I'm gonna start
before any adventures
for the magazine,
before I was out in Antarctica,
before any of this happened.
I'm gonna start by telling
you how cool I was as a kid,
because honestly,
I was pretty cool.
I was the first hipster
ever, sideways trucker hat.
I was kicking OshKosh B'Gosh,
popped collar, the whole deal,
but really, the point of
this picture is to show you
that from a very young
age, I was in campgrounds
and my brother and I
were in campgrounds
and we were always raised
to be in campgrounds.
As my parents would have
it, they wanted us to go out
from the tiniest age, and go
out and experience the world
and push our boundaries
and try to understand
what the world was around us,
and that was very
important in my family,
so they started us
skiing when we were two,
climbing when we were five,
and the whole point was
to sort of define
our own borders.
This is me in the
Wind River Range,
close to where I live
now in Bozeman, Montana,
at about, I guess
I'm 11, 12 years old.
You know, this is when
questioning boundaries
started to take
a different turn.
I was a smart kid.
I went to high school
two years early
and you know, exploring
boundaries took on
a completely different
texture at that point,
and what I mean by that
is I started exploring
social boundaries rather
than physical ones,
and when you're 12
years old in high school
and you're hanging out
with 18 year old kids,
you don't have that
six years of experience
to prepare you for
that, and so honestly,
by the time I was 14 years old,
I was completely dropped
out of high school.
My parents sent me to rehab.
I ran away three times,
and on the third time,
as they say, the third
time is the charm,
my parents gave up, and it's
not that they wanted to give up
or I blame them for
that, but they said,
"Quite honestly, Cory,
we're scared of you.
"We don't know what to do,
"and if you can't
abide by our rules,
"then you can't live at home."
So I was 14 and homeless.
I look back on the
privilege of education
and I shudder to think
what I was thinking,
but that was the
decision I made,
but that time period
led me to observe
the world from a
very curious place.
When I'm on the
streets, which was rare,
because oftentimes,
my friends helped me
and I wasn't actually sleeping
on the streets too much,
but sometimes I was,
and when I would see
people picking out
of garbage cans,
it took on a
different tone to me.
When I myself would
have to look for food,
it took on a different tone,
and what I mean by that is
I started to see this as
closer to our natural state.
That is a forager foraging,
and everybody in this room
is actually much further removed
than our evolved trajectory
than we like to think.
That forager is far closer
to the way we evolved,
and it was that story, that
time, seeing people struggle
that actually got me excited
about telling bigger stories,
and thank God for my parents
because they did start me
climbing so young that
it had a gravitational,
or I guess anti-gravitational
pull back to it.
Climbing was the thing
that got me out of this,
because I came back, I was
driven to do something,
and oddly enough, visually
and just in the
very nature of it
it's allegorical
to human struggle.
It's perfect for
telling the story
of what humans are
capable of and how much
we can overcome,
and not only that.
Visually, it's just stunning,
and you can grab people
and you can capture
their imaginations
So my early career
was all about this.
I would go out and I
would take pictures
with really crappy cameras,
and I would try to
sell them to companies,
and with that money, I
would go on other trips,
and I'd save it
and I'd save more
and I'd go on bigger trips
and I'd sell to
different companies,
and so that's my whole
early career worked,
and for a while, it was very
sustaining and I loved it
because I could say I was
a professional photographer
and people would
really respect me
and I was really
proud of myself.
I was kind of proving
people wrong at this point.
I was proving
everybody that said
I wasn't gonna amount
to anything wrong.
I was saying no, I'm
gonna amount to something,
and I think a lot of my early
career was dedicated to that.
A lot of it was dedicated
to making single images,
and I call these
single stories, right?
So a single story is an
image that you provide
to a company that inspires
some sort of inspiration,
that really inspires
people to buy raincoats.
I'm a glorified raincoat
salesman, which is fine,
or at least, it was
okay with me early on,
but I started to
see this divergence
between these single image
stories that I was hired to tell
and the larger narrative
that I was really engaged in,
the things that I really
wanted to talk about,
which was not the heroic moment.
It was the absolute opposite;
it was the anti-hero moment.
It was the thousand yard stare.
It was my version of
conflict photography
in the outdoor space.
I wanted to talk about
what it's like to hurt,
what it feels like,
and naturally,
as you travel, for those of us
who have had the great
privilege of traveling,
the more you travel, the
more engaged you become.
You become engaged with
culture and you start to grow
a certain sense of compassion,
or at least, I did.
