Climbing is actually a great sport for blind people and that carried me on to climbing bigger and bigger mountains, snowy mountains, ice faces, and developing different techniques to be able to do that.

I have a variety of friends I climb with. But the common thing is I trust all of them. They're solid climbers, the sort of people I trust to know what they're doing.

When I went blind at 13, I realized that I wasn't going to be a good baseball or basketball player like I enjoyed before. It forced me to look beyond the obvious, to things that I could still do well.

Maybe people, maybe the world writes things off as impossible a little too quickly, when they really aren't - when they just haven't reached out and figured out how to utilize their resources to the fullest degree or created pioneering systems in their lives.

When I'm following someone, I'm listening to a bear bell strapped to their packs. When I'm leading on a climb, like on a rock, I like to feel my way through it on my own, so I know the tricky moves and where to place gear.

Success is not just the crowning moment, the spiking of the ball in the end zone or the raising of the flag on the summit. It is the whole process of reaching for a goal and, sometimes, it begins with failure.

The key is to really have tremendously high expectations and to teach kids how to be self sufficient and confident and give them the skills that they need to succeed.