Before Hugh Herr was known for creating some of the world’s most advanced prosthetic limbs, he was known as the kid on his way to becoming one of the best rock climbers in the world.
By age 8, “Hugh had scaled a face of the 11,627-foot Mount Temple in southern Alberta,” Eric Adelson wrote in Boston Magazine. Later, he began climbing without a rope, ascending tough climbing routes, some of which no adult had ever done before, according to Adelson. By the time he was a teenager, Herr was one of the top rock climbers on the East Coast, according to Rock and Ice magazine.
In January 1982, Herr, then 17, and a friend, Jeff Batzer, age 20, set out to climb Mount Washington. What began as an ascent in reasonable weather suddenly transformed into a trudge through 100-mile-per-hour winds with an intense minus 110 Fahrenheit windchill, Adelson wrote.
Disorientation caught them, and after Herr took a fall in a river, the two were stranded on the “wilderness side of Mount Washington,” Herr told Jothy Rosenberg in the show “Who Says I Can’t.”
“We survived by building snow caves and hugging each other to stay warm,” he said.
Eventually, the cold took over. “When you’re hypothermic, one cannot think clearly. So even though we were approaching four days, we thought we were still in the same 24-hour day,” Herr told Rosenberg.
Hypothermia gave way to surrender. “We were no longer able to walk. We just gave up all hope and we actually stopped hugging each other to stay warm,” Herr told Rosenberg. “We just reasoned the sooner we die, the better,” he said.
They were eventually discovered by a snowshoer, and that evening they were airlifted to a hospital. Weeks later, Herr lost his legs to frostbite. While the loss of a limb was traumatic, Herr was more upset by the death of a volunteer lost in an avalanche while looking for the boys. Herr said: “That information, along with the whole trauma of the ordeal, was very, very difficult to deal with.”
“That was the No. 1 thing that got him to be so passionate about making a difference,” his sister told Rosenberg.
14 Below
Herr woke up after surgery 14 pounds lighter, missing everything below both knees, Adelson wrote. “A nurse told me that I would be able to walk with these things called artificial legs,” Herr said in a clip from the documentary Ascent.
