Why Ego Is The Enemy In The Outdoors

Terlingua Threads makes gear for hot weather – all of our products are meant to be used in 90°F or higher temperatures. So, it’s perhaps strange that one of the most important safety lesson I've ever learned came from a windstorm in Alaska as part of my quest to visit the 63 National Parks, where I was freezing in a damaged tent at barely freezing temperatures (kind of the opposite of the problem we’re trying to solve with our brand).

In the spring of 2006, David Sharp tried to climb Everest by himself. He had no Sherpa, no radio, no satellite phone, and he carried less extra oxygen than any sensible person would. He had previously failed twice, losing toes to frostbite, and had told other climbers he didn’t require guides or bottled oxygen on mountains he knew well. Close to the peak – likely on his descent – he sat in a small rock overhang known as Green Boots Cave. During the next few hours, over forty climbers went past him. Some assumed he was already dead. Others noticed he was shivering but continued on.

Fourteen years before that, Chris McCandless died of starvation in an old bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska. He’d donated his savings, burned his money, and walked into the wilderness with minimal equipment and no map. Jon Krakauer turned him into a romantic hero in Into the Wild. The guides in Alaska do not see it that way. I’ve worked with guiding companies in four different areas of the state, and each one, without being asked, mentioned McCandless – each reacting the same: a young man who mistook obstinacy for being able to take care of himself, and who died twenty miles from a road. His last note stated he was injured, almost dead, too weak to walk out. He requested assistance. But it was too late by then.

Sharp and McCandless represent the most extreme cases. Most outdoor mishaps caused by pride do not result in death; they end with a hiker on Mount Elbert dismissing calls from mountain rescue because the caller ID looks like a spam number. Or a family at Yellowstone getting too close to a bison for a photograph. Or a climber in New Hampshire turning down treatment after eleven people had to carry him out. The shared idea is that asking for help is a sort of defeat. And the most risky version of this idea isn’t found in novices – it’s in people who’ve done enough to believe they’ve moved beyond needing it.

The DeHavilland Otter turned to the left over the Chigmit Mountains and went down toward Moraine Lake, and I thought to myself that this would be simple.

The trip was a base camp operation in Katmai National Park: set up once, do day hikes, observe bears. Six clients, two guides. Allen, one of the guides, was in his forties, and his face was lined from years of sun, wind and cold. He smiled all the time and had a way of checking on all of us that didn’t feel controlling. Sarah, the other guide, had a degree from MIT and had quit Microsoft to become a wilderness guide. No roads into Katmai. No cell phone service. The closest hospital is a bush plane ride away, if the weather allows. Camp was set up that first afternoon. An electric bear fence around the whole area. Bear-proof containers were put a hundred meters from the tents. Within an hour of landing, we could see brown bears eating salmon along the creek, huge and focused and not interested in us at all. Everything was going as expected.

The wind came on Day 2, and didn’t stop. By evening, it had become really bad. That night we didn’t truly sleep, only the light sleep you get on a red-eye flight (maybe you get deep sleep in business class lie-flat seats; I don’t know, I fly economy). The wind hit the rain flaps without stopping, a constant sound that made it impossible to get into anything like rest. It wasn’t dangerous – yet. Just draining. Day 3, the tents began to be damaged. Night 3, the guides’ tent completely tore. My tent was the second worst. These were good tents from a company I trusted, but sixty-mile-per-hour winds for over thirty-six hours will, in the end, ruin any material. There’s a Mike Tyson quote about everyone having a plan until they’re hit in the face. We had a plan. The wind hit us in the face. What the tent failures meant was that the insulation was broken. My main layers, touching the wet tent floor, lost their warmth. My backups began to fail, too. There was no dry place to recover. And because I had researched and tested and believed in my gear, because I had thought through so many known issues, I didn’t see the situation where it all failed at once. I hadn’t even packed Tylenol.

Hypothermia can happen at temperatures above freezing if you are wet and in the wind. The CDC confirms this: 40°F with wet clothes and constant wind is enough. Your body loses heat more quickly than it can make it. Shivering is the first thing to happen; then a cough; then a sort of mental blur.

