veins.
19:37Whatever was actually happening in his body, the effect was instant.
19:42Everything that had been falling apart in him came back to life just enough to stand back up, find the
19:48rope with his hand, and keep going.
19:50He was nearly seven hours in at this point, into a descent that should have taken two or three.
19:56He worked his way down the final, grueling stretch of the route until, finally, the steep angle of the mountain
20:02beneath his boots began to ease.
20:04The terrain flattened out.
20:06He knew without being told or having the eyes to see that he had finally reached the south coal at
20:1126,000 feet.
20:12He had made it to Camp 4.
20:14He was safe.
20:15Well, almost safe.
20:17Because as Brian stood there, blind, a new problem hit him.
20:21The south coal isn't a tidy little campsite.
20:24It's a massive, flat stretch of ice and rock, roughly the size of four football fields.
20:31The tents are scattered all over the place, and most importantly, the fixed rope that Brian had been holding onto
20:37for his life for the last seven hours does not run all the way to the front of his tent.
20:43It drops him at the edge of the coal and stops there.
20:47If Brian could see, all he had to do was unclip, look across the ice, spot his team's tent, walk
20:53over.
20:54Simple.
20:54But Brian couldn't see.
20:56And letting go of that rope to go wandering blindly across the south coal wasn't a shortcut.
21:02It was a way to walk straight off the edge of the mountain and drop 10,000 feet down the
21:08other side.
21:09He'd survived the Hillary step.
21:11He'd survived two falls and an empty oxygen tank.
21:14And now he was stuck, frozen in place, gripping the end of a rope a few hundred yards from his
21:20own sleeping bag, unable to take a single step further.
21:24So he started screaming for help right there.
21:27The wind at 26,000 feet doesn't let sound travel.
21:31It's loud enough on its own to swallow a shout whole.
21:35Brian screamed anyway, until his throat was raw, with no way of knowing if there was any other human being
21:42within a hundred feet of him.
21:43And then, out of the roaring wind, he felt a heavy glove grab him by the arm.
21:49He flinched, and then he heard a voice shouting directly into his ear over the storm.
21:54It was Pasang.
21:56Pasang hadn't stumbled into him by accident.
21:59Even though he had gotten severely ill on the climb up, dropping 2,000 vertical feet back to Camp 4
22:05and resting in the tent had done the job.
22:07Once his head cleared, he did the math.
22:10Pasang knew exactly how much oxygen Brian had, and exactly how long a solo summit push should take.
22:17He knew his client was wildly overdue.
22:20Instead of staying huddled in his sleeping bag, Pasang geared back up, walked out to the exact spot where the
22:27fixed lines dropped climbers into the camp,
22:29and just stood there in the freezing wind, waiting for a client he wasn't sure was even still alive.
22:36And that's when the reunion moment happened.
22:39Pasang clipped Brian to his own harness and physically guided him through the maze of the South Coal to their
22:45tent.
22:45He was down.
22:46He was found.
22:47But he was still completely blind.
22:50Still at 26,000 feet.
22:52And the mountain wasn't done with him.
22:54He had 8,500 vertical feet standing between him and base camp.
23:00Brian had just survived the death zone, but getting into the sleeping bag didn't mean he was safe.
23:06It actually meant the adrenaline that had kept him moving for the last seven hours finally ran out.
23:11And once it did, everything the mountain had done to his body caught up with him all at once.
23:17He was severely dehydrated and frostbitten.
23:21Anywhere else on Earth, he'd be loaded onto a stretcher.
23:24But at 26,000 feet?
23:26It just meant his body was shutting down, with 8,500 vertical feet still left to descend.
23:33But the real agony was his face.
23:36Sunlight carries ultraviolet light, the same kind that gives you a sunburn.
23:40Except at 29,000 feet, with almost no atmosphere left to filter it out,
23:45and fresh snow bouncing it back up at his face from below,
23:49the dose Brian's eyes took that morning was far beyond anything a sunburn compares to.
23:54But climbers wear heavy, UV-blocking goggles for exactly this reason.
23:59So how did the sun get to his eyes?
24:02It goes back to May 14th, exactly 24 hours before he reached the summit.
24:07While climbing the steep ice of the Lhotse Face above 21,000 feet,
24:12Brian had accidentally cracked his goggle lens.
24:14With no spare pair, he had to make a brutal call.
