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Delivering Happiness welcomes guest blogger, Jay Hack, and his story of how adversity on Mt. Denali lead to growth and greatness.
It started out like any other expedition. My friends and co-guides Lyle, Todd and I were responsible for getting nine clients to the summit of Mt. Denali and safely back down. Denali is the tallest mountain in North America but at over 20,000 feet and in a storm, it’s one of the coldest and most inhospitable places imaginable. On the morning that we were supposed to shuttle gear to our 11,000 ft camp, we had packed our bags (over 1000 lbs), divided into rope teams, and started to crampon up Denali’s vast western buttress.
A few hours after we began, a storm started to close in and within a half hour, the weather became ruthless . . . it was a complete whiteout, navigation proved impossible. I could not even see the compass I was holding in my hand -- it would ice up nearly instantly after each time I wiped off its housing. Worse, Lyle and Todd had been moving much faster and we were now separated. My team tried moving for a couple of hours and decided after a while that it would be safer (and less avalanche prone) to hunker down.
We pitched our three man tent for the four of us, dug a latrine and brought out the stove to begin to melt snow to make water. That’s when the direness of our situation hit me . . . I had packed all the fuel bottles in Todd and Lyle's bag; my team had nothing to make water with. Our situation went from disappointing to desperate. And it was my fault, a small mistake turned huge, and in Alaska, a storm can last for more than a week.
I needed a true deus ex machina, a way to melt snow into water. I figured that if we never drank more than half of our Nalgene bottles, we could fill the remainder of the bottles with snow, keep them between our thighs in our sleeping bags and after a few hours, we would have more water. Fortunately, the idea worked; every two hours one of us would get up to dig out the tent as the snow fell mercilessly so we could stay alive and hydrated.
By the time the storm cleared, we had been in the same place for three days and our teammates were just a few hundred feet away; we hadn't seen nor heard them during the storm. After a day rehydrating and resting, our group made the decision that if we could overcome adversity like we just had, we could continue on. Nine days later, we all made the summit of Denali and two days after that, we were back on the airstrip waiting for the ski plane to deliver us home.
I learned a lot from that experience, about taking responsibility for my actions and then taking the steps to make a mistake right again. In fact, I think there are a lot of parallels between my experience and Zappos' core values; I had to embrace change, do more with less, be determined and ultimately be open and honest about our situation. A small mistake led to a big problem but eventually, a little bit of creativity and perseverance saw us through and we were able to learn, come together and grow from it.
