Joe Lentini (19:38)
I'm a climber, which is fairly remarkable given the fact that when I first climbed, I was petrified of heights. Every time I went out, I'd say to myself, if I ever get out of here alive, I will never do this again. But when you're 16 years old and you get back down to the ground, the exhilaration overwhelms the terror. And every time I went out, the terror was a little less. The exhilaration was a little more. And I loved it. I loved it. And I started climbing in all my free time on weekends. Weekends became weeks, weeks became months. I was a dirtbag climber. When I was 19 years old, I triggered an avalanche high up in a gully, a long, narrow ice gully. And I was nearly swept hundreds of feet down, probably to my death. I knew 5% of what I needed to know to be in that place. And by luck, just by luck, that 5% is what I needed to survive. I spent a lot of time after that learning about the science of snow. A few years later, I was offered a job teaching climbing in northern New England. Well, I didn't know if I could share my passion with my profession, but I would get paid to go climbing, and that's not so bad. So I moved to North Conway, where there was a small group of hardcore climbers, climbers just like me. We worked together, we climbed together, we trained together, we lived together. We did everything together. We were a community. We were a family. That ability to be on the rock where nothing existed in the universe except what I could touch with my hands or my feet, to push myself to my complete limit, and then, when necessary, to push a little further. There was a young climber, part of our community. He was local. His name was Albert. We were on the cliff together one day on different climbs with clients, and his client was having trouble standing up on his feet. He was leaning into the rock. That's not good when you're rock climbing, especially hundreds of feet up. And he looked down at him and he said, stand up. Stand up like a man. I grew up in a house in New Hampshire whose kitchen floor was steeper than this. That was the type of intensity and drive we all had. Part of my community, part of my family. I was asked to be in an elite new mountain rescue team. Elite, because when you're high up in the mountains at 2 in the morning and it's 20 below and the wind's blowing at 70, you need to know that the person on your shoulder is solid, and they need to know that you're solid. Winter in the mountains is where I like to spend a lot of my time, guiding clients up Mount Washington. And one weekend there was a nor'easter coming in. I could see it on the maps. It was a big one. But I knew it wasn't going to hit until a little later in the afternoon. And I said to my clients, we will not be able to summit today, but if you want, we can get up to treeline. We can feel the oncoming storm. They were game. When we got two thirds of the way up the mountain and got above the scrub pines and onto the exposed rock, we were feeling the oncoming force of the storm blowing 50, 55. It was probably about 10 degrees. The wind was like hands on me, moving me around, trying to push me out of balance. The cold was trying to find any gap in my face mask or goggles to try to freeze little bits of flesh I had pushed as far as I was comfortable with. I didn't have to say anything. I simply pointed down and we headed down the mountain. And soon we were down in the shelter of the trees. When we were there and the face mask came down and the goggles went up, everybody's eyes were the size of silver dollars. I took my clients back to town and then headed home. The storm was really beginning to break at this point. It was really beginning to rage. I got home, I had my plate of pasta and my two glasses of cheap red wine, and I went to bed. But in the middle of the night, the phone was ringing. There were two climbers missing on Mount Washington. The team assembled the next morning, but the nor'easter was passing us. We were on the backside of it, and the backside of it means that the counterclockwise flow is now pulling cold arctic air down on us. The winds were accelerating. The temperatures were plummeting. We searched, but the winds were blowing 70, 80. It was 20 below zero. And the wind wasn't just moving me around, it was knocking me down. The cold wasn't looking for little bits of flesh. It wanted my hands and my feet, and I couldn't feel them. We searched all day, and we never found a sign of the two Young climbers from Pennsylvania who had come up on their own to do a climb on Mount Washington. The next morning, we gathered again and headed up into Huntington Ravine. And we broke up into teams of two to climb all of the gullies to see if we could find any sign of the two young climbers. Albert and his partner Michael, radioed that they were going to go across the plateau and down a different trail, while the rest of us worked our ways back down to the bottom of the ravine. We hadn't found any sign of the climbers. That was it. We were done for the day. We got in the Snowcat, which is a giant tracked vehicle that could hold our entire team, a dozen of us, and we were going to pick up Albert and Michael. I