After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live!

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. 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. What I mean by that is I started exploring social boundaries rather than physical ones. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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 from 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.

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. 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 how my whole early career worked.

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. 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. It was for Jim Balog's movie, Chasing Ice, because 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. 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." For those of you who don't know, there are 14 8,000-meter peaks in the world—so 14 peaks that are above roughly 26,000 feet—and nine of them are in Tibet and Nepal, and five of them are in Pakistan.

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. 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.

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 on 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."

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 because 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? Because 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. 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, 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 a 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 others, 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 thumbprint, 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—is that 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.