Gary Overcomes Adversity To Get To The Top

By Vanessa Garnica

You can say he is on a journey to change the world one step at a time.

But world-class climber Gary Guller never thought his dream of reaching the top of Mount Everest would ever come true after an accident more than 20 years ago left him without an arm.

However in 2003, not only did he achieve his dream but he led the first and biggest group of people with disabilities to reach Mount Everest base camp at 17,500 feet (5385 meters).

“That was one of the most important moments in my life for sure,” Guller said this week in Tamarindo, during a visit to Costa Rica.

“Everybody in the world thought I had lost my mind putting this expedition together.”

After speaking at a Disability Convention in Texas, Guller was approached by someone in a wheelchair and asked if he would ever take someone like him on one of his expeditions.

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Gary Guller (right) and Lakpa Sherpa, a Nepalese Buddhist lama who had never seen Mount Everest, admire the world’s tallest peak. Lakpa had lost his right arm after he was bitten by a snake bite when he was a child. Guller said the two had a “connection”, both having lost an arm at a young age.

“That’s how Everest Expedition was born,” he says. “Within three to four weeks, I had a team of 30 plus people with varying degrees of disabilities: paraplegic, quadriplegic, leg amputee, arm amputee, mentally challenged and so on.”

The journey was documented in a film called Team Everest: A Himalayan Journey which illustrates the numerous difficulties the team was presented with on their way to Mount Everest.

They trekked ancient trails still utilized by Nepali, Tibetan and Indian traders.

According to Guller, the trails ranged in difficulty from hard to nearly impossible.

Altitude became their biggest problem.

Guller, who had been to Mount Everest base camp more than 30 times, became the first amputee to summit the world’s highest peak during this expedition.

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He lost his left arm in a climbing accident in 1986. Guller and two friends, Jerry and Dave, were just 30 meters (100 feet) from the summit of Pico de Orizaba in Mexico, when disaster struck. One of his two friends slipped at a steep, icy section and all three climbers, who were tethered together, plummeted more than 500 meters down the hard, icy face.

They spent three days, badly hurt, not knowing if they would make it out alive. When rescuers finally arrived Jerry had died, while Guller and Dave had survived. Guller was later told he would lose his arm.

As a result, Guller and his friend Dave spent many years apart with absolutely no contact with each other.

“We’ve reconnected and bonded and realized that we survived a pretty horrific accident and there’s something special about that,” Guller explains. “What’s interesting is that our lives were pretty parallel for all those years we were apart… the good and the bad.”

He came to Costa Rica for the first time last year with his friend Dave.

“I came down with him for about four, five days and I just found it to be a great place to communicate and have a sort of a freer mind,” he shares.

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Guller, who spent most of the month of July in Costa Rica, says he loves to reflect, relax and enjoy the energy he gets from the ocean here in Guanacaste.

“Most of my life it’s been spent in the mountains,” Guller explains. “The closest connection that I can get with that tends to be the ocean, which is a very different type of environment than I’m used to.

It was not always that way.

Twenty years ago, shortly after he lost his arm, the climber says he had hit rock bottom.

“I did my fair share at the local pub and experimenting different paths before I came to grips with what had happened to me,” he says. “At that time I felt like (climbing) was taken away.”

With few prominent climbers with disabilities, Guller began to doubt he would ever achieve his childhood dream of climbing Mount Everest.

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Gary Guller and his Nepalese sherpa team members celebrate their summit of Mount Everest in May of 2003. Guller became the first arm amputee to climb the world’s highest peak.

“Then, there wasn’t a lot of role models when it comes to mountaineering and climbing with one arm, doing this sort of extreme type endeavors,” says Guller. “But I realized there were a lot of people out there that had it a lot worse that I did.”

Since, he has traveled the world as a motivational speaker, talking extensively to audiences about equality, core values and the fair treatment of fellow man, something to leave a positive mark on the world.

“(Overcoming this challenge) helped me put this expedition together, it helped me climb another big mountain in the world (in Tibet) with a big international team,” Guller explains.

“It helps me now when I give presentations with regards to not giving up, working as hard as you can for what you believe in, and treating people fairly and equally.”

Guller has no plans to slow down. He wants to organize another expedition to raise awareness for children in Africa who have lost limbs as a result of civil wars or manual labor.

“I want to visit local organizations and see how I can assist them either financially or with volunteers or even by donating equipment,” he says.