It is exciting to kind of figure things out in yourself and then use other people to help you figure things out so you can really reach your potential.

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.

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.

It is exciting to kind of figure things out in yourself and then use other people to help you figure things out so you can really reach your potential.

It's kind of too movie-like to say, "When I started climbing, I knew I wanted to climb Everest some day." Instead, I just started rock climbing as a kid, when I was 16, and then I started teaching and a buddy of mine started taking me out.

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.

People have the inner resources to become anything they want to be. Challenge just becomes the vehicle for tapping into those inner resources.