17 minute read
The Pioneer
Phil Henderson is a groundbreaking adventurer. And this spring, he’ll be leading the first all-Black team on Everest. He’s not seeking glory or redemption—he’s looking to share a dream.
Words MARK JENKINS Photography GREG MIONSKE
“This expedition is not just about the summit,” says Henderson, who was photographed in Cortez, Colorado, on November 1.
Henderson will lead the Full Circle Everest Expedition, tackling the world’s tallest mountain this spring.
P
hil Henderson and I were alone together at Camp 1—up around 20,000 feet—on Mount Everest. It was May 2012. We were scooched deep inside our fat sleeping bags inside a two-person tent staked to the ice. Crevasses, cracks in the glacier large enough to swallow a freight train, surrounded us. To get up here we had climbed through the Khumbu Icefall, the deadliest jumble of apartment-size ice blocks in the world. Two years later, 16 Sherpas would die when a portion of the Khumbu Icefall collapsed.
We were high enough to be in the clouds, and wind was rushing snow over our diminutive nylon dome.
“Sounds lovely, like a waterfall, doesn’t it?” asked Henderson, making me imagine a warm waterfall in Hawaii, the diametric opposite of our ice-encrusted home on the edge of oblivion. For the next 12 hours, throughout the night, we would periodically bang the tent walls to keep the snow from burying us alive.
Henderson saw the bright side of every situation. It’s part of his character and what drew me to him on Everest. He and I were tentmates, climbing partners and confidantes.
Camp 1 did not have Sherpas, so we took turns cooking for each other in the flapping vestibule. Graupel blew into our tent as we melted chunks of snow into water. Rice and a few fresh eggs carried up from base camp, hot Gatorade, a Swiss chocolate bar split in half for dessert. We were comfortable and content, both of us having spent big chunks of our lives in small tents in cold, inclement conditions.
At that point, Henderson had been an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), for almost 20 years, spent months training Sherpas how to climb at the Khumbu Climbing Center in Nepal and led expeditions from Africa to Alaska. He had played football in college before an injury put him out of the game and he shifted to outdoor sports. He was the only Black climber on our team, the 50th anniversary expedition of the first American ascent of Everest.
We lay back in our bags and talked. There’s one thing that most people don’t realize: More time is spent talking than climbing on a typical two-month, highaltitude expedition. You can only acclimatize so fast; the weather frequently causes you to be tent-bound, and nights are long. So you talk. Share stories.
Often we talked about our families. Henderson’s wife, Brenda, is from Kenya, and their daughter, Bahati (“luck” in Swahili), was 4 years old. I had two daughters in college. It is not easy to leave those you love for a grandiose act of selfindulgence. We mountain climbers always feel guilty, but then we always leave anyway. We are called. Drawn. Mountains are that magnetic.
That night, however, we were on a different subject: the Black experience in America. Although I had spent years reporting from Africa, I was a white male from the white-bread state of Wyoming. Henderson was from California but at that time lived in Vernal, Utah, a state nearly as white as Wyoming. This was years before the murder of George Floyd and the BLM movement finally woke up many white Americans to the systemic racism in our country—but all we really had to do was listen. It wasn’t like cops weren’t beating or killing Blacks over a century ago—we just didn’t have smartphones to bear witness. Almost 100 years ago, the 1928 Illinois Crime Survey found that although Blacks made up only 5 percent of the population, they constituted 30 percent of police killings. The late great representative John Lewis was severely beaten by police while leading the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights on what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
“I grew up in San Diego, practically the only Black kid in a white neighborhood,” said Henderson. “John-John and I were always getting hassled by the police.” John Williams Jr. was Henderson’s boyhood best friend. They did everything together, including getting into trouble.
“It was either jail, or getting out,” said Henderson. “I got out.”
But when I asked what he meant, he pulled his red and black Rastafarian bandanna down over his eyes, withdrew a yo-yo-size speaker from inside his sleeping bag—he’d been keeping it warm—and placed it between us on the icy tent floor.
In 2012, Henderson was on an Everest expedition; here he traverses the notoriously perilous Khumbu Icefall.
We listened to the big-band jazz of Ghanaian Ebo Taylor on his Love and Death album. We listened to the cool jazz of Nigerian Fela Kuti’s Water No Get Enemy, then the dark Sorrow, Tears and Blood. Before the speaker died from the cold, we fell asleep to the loping reggae of Jamaican Bunny Wailer’s Liberation and its lead track “Rise and Shine”:
We’ve been down in the valley much too long.