This is a picture that I took
a very, very long time ago,
but I remember it distinctly
because all of a sudden,
after looking at this
image back in Huaraz,
coming out of the hills in Peru,
I remember looking
at this and thinking,
oh, climbing's kinda
dumb, and it's true
because it's a very
self-indulgent act
and I realized I
needed climbing,
A, because it sustained me,
and B, because it took
me to these places,
but the most important
thing was the thing
that I had missed to that point.
I was so engaged in my own
struggle and telling that story
that I was missing
everybody around me,
so culture became
a very focal point
in my early
development, but again,
I wasn't a photographer
of any note at this point.
Nobody was gonna hire me to
go tell a cultural story.
I was always gonna
be hired to go tell
the story of mountains,
and that's okay.
This is a picture of
Mount Everest on the left.
The little one in
the middle is Lhotse.
In 2010, Conrad Anker, one
of our other explorers,
asked if I would go here and
install time lapse cameras
on the Khumbu Glacier
to monitor deflation,
and it was for Jim Balog's
movie, Chasing Ice,
'cause we wanted to look at
the impacts of climate change
on the glaciers in
the Khumbu region.
Coincidentally, Conrad
could kinda sense this.
I mean, Conrad's been a
climber for a long time
and he could just
see me looking up,
kinda like, I mean the
time lapse cameras are cool
but that's really cool.
Like, you know,
I wanna go there.
And so we actually finagled,
we called down to Kathmandu
and I got a permit
to climb Lhotse.
There was no way I
was gonna get a permit
to climb Everest at this
point; it was too late,
but they got me a
permit to climb Lhotse,
and it was unlikely
that I was gonna do it.
There was no way, because most
people take about eight weeks
and they go up and down and up
and down to get acclimatized.
I had been there
for three weeks.
I hadn't been higher
than base camp,
and you know, I had six
days till the summit window,
so people were like,
well, good luck, have fun.
You know, go up, don't die.
That's a common
theme in my life.
Have fun, don't die.
But I ended up climbing it.
I ended up climbing
it in six days,
so a total of three and a
half weeks from my house
to the top of the fourth
highest mountain in the world,
and that got noticed.
It got noticed by a
guy named Simone Moro.
Now, Simone Moro is
an Italian climber.
He's known for hard
first winter ascents,
and he called me after
this climb and he said
in this awesome voice,
I'm gonna do it again.
You guys ready?
He talked like this.
I'm not kidding, he
calls like this, he said,
"Cory, do you want
to go Gasherbrum II?
"Winter time, meet with us."
And I said, "I don't
understand what you're saying,
"but I would love to go with
you because you're my hero."
Where are we going?
Gasherbrum II.
I'm like, okay, that
sounds great, where's that?
And he goes, "It's in Pakistan,"
and for those of
you who don't know,
there's 14 8,000 meter
peaks in the world,
so 14 peaks that are above
roughly 26,000 thousand feet,
and nine of them are
in Tibet and Nepal,
and five of them
are in Pakistan,
and the nine in Tibet and
Nepal have all been climbed
or had at this point all
been climbed in winter,
but none of the Pakistani
8,000 meter peaks
had ever been climbed in winter
because they're about
600 miles north,
the weather's much more severe,
and a lot of people at
this point, I think,
16 expeditions over 26
years had tried and failed.
But here's the thing, I jumped,
I leapt before thinking.
I didn't even know any of that.
Likewise, I didn't know
that if I did this,
I would be the first American
to climb any 8,000
meter peak in winter,
but of course, I said yes, and
all of a sudden, I was here
on the literal, physical
border of India and Pakistan,
so that's something
to pay attention to.
I remember taking this photo
mostly because I
saw it happening.
I knew the sun was gonna crest
and I knew that we're
on our summit push here,
so I ran ahead in crampons,
that's really hard.
It doesn't look
cool, you're like...
I ran and because I ran, I
was just so out of breath
that I immediately vomited,
and then I get my camera out,
I take my mittens off, I
think it's actually minus 50
and I pull it up and I
realize I can't take it.
It's frozen, I can't turn
it off shutter priority,
so I can't change the shutter
speed, I can't do anything,
and it's at a 50th of a second,
which for those of you who
don't know, that's very slow
especially when
you're just vomited
and you're like
trying to do that,
and I took this picture,
and that was that.
I knew that moment was special
because I also
knew in that moment
that we were very
likely gonna summit.
But the summit there
was just the beginning.
Like I said, I didn't know
I'd be the first American.
I didn't know any of
that, and to be fair,
had I known, I don't think it
would have been good for me.
I was climbing out of
pure joy and I loved it.
As we got to the
summit, a storm hit
and on the way down, we were
hit by a massive avalanche.