felt a sense of relief. We were done for the day. I had been beaten up, knocked down, and cold for two days, but I was going home, and the rest of the team was healthy. And then the radio came alive. Avalanche. Avalanche. Michael was screaming, Avalanche. The world sort of turns really quickly. All of a sudden, the Snowcat accelerates down and over and up into Tuckerman's Ravine. When we got to the trailhead, two of our team jumped off, went to a first aid cache to get avalanche probes. Long aluminum tubes, 10ft long that you push down into the snow looking for missing people. We got up to the avalanche debris, and as we looked around, as I looked up, I could see a hand poking through. Michael had poked a hole through the snow to create a breathing hole. Two of our team went up to dig him out. The rest of us stood shoulder to shoulder. We took our probes. We pushed them down into the snow as far as we could. I pushed down, lifted up. Then in unison, we stepped forward. I pushed down. I hit something hard. I didn't know, was it Albert? Was it just a block of ice? I had to know because every second counts. And it broke through the ice to my left. One of the team yells, I've got him. I dropped my probe. I headed over. I grabbed a shovel. I got in line. When it was my turn, I dug with as much strength and as much speed as I could. 20, 30 seconds, and I just fell to the side. Somebody took my place. I got my breath. I got back in line. It was my turn again. I dug as hard and as fast as I could, and there he was, three or four feet down. There was Albert's head. We started to dig around him, but he wasn't breathing. We cleared snow around him and carefully moved him up onto the snow. But he still wasn't breathing. We tried to get a breath in to start cpr, but the breath wouldn't go in. And I saw the gash under his chin. He had snapped his neck. The wind was still howling. The snow was swirling. I was standing there with 12 of the toughest people I have ever known in my entire life, and everyone's crying. We gently took his body and put it into a litter, strapped him down and carried him down to the Snow Cat. As we went down the mountain, I sat there in the open back, just looking at the lifeless body of my friend. When we got to the bottom, there were reporters, so I bolted to my car. I had to tell his girlfriend before she heard anything. I was almost at her house when I saw another car pull her over. I got out. As I walked forward, another friend was telling her what had happened. And I stood there in front of her, and she was screaming. I didn't have any words. I was numb. I was just crying. The next day, two young climbers were found on the other side of the mountain. They had severe hypothermia. They were close to death. They had massive amounts of frostbite, and they were going to lose limbs, and I didn't care. My friend was dead, and these two idiots had caused it. A lot of bourbon was consumed, a lot of crying. But life went on. I kept climbing. I kept guiding. Every year, I'd head up to the site of the avalanche just to be there, just to look and think about my missing friend. I had nightmares almost every night. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, seeing the body of my friend in the snow. And then a friend of mine, Marie, told me that she had talked to one of the climbers, one of the idiots who had caused my friend's death. And he was moving to town. He wanted to live in my valley so he'd be accessible for people to talk to, to confront. He had been faceless to me. He had just been the object of my hatred. And now he was going to be there. One day, I was walking down the street and across the street at a coffee shop called the Muffinry. It was warm out, and there was a young man sitting there in shorts, and he had pipes for legs. I'd never met Hugh, but I knew who this was. I walked towards him. I had so many emotions running through me, but I walked towards him. And as I picked my hand up, he picked his hands up to protect himself, like I was going to take a swing. But I didn't. I Just reached forward and I put my hand out and I said, hi, I'm Joe Lentini. I saw a young man who had made a mistake. Over the next weeks and months, he lived in my town. I'd see him on the cliff. He was a gifted climber. When asked how tall he would have been because with his pipes he could either be five foot or up to six, four, he said he didn't know how tall he would have been because he was only 17 when he lost his legs. In everything I've ever read he has said or heard him say, he has never failed to acknowledge what his actions caused. I'm still a professional guide. It's what I do. This month. It's been 41 years. I'm still a member of the Mountain Rescue Service. I can be called at any time to go out into the mountains. Recently, I was on Cannon Cliff, a very large cliff in Franconia Notch, where we were pulling two young climbers who had gotten trapped high up on the cliff. And after we pulled them off and got down, some of my team members were saying, what fools, what idiots. But I looked at them and I saw myself and I saw you, and I saw young climbers that maybe pushed a little too far. Thank you very much.
