The Mountaineer Who Hit Rock Bottom on Top of Everest

Cory Richards, the renowned photographer, filmmaker and mountaineer, has just released a memoir, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within, which details a tumultuous childhood, addiction issues and the forces that have driven him to throw himself time and time again at the mercy of some of the planet’s most inhospitable peaks.

Growing up in a middle-class family around Salt Lake City, Richards, now 43, learned to hike, climb and ski with his brother David at his family’s mountain cabin. But things were far from idyllic. Richards’s mother struggled with postpartum depression, Richards himself was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, and violent fights with his brother would more often be met with disinterest from their father rather than any attempts to lay down the law.

Emotionally, Richards lacked both support and acceptance. Diagnosed with depression at the age of 12 and as bipolar at the age of 14, he left an unsupportive home life in search of something more. His journey would see him placed in a psychiatric hospital and 12-step programs while still a teenager.

Throughout all this upheaval, the mountains remained a constant. His climbing career took off in his late twenties when he established a new route on Kwangde Shar (19,990 feet) with German climber Ines Papert. He went on to solo Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak (27,940 feet), before completing the first winter ascent of Gasherbrum II (26,362 feet) on February 4, 2011 alongside Italian climber Simone Moro and Russian-Polish alpinist Denis Urubko. Richards is still the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter.

On the way down from Gasherbrum II, Richards was caught in an avalanche, the very avalanche that opens The Color of Everything in startling color. By this time, Richards’s photography and filmmaking career was already taking off, but it’s the shot of his own face after the avalanche — a terrified visage crusted over with ice — that he may be most remembered for.

He survived. And in 2016, he summited Everest. But it was there, at the top of the world, that Richards says he reached his nadir. “It’s almost poetic to say my low point was literally at the highest point in the world,” he writes. “I had to run to the farthest, most out-there place on the planet to realize that I had to deal with my problems in a real manner.”

Having struggled with addiction for most of his life, he became sober in November 2016. Eight years later, Richards has left climbing behind him and found a new sense of focus, colored by optimism. Richards joined us over Zoom from his home in Salt Lake City to talk about how he climbed to the top of the world — and out of the darkest reaches of his mind.

InsideHook: Cory, your book comes out today. Congratulations. How are you feeling?

Cory Richards: Honestly, dude — it’s 8 a.m., my back hurts, I’m 43 years old and and I have less money in the bank than I thought. But, you know, it’s a great day. I just walked to get my morning coffee and I realized that you have this anticipation of these big moments, that they’re going to be something different, but they’re just so normal. But thank you, man, it is a big day, and it’s a marvelous day because I’m alive and breathing.

At 43, you’ve lived a lot of life. How did you find the process of writing it all?

It was really beautiful at times. It was really painful at times. It was really confronting at times. I noticed, especially early on, that I was writing from a place of very much still being trapped in a story. It’s so easy to just retell the same narrative over and over and over again. So I started to really ask questions: Is that true? Not factually, but is that true in the way you’re communicating it? Is that really how you feel, or is that how you felt? Is that how you still want to feel? I really started to shift and look at those narratives from the perspective of “How can I invite other people into this?”

Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you first experience the mountains?

My parents were both very into the outdoors. My mom started climbing before my dad but my dad was very into skiing. They were very adamant that my brother and I were going to join their lives, so pretty much immediately we were backpacking. Somebody was carrying us and the other person was carrying all this stuff. They put us on skis as soon as we could balance, and we had this deep sense of connection to the mountains, specifically in winter.

As we grew up a little bit, we started climbing. I think my brother was seven, and I was five the first time my dad tied a rope around our waist and threw the other end over a boulder. It wasn’t a serious climb, compared to what kids are doing these days.

By the time I was 11 or 12, I remember having this deep sense of groundedness in that excitement [of being in the mountains]. I was able to quiet what seemed to be a very noisy internal dialogue. These experiences of waking up early and watching the sunrise with my dad and my brother became central to what I would consider a very healthy expression of myself.

You were diagnosed with more than a few conditions as a child. How did you cope with that?

The first diagnosis was depression because I was a smart kid, and then all of a sudden I was basically failing, and then I was completely dropped out of school. By the time I was 14 years old I had already been put in one psychiatric hospital and I was moved into another longer-term treatment program. It was there that I was diagnosed with bipolar II.