Six days out onto our
summit bid, one day,
the last day to base camp,
we were hit by an avalanche
and I sent this picture
to my mom when we got back
and I said, "Mom, we made
it, we're back safe."
And she goes, "Oh, it's a lovely
portrait, is that Dennis?"
And I said, "That's me, mom."
She goes, oh, like,
oh, that's gross.
And I'm like, yeah, 'cause I
look like I'm 90, it is gross.
My face is all swollen.
Did you know that more people
have died this year from
taking selfies than shark
attacks and lightning combined?
Yeah, it's bad news, don't do
it, but do keep taking selfies
'cause apparently,
you can get 'em
on the cover of National
Geographic, that's a thing.
But honestly, to get serious
for a second, that moment,
as much as the avalanche was
a defining moment in my career
and this image became something,
it became much more than
I had ever anticipated.
It represents something much
deeper, and I look at it now,
I look at the gesture, I look
at the facial expression,
and what I see is somebody
who's struggling to deal
with a traumatic event, a
very, very traumatic event.
What happens to the
brain is when it thinks
it's going to die, it quite
literally prepares for death,
and so when people say my
life flashed before my eyes,
that's a very real thing.
It's not the way
you think of it.
It's not like all these
beautiful visions and things.
Sometimes, you're like Cheerios,
parking tickets, you know.
It's all of it, compiled,
but I see this now,
and what I see is a
person who is alive,
realizing they're alive
after their brain has
prepared for death,
and what that manifests as in
psychological terms is PTSD.
That's where it goes from there.
The experience is
locked in your brain.
Your sympathetic
nervous system kicks in
and you are continually
experiencing that moment
from that point on,
so it's spinning out,
and essentially, that's
just a corrosive method
for your brain,
and what you do is
you try to find anything
to calm that spinning down.
It's where all
addiction stems from.
So I didn't know it at the time,
but G II had given me the
first American to do something,
8,000 meter peak in
winter, and PTSD.
It's the gift that keeps on
giving, but we'll get into that.
I went home and I got married.
I got married to
a wonderful woman.
We had a wonderful
group of friends.
We had incredibly
supportive families.
We lived an alternate lifestyle
that some parents would
be a little alarmed by.
Like, okay, you're
gonna go climb mountains
and you're gonna go climb rocks,
and we had very
supportive family.
But the problem was that
even right after my marriage,
I started to feel disassociated
and I started to feel withdrawal
and I started to feel
confusion and darkness,
and I didn't know what it was.
I felt like there was a
weight pushing down on me.
Like, a literal weight.
I'd wake up in the morning
and my brain was just going,
and it was like this
very loud silence,
and it reminded me of
a quote that I read,
a quote from a book.
It says, "They carried
all that they could bear,
"and then some,
including a silent awe
"for the terrible power of
the things that they carried."
That's by Tim O'Brien from the
book The Things They Carried.
G II didn't just
leave me with PTSD.
It gave me something else.
It gave me an
opportunity to provide
a storytelling example
to National Geographic.
There was a Pakistani
military camp at base camp
and because we were
there in the winter,
they were very welcoming.
They opened up
their doors to us.
They were sort of
intrigued by us.
Who are these three crazy
guys climbing in winter?
'Cause in the summertime,
you can't go here.
It's just off limits
because there's too many
people up on the glacier,
and these guys are
18 to 24 years old.
I was so alarmed by what I
had seen in western media
and what was actually
happening there,
so I took on the task of trying
to communicate their story
in very, very brief terms,
because I wanted to come
back and have something
to show to Sadie
Quarrier, who had asked,
she's my photo editor
here, who had asked,
hey, can you show me some
storytelling examples?
It was a very unique
opportunity, extremely unique,
and to look back at these and
see what I was trying to do,
I can understand it,
and I think, you know,
some of 'em are okay,
but oddly enough,
I just wanna tell
how we got here.
These guys would
come over to our camp
and they'd kinda peek in
and it's like they
were six year olds
and then they'd kinda
nervously walk in
and we'd have tea with
them, and then finally,
the reason it all worked out,
the reason we became friends
is because they asked,
hey, Cory, I know you
guys have internet.
Could I check my Facebook?
So now, I have a ton of
friends named Farooq, Muhammad,
and I'm on the TSA watch
list, which is awesome.
Can't get on a plane
to save my life.
But it was a real lesson
in creating intimacy
and learning through
non-verbal communication
and trying to take
pictures that told
deeper, more meaningful stories,
and really using that
which is different
to show that which
makes us all the same.
I love this photograph.
It's not technically perfect.