We’ve been down in captivity oh so long.
We’ve been down in humility much too long.
We’ve been down in slavery oh so long.
But we’re gonna rise and shine!
And win our liberation,
For now is the time
When all nations must be free.
So rise and shine!
Restore your strength and power,
Waste no more time,
Remember your history. N early 10 years later, Henderson is leading the first all-Black expedition to Everest this spring. Called the Full Circle Everest Expedition, it already has big equipment sponsors and more than $100,000 raised via GoFundMe.
“Philip is a natural leader,” says Larry Berger, a colleague and close friend of Henderson’s. They both worked at NOLS for years. Now they live near each other in Cortez, Colorado. Whereas they used to climb together, now they go fishing.
“Philip didn’t have it easy at NOLS,” says Berger. “Back then, the school was run by white entitled people, for white entitled kids. Philip tried to change that, but he was largely ignored. He was ahead of his time.”
As I had witnessed on Everest, Henderson has fine-tuned leadership skills. He’s thoughtful but decisive, driven but not egotistical. He’s a good listener but always speaks his mind, often in a quiet yet profound way.
“Philip inspires people because he believes in making a positive difference in the world,” Berger says. “That’s just who he is. I can’t imagine anyone else leading this expedition.”
The Full Circle Everest Expedition is comprised of an eclectic team of Black climbers, men and women from across the U.S. Their goal, as it says on their website, is to “showcase the tenacity and strength of these climbers, and highlight the barriers that continue to exist for Black communities in accessing the outdoors.”
When you look at the résumés of the climbers on the Full Circle Everest Expedition, they are not loaded with first ascents or cutting-edge alpinism. Instead, team members reveal a deep commitment to their respective communities. Abby Dione founded the Coral Cliffs Climbing Gym in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and has taught climbing clinics at Color the Crag and at Flash Foxy’s Women’s Climbing Festival. James “KG” Kagambi of Kenya— the first Black African to summit both Denali and Aconcagua—has been a teacher his whole life and trains Kenyan
mountain rescue teams. Eddie Taylor, who has climbed El Capitan in a day, is a high school chemistry teacher. Fred Campbell, a data scientist with a PhD in statistics, teaches free climbing classes for beginners. Demond “Dom” Mullins, a sociology PhD and an Iraq War veteran, researches the benefits of outdoor recreation to combat vets. What distinguishes this Everest team from most others is its desire to give back to the Black and Brown community, rather than just tag the summit and start bragging.
“This expedition is not just about the mountain,” says team member Rosemary Saal. “It’s about building community, about building relationships, most importantly about changing the narrative about Black people and the outdoors.”
Saal is a NOLS instructor, primarily focused on backpacking, and a mentee of Henderson, who took her under his wing while climbing Kilimanjaro. “Phil doesn’t just make suggestions—he actively looks for opportunities for young people of color,” she says. “Our expedition is about showing that Black people do climb, Black people do camp, Black people do ski!”
When I speak to Saal, she is driving across Utah to teach a NOLS course. We keep getting cut off, but she keeps calling back. When I ask her what she hopes to communicate to the Black community about climbing Mount Everest, she doesn’t mention the conventional tropes of challenging yourself and conquering fear.
“Joy!” she exclaims. “The joy that comes from being in the outdoors. Many people of color have never been given the opportunity to experience the joy of mountain climbing. It’s a feeling of liberation. I want to share this with the Black community, a community that has historically been excluded from the outdoor experience. I see practicing joy as an act of political resistance.”
When I call Henderson to congratulate him on putting together the Full Circle expedition, we don’t talk about climbing. Not a word about crampons skittering on blue ice or blizzards or altitude sickness; we talk about giving Black people a different perspective of what they can be, what they can achieve.
“Do I want to see someone on our team summit, damn right I do!” Henderson says. “But this expedition is not just about the summit. It’s about sharing a dream with a community that has been held back, and sometimes held themselves back.”
Henderson reminds me that the first American team to summit Everest did so in 1963, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Were any Black Americans dreaming of climbing Everest back then?” he asks. “That was during the civil rights movement. That’s when things were finally starting to change. That movement never ended. Black people are still fighting.”
It occurs to me that Black people in America have been climbing their own Everest, battling dangerous conditions for uncertain results, for centuries. I remember the conversations about race and equality Henderson and I had on Everest back in 2012.