The mid ’90s were banner years for diagnosing teenagers with bipolar. Now we see it more as ADHD. Not to say that they’re the same thing, we just see more of a diagnosis sway and they come with a lot of overlapping symptoms, from impulsivity to distractibility, to anger at certain times, and this deep sense of anxiety.

This idea of being somehow sick was so formative to the way I viewed myself, this underlying story of brokenness. The diagnoses themselves are, I think, secondary to the story that kids often pick up in this time frame, which is “I’m fucked up” — and that’s a really hard thing to break out of later in life.

How did you deal with the polarity of being out there in the mountains, living a freer life than many teenagers, but then also in your childhood, you’re in a psychiatric ward?

That’s such a beautiful question because I’ve never really thought about it in those terms, this wild freedom to a profound caging feeling that was incompatible. I think that desire to be free was natural. Nobody likes to be caged. As I reflect now, experiencing this question for the first time, I can see how that might have made it more challenging.

How did climbing help you feel better about yourself?

It’s kind of like doing drugs. Early on, climbing acted in that way where you’re immersed in the activity and there’s a sense of freedom from the burden of daily life. I always joke with my friends that “humaning” is hard. It’s tiresome and it feels at times very, very confusing, because you’re like, “What the fuck is the point of all this?” You know?

In climbing, there was this sense that if I can do those things, then I’m free of all of this baggage. I was so trapped inside my head that at times it would lead me to these deep places of depression, to the point of suicidal ideation. Climbing became a way to step outside of that.

As well as battling addiction, you’ve also said that you’ve found certain drugs to be helpful. Can you expand on that?

The substances that I found to be greatly helpful all fall in the psychedelic space. MDMA is nearly approved for psychiatric use, and I use things like sassafras, which has a very similar effect. I’ve also done psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, all of these things. But I try to be so clear that I’m not doing these things in a recreational setting. I have no judgment around that, but for me, the helpful aspects come from doing them very intentionally, usually in small group settings supervised by a psychiatrist and attending physician.

I say in the book that psychedelics are not a panacea. You don’t do them and have this experience and then everything’s fixed. What’s required is integration, where you’re consistently working on the information that you’re presented with during a psychedelic experience. Information is not healing, you have to work to implement it.

You had a big moment of realization not on psychedelics, but at the summit of Everest. What happened?

Climbing Everest without oxygen and sitting on the summit alone was absolutely a beautiful experience and one in which I felt a great sense of pride. But at the same time, the story that I’d built around it — that there would be some sort of resolution around so much of what was happening in my life and that by climbing Everest I could somehow heal or mend or escape what was so troublesome — wasn’t true. There was no escaping.

I realized then that climbing had to be the end, not the means. I was using climbing to try to unify my mind with my body and I kept climbing because I was so wrapped up in the identity of it, but it became unhealthy because it was pure escapism.

Has quitting climbing to focus on films and writing helped?

I’d be totally full of shit if I said yes. There are days where I feel like my mind is completely disconnected from my body, where I’m thinking in a million directions and I kind of forget that I exist in a physical form.

My friend Katie Arnold just wrote a book about Zen and running, and it parallels this idea that “enlightenment” is a momentary experience and not a place that we arrive at. I meditate, but I love demystifying this idea that I’m going to sit under a Bodhi tree for 40 days and then I’m going to live in bliss forever. I don’t believe that happened to Buddha. I believe there were still discomforts and sometimes I’m guessing he was like, “Yeah, I don’t like this.”

It’s taken you 43 years to write this book. You’ve filmed some documentaries. You’ve made historic ascents. You’ve made iconic photos. Do you think about the legacy of these things?

I’ve never thought in terms of legacy. I got the first hard copy of the book and I opened it up and I was looking at the pictures and there was a sense of them being very separate, of looking back and having a conversation. I know that sounds a little bit metaphysical, but I realized that while our accomplishments can be really beautiful, there’s a common pitfall of mistaking them for value. I really learned that throughout the book.

So I’m genuinely grateful for all the experiences that I’ve had, and I’m also very aware that to rest on that would be ill advised, because it it creates a very shaky foundation. Over time, while they still exist, the relevance of those things becomes less important. If I tie myself to that, that would result in my own relevance feeling less important. This whole practice has been about shifting from sharing for my own benefit to sharing for other people’s benefit. If those accomplishments are meaningful to other people, then job well done.

There’s also an element of of extending gratitude, not just for the highs, but for the lows. Had it not been for the relationship with my brother, had it not been for the the tumultuous childhood, had it not been for all of that, then I certainly wouldn’t be where I am.