What self respecting
photographer leaves
a shadow in the bottom?
It's hardly in focus, but the
guy has a purple tracksuit.
Like, that is dope,
that is awesome.
And who dries their
clothes in minus 40?
Why would you do that?
But the thing is,
it's just like,
I'm a guy out drying my clothes.
Sure, I'm in the
Pakistani military
in the highest battlefield
in the world, but guess what?
It's relatable, and that's
what brings us together.
That's the power of photography.
It brings us together;
it brings us closer.
This is hard living up here.
This is very intimate
space, and to be invited in
and to be shown that level of
friendship was a true gift,
and it made me connect
with these guys in a way,
a very real way, where I started
feeling much more
for their struggle,
and their struggle is one
that is very, very real.
Bertrand Russell has
a wonderful quote.
He says, "War does not
determine who is right,
"only who is left,"
and I found this foot
of a Pakistani soldier frozen
in the ice on the glacier,
and it occurred to me that
this is somebody's son
and probably somebody's brother
and maybe somebody's uncle.
These wars are ugly
and they leave scars,
and our actions as
humans have consequences.
They all do, but this led me
to my first assignment
for National Geographic.
They said, yeah, you can
take a couple pictures.
We'll try you out.
Might not go so well, but
we'll give you a shot.
It was to an area
called Mustang.
It's on the northern border
of Nepal, just south of Tibet,
and it was pivotal for
Tibetan freedom fighters
at the end of the
cultural revolution,
but before that, for thousands
of years before that,
it was a space of absolute
beauty and mystery.
We were using climbing
to access these caves
and what I love about that is,
back to one of the previous
photographs, it's the hook.
Adventure is the hook to get
people involved in science
and then we can talk about
culture and human migration,
so when you're telling stories,
you wanna bring these
elements together.
That's sort of what I've
found works best for me,
and effective storytelling
always brings you in.
It brings you very, very close.
It takes you into the caves.
It gives you the smells
and the textures.
It shows you that dry, dry,
that sort of sand everywhere.
But it's interesting, when
I look at these now too,
I feel like there's a parallel
with what was
happening in my life.
I felt like I was standing
at the opening of a cave,
looking in, not
wanting to go in,
but just sort of being sucked
in, and not being able to see
and feeling completely
this sense of vertigo.
I didn't know what
was happening,
and much like Matt
is doing here,
I was picking up random pieces
and trying to fit them
together and figure them out,
but nothing seemed to work.
In this image, Matt is actually
finding a piece of pecha.
Pecha is ancient script.
A lot of times, it
looked like this.
Pick it up, blow the dust off.
You know, it was tax records
and things like that.
Sometimes, it would
look like this,
and that is an illuminated
folio that predates Buddhism.
This is Bon, so this is
the animistic tradition
of the Tibetan plateau before
the spreading of Buddhism.
It gives a deeper understanding
of how the culture
there evolved.
It's really about taking images
that take tiny little
pieces of the puzzle
and then put them all together.
That's what a
visual narrative is,
and some of 'em have to take
bigger leaps than other,
but it's construction
from the ground up,
and you have to open yourself up
to seeing things in
a very different way.
After a very long
time, we finally found
what we were looking for,
which was human remains.
This is rescue archaeology.
These caves are actually
literally exfoliating
off the side of the
mountain, so we'd go in
and we'd collect
samples that we could.
What we were really looking
for here were teeth.
Now, if you think
of this in a way,
basically, human
remains are like finding
the corner and the edge pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle, right?
Once you have that, you start
to piece things together.
The reason teeth are
important is 'cause
in your tooth enamel, there's
something called strontium.
It's Sr 38 on the
periodic table,
and what that has in it is a
geo thumb print, essentially.
It tells you where
you were born,
so if you can find
somebody's remains
and you get their
strontium index
and they were born someplace
different than where they died
and you do that with
everybody in the burial crypt,
well, all of a sudden, you're
painting a very real picture
about human migration and trade,
and this is the story
of our human family.
This is why this matters.
We're connecting the pieces,
and what's so
important about that,
and I think it's more
important now than ever,
now, this is ancient history,
but ancient history matters
because it's only through
understanding our past,
I mean this so much
especially this week,
only through
understanding our past
can we hope to
navigate our future.
So we have to pay
attention to this stuff.
When we look back and we look
at the events that happened,
how can we predict the
future, and hopefully,
how can we alter it to
go down a better road?
Because honestly, we
all look up at the sky
and we think the world's
so big and it's infinite.
You know what? It's not.
The sky might be infinite,
but the world is very,
very, very finite.
It's extremely finite
and extremely fragile.
