Chris Davenport – TRANSCRIPT
Welcome everybody. It’s great to be here. How many of you guys think these extreme skiers are crazy? Most of you, the stuff you see in movies, right? Yeah, it certainly looks that way. I’m going to do my best today to dispel that myth. When I heard that the theme of this talk was risk versus reward, I was really excited, because I live in a world that is pretty much defined by risk and reward. In fact, I would say it defines my life, my profession. I’m out there doing dangerous things all the time.
Some time ago, as I started getting older, maybe ten years ago, I started thinking more about how to manage risk. We all want to get to a ripe old age in life, and be skiing with our grandchildren, and make it through. I started taking a bit of an analytical approach to what I do as a skier, so that I can hopefully make it through. So I’m going to talk a little bit about mastering the art of risk management as we deal with the mountains, and I’m going to use a trip that I did, that I guided on Mount Everest last year, just about a year ago, to sort of frame the structure for this conversation.
So what is risk? We all know the word. You probably use it, you know what a risky thing is, but really, what is the definition of risk? For me it’s an action or an activity that has the potential to go wrong. It can be so many different things. It could be a ski run, a mountain climb, it could be a business deal, an investment, a relationship. There’s so many different things that can be risky.
I could totally blow it. But what’s the worst that could happen? Maybe I’d be embarrassed. So once we know what risk really is, we can think about why we, as humans, take risks. It’s sort of illogical; we should want to preserve ourselves so we get to that ripe old age, but no, humans love taking risks. Why? It’s exciting.
It’s fun to blast down a mountain and feel the powder snow in your face. It’s fun to climb a fourteener. It’s fun, it’s a thrill, it’s adrenaline to be out doing these kind of sports. We take risks to make money, we take risks to bolster our reputation or our image. All sorts of reasons out there for why we would take risks, but again it’s very illogical.
Why sit at a gambling table and waste money? That time you win, your brain goes, “Oh, I really like that!” Even though the other nine times out of ten you lost. But this is the quick and easy of why we go out and take risks. On Mount Everest, I chose to go there for pretty much all of those reasons. Yes, I was being paid as a guide, so there was the financial incentive. It was really fun, even though it’s long and hard, it’s really fun and exciting.
There was the possibility that it would enhance my reputation as a guide if we were successful. On the opposite side of that, if you aren’t successful, the risk of failure, coming back, not getting the summit, is great and there’s a lot of other potential risks that I’ll talk about in just a second.
So how do we identify these things when we go up on a Colorado fourteener, we go up on Mount Everest, we look at the mountains and we have to open our eyes, our ears, and all of our senses to soak up what we see and what we feel, and look around us. On Mount Everest, the risks are crevasses, like this big crack that I skid by here. You don’t want to fall in that; you’ll never come out.
Avalanches, of course. Just two weeks ago, the media was full of Mount Everest stories because there were a lot of accidents. People were getting hit by rockfall, people were falling, there were medical emergencies, all sorts of bad stuff happening. A lot of that comes from people that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. That’s a risk that they choose to take, perhaps stepping outside of their comfort zone or over the boundaries of what they’re capable of to go up to Mount Everest.
Estimating the risk is really just an assessment of the probability of something happening. We know bad things can happen. Lighting can strike, your car can crash, you can fall, an avalanche can happen, but will it happen? That’s the important thing to understand. We know all this bad stuff, we’ve seen the risks in front of us, we’ve identified them, but will theses things happen? This is where your experience is huge. If you’ve climbed all of the Colorado fourteeners, you’ve gained a wealth of knowledge that you can use to make good decisions.
If you’ve been in the banking business for 30 years, you have a wealth of knowledge and experience which you use to inform your decisions. For me, I’ve grown up as a skier in the mountains, so that’s the most comfortable place. I’m much more comfortable on top of a fourteener than I am walking down a city street, where I feel like I have less control. So in estimating the risk, we’re looking at what’s the probability of something bad happening? Now, we want to manage these things. We know what the risks are, we know what the probability is, or at least we hope we know.