At Camp 2 in 2012, Henderson fell acutely sick and had to descend the mountain.
Back in 2012, Henderson waits out bad weather at Everest’s Camp 1 at roughly 20,000 feet of elevation.
To learn more about Henderson and the Full Circle Everest Expedition—and possibly donate—visit fullcircleeverest.com.
We reminisce for a few minutes about that bittersweet expedition. Henderson had gotten deathly ill at Camp 2, his lungs filling with fluid. His oxygen levels had dropped to 60 percent by the time we got him on an oxygen tank. That night in the tent together I listened to him struggling to breathe through his oxygen mask. He was gurgling, choking. The next morning the expedition was over for him. He had to go down, and I lost my wingman.
“That was hard, man,” says Henderson.
“But you were so calm about it,” I reply.
I can see Henderson shrug and smile right through the phone.
I don’t ask him why he’s going back to Everest. Only non-climbers ask such stupid questions.
“Bahati must be 13 now,” I say.
“She is,” says Henderson. “And she’s growing up in a different world than I grew up in.”
As I did years earlier, I ask him about his own childhood, but he again demurs.
“You’d have to talk to John-John,” Henderson says.
So that’s what I do.
Philip was the best athlete I’d ever seen,” says John Williams, now an electrician and pastor in California. “As a running back he would just run right over the defense. He could have gone pro if he hadn’t been injured.”
Williams acknowledges that they drank and smoked pot in high school. “Phil knew his limits, but I ended up taking it way too far.” Williams has been clean and sober now for 14 years, but back then, it was a different story.
One night somebody started a fight with Henderson.
“Philip was not aggressive,” Williams says. “But he was a damn good fighter. He knocked this guy out.”
Later that night, after Henderson had gone home, Williams encountered the same guy again, got into another fight, and stabbed him. Both Henderson and Williams went to jail.
“I know that really got to him,” says Williams. “He couldn’t be cooped up like that.”
Henderson’s football coach got him out of jail, but Williams went to juvie for a year.
A similar incident happened again a few years later. “Phil was always protecting me,” says Williams. “But he saw where this was all going and got out.”
Williams ended up in and out of prison for the next two decades. “I spent a total of 12 years behind bars,” says Williams. “I think I was Philip’s cautionary tale. He wrote me many letters while I was in prison. I think he felt like he’d abandoned me, but my life was my fault.”
Williams believes this is why Henderson has focused on mentoring Black youth for his entire life.
“He saw what happens,” says Williams, pausing for a moment. “I used to put the pictures he sent me up on my cell walls. Pictures of him climbing mountains. He was outside, I was inside, and he knew I needed hope.”
This spring Phil Henderson and his Full Circle team will be attempting Everest, giving hope to a new generation of climbers along the way.
NAME CALLING
How climbers are changing the culture, one route at a time.
To celebrate his 34th birthday in 2020, DJ Grant made the three-hour drive from his home in Pittsburgh to Fayetteville, West Virginia, for a long weekend of rock climbing in the New River Gorge. “The New” is a large climbing area, with more than 3,000 established routes on soaring, bullet-hard sandstone cliffs. It’s where Grant fell in love with outdoor climbing. The sport holds huge significance for him.
“Climbing saved my life,” he says. “It changed my path, changed my outlook.” It pulled him from depression, propelling him through rebuilding and rediscovery. “Climbing has been a therapy, a way to center. It’s more than just rocks and routes. It’s trusting your partner with your life. It’s understanding that some challenges you might not overcome immediately.”
On this trip, though, something ate at him: the names of some of the routes. Slave Fingers. Tarbaby. Kool Krux Klimbing. Another Tigger in the Morgue.
Grant, a Jamaican immigrant, is Black. It wasn’t the first time he noticed names that seemed to carry racial overtones, but this time, it felt like they were everywhere. He had been thrilled to introduce his son, now 11, to climbing. But how could he feel good about bringing him into this? “A friend put it best,” Grant says. “How can we go through the South to someplace called Slave Fingers and feel safe camping at night?” It was so disheartening, he felt like quitting climbing. After all, what could he do about it? Did anyone even have the power to change names that were accepted by local climbers for decades? Did it even bother them?
