Photo: IG//@kirstie_ennis
Kirstie Enis can look forward to one of the most gratifying summit experiences Mt. Everest has ever seen when her day comes. The Marine veteran has now come within striking distance of the world’s tallest peak twice and was forced to turn around short of her ultimate goal. But as she puts it, the “third time’s a charm.” A fascinating aspect of her story — aside from the fall-down-seven-time-get-up-eight attitude — is that her recent attempt ended with a tremendous level of willpower and wisdom. She chose to cut the journey short herself rather than roll the dice and risk never making it back home.
Enis is an above-the-knee amputee, which obviously comes with its own set of challenges in getting as far as she has. She’s reached six of the world’s seven summits and came close to crossing Everest off her list in 2019, only to come back again earlier this year. When she returned for her second attempt, she found herself just 200 meters from the south summit before realizing the final leg of her journey was going to be a gamble.
“Everything that I do now is essentially like taking a step with my right leg and then having to match it with my left leg,” she recently told NPR. “So my left leg is locked out at all times. There is no bending. I can only use it to brace or stabilize myself. There is no forward, or actually any kind of, momentum from my left leg whatsoever. And my biggest fear now when I’m out climbing these mountains isn’t dying or running out of oxygen, any of those things. It’s more so getting frostbite on my residual limb just because of the cold transferring so quickly through the aluminum and steel devices.”
And even though Enis says running out of oxygen isn’t her biggest fear, it was clearly a factor in her decision to turn around short of the summit. In harsh conditions on the final 12-hour ascent, she realized she’d be signing herself up for a 24-hour descent. The line to reach the summit is obviously long nowadays, packed with people of all experience levels and circumstances on any given day. Sprinting 200 meters on an open field isn’t exactly like scaling the final 200 meters up Everest, sharing space with dozens of other slow-moving mountaineers, fighting winds and unthinkable cold, and navigating your own exhaustion. It’s been described by plenty of people as a cut-throat environment where you may even be denied something as simple as water by a stranger. Factor in that Enis is an amputee navigating an entirely unique set of challenges, just taking one step at a time toward the summit.
“Everyone was moving at a snail’s pace, some from exhaustion and most because we had no choice but to fall in line,” she wrote. “We inched along the ridge to make our way to the South Summit. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I yelled to Anup through my mask, again and again. A moment of panic took over and in the midst of gasping, I looked up at the line of headlamps; dozens of them not moving.”
She knew she was faced with a tough decision.
“We would run out of oxygen standing in lines and I wasn’t confident that if shit got sideways in line on the summit ridge that I had the right people with me to help me,” she explains. “I made a promise to my loved ones that I would come home and I made a promise to myself that I would go back in tact, so climbing would still be in my future….”
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