On the third night, going into the fourth day, the cough began, and after that, the fever. I was shivering in a manner I couldn’t manage, which was both new and worrying – and I generally like the cold. My spirit animal is likely a husky, the sort who gets the zoomies when it snows (raccoons, German Shepherds, and Pallas cats are also in the running, but that’s a topic for another time). This was nothing like that. My equipment wasn’t up to it, not because it wasn’t good equipment, but because the weather was beyond what any kit could deal with for very long. Without working insulation, I couldn’t simply think my way through the cold.

I’d been in this kind of situation before, at least in my head, if not physically. One of the leadership treks I did as part of my grad program was in Antarctica, arranged as a trek over glaciers lasting several days. No facilities, cold & damp conditions, ropes tying you to your teammates which in turn slows down movement – deliberately unpleasant conditions meant to make your psychological weaknesses show. When it was my turn to lead, everything went wrong, and I discovered with unpleasant clarity how I fail: I stop talking when I’m losing, blame myself with a level of self-wallowing that spirals, and make things worse for myself and everybody else. In the wrap-up discussion, someone asked what had gone well. I said: nothing.

Four years on, in a ripped tent in Katmai, I felt the same thing pulling at me. Shut down. Tough it out. Don’t ask for help. You’re an Eagle Scout. You’ve crossed glaciers. You train for triathlons. You don’t require anyone’s sleeping bag.

Allen came to see me after breakfast. He could tell I was unwell (I’m not good at hiding it - I’d like to think I’d be a great CIA agent or poker player but my friends tell me no). He offered his sleeping bag so I could rest. No fuss. No hint that I was failing. Only a guide seeing someone who needed something, and providing it, simply.

I said yes. I took the sleeping bag.

It sounds small, written down. A guy takes a sleeping bag from his guide and naps in the middle of the day. But for me it acknowledged that I wasn’t fully self-sufficient and that I was not an island, and one of the things I'm most proud of. Because I knew exactly what I was choosing not to do. I was choosing not to spiral. I was choosing not to protect the image of the guy who doesn't need help. I was choosing to say, out loud, through action: my gear is compromised, my body is struggling, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I crawled into the sleeping bag in my battered tent. The rain fly was still mostly functional. The wind hadn't relented much, but the heaviest rain had subsided, so I could barely get by. Allen's sleeping bag was dry and warm and it was, in that moment, the most important object in the world. I took Tylenol from the guides' medical kit. I slept.

When I woke up and joined the group for dinner in the common tent, they greeted me like nothing had happened. There was no diminished respect, no awkward silence, no sense that I'd lost social capital.

I went into the sleeping bag, took some painkiller from the guides’ medical kit, and slept. When I went back to the group for dinner, they acted as though nothing had happened. Another of the people on the trip – a woman from Arizona who worked in search and rescue – told me something I’ve considered a great deal since. She said she could tell I had real experience in the outdoors because I’d been willing to accept help. In her line of work, the pattern was always the same: the people most likely to insist they were fine when they were plainly not were nearly always the least experienced. They were acting competent. People with a lot of time in the field understood that getting help wasn’t a weakness. It was good judgement.

How many people have let their pride get in the way of their own wellbeing? Not in the extreme cases, but in the everyday ones. The person who won’t go to the doctor until the pain is intolerable. The friend who won’t admit they’re in trouble until it’s too late. There’s a myth about being self-sufficient, especially for men, and especially for men with outdoor experience who wear that experience as a part of their identity. I’m describing myself. What I learned in Katmai was that this myth almost stopped something very basic: taking a sleeping bag from a kind guide who could see I needed it. Allen said something that evening that has remained with me: there’s no award for needless suffering.

I don't tell this story because I think my mild hypothermia at a bear-viewing camp in Alaska is comparable to dying on Everest or starving in the bush. I tell it because the mechanism is the same. The voice that says you should be able to handle this. The identity that's wrapped up in being the person who can. The stupid analysis that tricks you into thinking that asking for help costs more than suffering does. And if you're lucky, you learn it's wrong in the right place, where the stakes are recoverable. Where the guide has a spare sleeping bag and the search-and-rescue professional is in the next tent and the worst that happens is you nap through an afternoon.

My ego died a little that day. I'm much better off for it.