We have to remember that we, as human beings, are not as smart as we like to think we are. Humans are capable of doing incredibly stupid things, and we never seem to learn from each others’ mistakes. You can go back in history and everybody has done things wrong. Everybody’s done everything wrong. We just haven’t always learned from it, so we tend to repeat these mistakes.
There’s an art to managing the risk, and I’m going to teach you, or give you a tool, that I created. It’s sort of a methodology that I created; I call it the MEAT method. I wanted to put up a slide of a steak, just because I thought it would be funny, but I didn’t get around to doing that. I’m actually a vegetarian, so it’s even funnier for me. But, it’s just an acronym I could’ve called it the TEAM method, but meat was in the right order that I wanted.
This is a picture of the South Col of Mount Everest, the high camp, and that’s the summit in the distance. So we’re going to talk about what it’s like to go from that high camp up to the summit, and how we managed the risks that day. So the first thing you can do in the MEAT method is mitigate. Mitigate just means reducing the risk, it means tweaking the situation. So for instance, ski patrols on the ski area will throw bombs in the morning after a big snow fall to try to get avalanches to come down to steeper terrain so they can safely open for the public. The Colorado Department of Transportation will go up on the highways and shoot their guns, like on Loveland and Berthoud Pass, to try to bring avalanches down before they open the highway if it’s a dangerous scenario. They’re trying to tweak the situation, reduce the hazard, so that it is safer.
The second thing, and this is actually a picture of the world’s fourth highest mountain taken at sunrise from about 28,000 feet on Everest, and this is Lhotse, which, by the way, has never been skied if anyone is looking for a really cool project. It’s very risky though. Very risky. So the second thing we can do is eliminate the risk all together. What does that mean? Don’t go. Don’t do it.
On May 19th last year, we got up at about 8 PM at the South Col, we got out of our tents, got dressed, drank some hot tea. It’s about all you could stomach up there. About 10 PM, we started walking toward the summit. It was a snowy night, it was windy, it wasn’t good conditions.
We walked for about an hour, about 700 vertical feet, and at 27,000 feet, I looked at my client and one of the other guys and said, “This doesn’t feel good. I’m not liking the weather.” It was really cold and windy and it was going to be a long, hard climb. I decided, along with one of the other guides to take a chance, and it was a risky decision, to turn around and to go back to the South Col. We had one chance, we had enough oxygen to go the next night.
If we missed that opportunity, we were done, we were going back down. So we made the call to eliminate the hazard that night, go back down, safely sleep in our tents, and try it again the next day. Fortunately, we woke up the next day, and it was absolutely gorgeous out, the sun was shining, we just relaxed all day long, and did the same thing: we got up at 8 PM, cooked, got dressed, were out of the tent by 10 PM, climbing. There was a gorgeous starry night with the Moon out. It was the right call.
So in this case, we were accepting of the risk. We felt good about the situation. Our bodies felt good, the conditions looked great, and we said, “You know what? This feels good.” Our intuition, our gut instincts, those things we’ve learned over all those years out in the mountains were telling us, “Game on, let’s go.” So here’s a picture of my friend and another guide, Neal Beidleman, who many of you might know. He’s a Coloradoan who was involved in Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” book about the disaster in 1996. He was back on Everest with me for the first time in 15 years. It was very different circumstances; we had great weather and great conditions. This is him on the South summit of Mount Everest. The final letter in the acronym, as I climb up over the Hillary Step here, towards the summit of Everest, is transferring the risk.
Transferring the risk is really just a fancy way of saying, “You go first.” Somebody else can take the risk. It makes perfect sense. Why not? Let’s go see what will happen to someone else. Do you guys remember being kids, maybe you’re standing up on a bridge over water, and you’re waiting for someone else to jump in first to see how hard it was, or perhaps skiing, you’re waiting for someone else to jump off that little cliff to see what the landing looks like? Transferring the risk is a good way to go.
Alright, I’m going to leave you with two quotes, one from the World Olympic Champion Skier Jean-Claude Killy. He said, “To win you have to risk losing.” Another one that came to my mind last night actually was from the American poet TS Elliot. He said, “Only those that are willing to go too far will understand how far they can possibly go.” Thanks a lot, Denver. I appreciate it!
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