24:18Abandon a $50,000 expedition just shy of the top,
24:22or keep climbing and hope the cracked plastic would hold up.
24:26He chose to keep climbing.
24:27But for the next 24 hours, that crack had been leaking pure, unfiltered UV radiation straight into his eyes.
24:37Taking them off on May 15th at the summit to snap a photo was the final dose.
24:42The sunburn had cooked the surface of both his corneas, the clear front layer of the eye,
24:48the exact same way skin blisters and peels after too much sun.
24:53Except this was happening to the one part of his body that let him see.
24:58That's why his eyelids were swollen shut,
25:00and that's why every time he tried to move his eyes underneath them,
25:03it felt like sand and broken glass grinding into his pupils.
25:08When Brian woke up the next morning inside that tent,
25:11he was psychologically safe, but physically, he remained completely blind.
25:17And he was still at 26,000 feet, which meant the ordeal wasn't over.
25:23Somebody had to walk a blind man down every single foot of the 8,500 feet from the South Pole
25:29to base camp.
25:30That job fell to Pesong and the expedition leader, Dennis Broadwell,
25:34and it took them two full days.
25:37First, they had to descend the L'Anse Face,
25:40which is 3,000 feet of steep blue ice,
25:43smooth and slick as a frozen window.
25:46Brian went down it the same way he'd gone down everything else,
25:49by feel, one anchor point at a time,
25:53unclipping and reclipping his harness by hand at each stop,
25:57with Pesong and Dennis shouting directions at him the entire way over the wind.
26:02One missed step here,
26:04and there was no fixed rope left to catch him except Pesong,
26:08and how fast he could grab him.
26:10Then came the Khumbu Icefall.
26:13This slow-moving river of ice constantly cracks open new gaps in itself as it goes.
26:18To get across those gaps,
26:21Sherpas usually lash aluminum ladders end to end
26:24and lay them flat over drops that fall 1,000 feet straight down into blue-black darkness.
26:30A sighted climber crossing one of those ladders
26:33is already gripping the ropes on either side out of pure nerves.
26:37Brian couldn't see the ladder at all.
26:39He couldn't see the drop underneath it.
26:41All he had was the sound of Pesong's voice on the far side,
26:45telling him exactly where to put each foot,
26:48one narrow metal rung at a time.
26:52If Pesong's directions were off by two inches,
26:55or if Brian misunderstood a single word,
26:59there was nothing below him but 1,000 feet of empty air.
27:02But he crossed it.
27:05Leaning on his team for every single step,
27:08Brian made it through the icefall and reached base camp.
27:11Even then, it wasn't over.
27:13Helicopters in that part of the Himalayas are heavily restricted,
27:17and weather grounds them more often than not.
27:20So, still completely blind,
27:22Brian had to walk 38 miles
27:24out along the rocky, uneven trails of the Khumbu Valley,
27:28all the way to the nearest airstrip in the town of Lukla.
27:31From there, a short flight to Kathmandu.
27:35From Kathmandu, a much longer flight back to the United States.
27:39By the time he landed at home,
27:41he'd lost 20 pounds.
27:43His face was wind-burned and peeling.
27:46It would take over a month of care
27:48before the burned tissue in his corneas
27:50finally healed enough for his vision to come all the way back.
27:53But, Brian Dickinson survived.
27:57And, depending on who you ask,
27:59he was the first and only person
28:01to have completed the highest solo,
28:03blind descent in human history.
28:06When you look back at how Brian survived,
28:09it isn't only luck.
28:10It's about a man who made the calculated decision
28:13to push for the highest point on Earth,
28:15alone,
28:16and paid for it with his eyesight.
28:19But more importantly,
28:20it's about a man who found himself blind
28:23in the most dangerous environment on Earth
28:25and still decided to keep moving.
28:27But not all climbers are fortunate enough
28:30to survive the mountain on their own.
28:32This climber reached Everest,
28:34and on his way back down,
28:36he ran into trouble.
28:38He couldn't move anymore
28:39and would die if left there.
28:42All around him,
28:43other climbers passing him
28:45had written him off.
28:46This Sherpa didn't.
28:49What happened next
28:50was unbelievable.
28:53You
28:53was, you know,
28:55you sharing your standing
28:56when you had a difficulties
28:56other than people
28:56had when you were恭喜
28:56yourimagination
28:56had the evidence
28:56and the closure
28:56that you're looking
28:56or something