There are hundreds of thousands of climbing routes in the United States, and most of them have innocuous names. Some, like the Nose on El Capitan, are named for rock features, or for the person who first climbed them, like the (Fred) Beckey Route. Others involve wordplay. U.S. routes are typically named by the person who climbed it first—the first ascensionist. Being first requires vision, technical skill, hard work and, often, guts. Name tags aren’t pasted on the rock, of course. Instead, route names are published in heavily used guidebooks and on major crowdsourced aggregator sites, such as Mountain Project.
Offensive route names aren’t confined to the New. Thousands of route names are, at the very least, questionable. (Mountain Project users have flagged more than 6,000.) Some are clearly derogatory, misogynistic, anti-gay or racist. Marginalized groups of climbers have been talking about this problem for years. To many, it’s tied in with a larger problem: the lack of inclusivity in many outdoor sports. Many people of color and other marginalized groups just don’t feel welcome. Most first ascensionists have been white males—so far, anyway. At crags today, most of the climbers are still white.
Which is perhaps why there hadn’t been a lot of serious mainstream attention paid to the issue. People who complained were dismissed.
Then, in June 2020, came the reaction to George Floyd’s death, says Taimur Ahmad, who works on policy issues at the Access Fund, a national climbing organization. “It was a huge kick in the pants for a lot of companies and grassroots climbing organizations,” he says. His job involves working to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, which remains a “big, difficult, problem,” Ahmad says. Route names seemed “more tangible” and a lot easier to fix. Easier, perhaps, but not simple.
In the months after Grant’s birthday, he and his girlfriend, Natalie Sauerwald, along with friends, came up with a plan. They contacted the New River Alliance of Climbers (NRAC), a nonprofit that acts as steward of the climbing area, organizing trail maintenance, replacing worn anchors and working with land managers.
Initially, NRAC told Grant it had no control over route names. After George Floyd’s death, NRAC had begun to question its role in creating—or impeding—inclusivity. The alliance changed direction, seeking input from the climbing community, including climbers of color and others who explained how they’ve felt excluded trying to enjoy a day outdoors while surrounded by routes that demeaned them.
Local climber Elena Fouch-Watson says until then, she hadn’t given it much thought. But upon hearing from these climbers, her eyes were opened. “Can you imagine,” she asks, “being a Black climber in the rural West Virginia backwoods, and you drive by a bunch of Dixie flags, and you open the guidebook, and the route you want to get on is named the Racist?” She joined the NRAC board to help work on these issues.
There are some climbers, at the New and elsewhere, who liken any change to “erasing history.” Others argue that the names weren’t intentionally hurtful and that these new climbers just don’t understand the context. For example, there are several “Tigger” routes that seem to be a play on the n-word, but, in fact, “Tigger” was the first ascensionist’s nickname.
NRAC held fast. By the end of the summer, it became the first climbing organization in the country to develop a process for addressing this problem at its local crag, according to Ahmad. Other organizations, including the San Luis Valley Climbers Alliance, have since followed. Mountain Project also instituted a process for flagging and redacting toxic route names. (It was a turnaround from a few years earlier when, under different ownership, Mountain Project rebuffed the efforts of a climber of color, Melissa Utomo, who had developed a flagging process.)
Under NRAC’s process, climbers submit offensive names for the board’s consideration. A name that’s simply juvenile or obnoxious gets left alone. For the derogatory names, a representative of the board contacts the first ascensionist, explains the issue, and asks if he’d like to come up with a new name.
“A lot of them were psyched,” FouchWatson says. In some cases, something that may have seemed acceptable in the 1980s has taken on new meaning. In other cases, the first ascensionist admitted to some youthful insensitivity.
In speaking with first ascensionists, Grant realized something. The main hurdle wasn’t about “erasing history. My perception is they thought that by changing the names, they were acknowledging that they at some point in time were racist.” He says he took pains to avoid sounding accusatory and believes that those who agreed to rename their routes “made it more welcoming to people who look like me and my child.”
So far, more than 100 route names have been changed. The new names are reflected on Mountain Project. That company, in fact, has begun to take on the issue more broadly. So far, of the 6,000plus route names (out of more than 253,000 nationwide) that have been flagged as offensive by users, 563 have been redacted, and 163 have been renamed by first ascensionists.
NRAC also convinced the guidebook publisher to reflect the changes in its new edition. The book has other new features, as well.
“There are photos of LGBTQ+ climbers, men, women, BIPOC climbers,” Grant says. “I’ve gone through all the other climbing guidebooks in my house. I haven’t ever seen a photo of a Black climber before.” —Maureen O’Hagan
