I enjoy a sport called via ferrata. It’s a way of climbing mountains using cable systems and rungs—something halfway between rock climbing and hiking. The Italians invented it, which is why they got to name it. In English, via ferrata means “iron way.”
This summer, I invited four buddies who’d never tried the iron way to the Italian Alps. We landed Friday night, climbed a popular introductory route on Saturday. Then the next morning, I brought them to Via Ferrata Eterna, the longest and second-most technical iron way in all of Italy.
We hiked a steep hill up to the rock face. Then, we climbed into our harnesses, buckled our helmets, and prayed. I checked the weather one last time on my phone. Due to the heat wave across Europe, we had a balmy day ahead, similar to what June was like for us back home in Virginia. No rain forecasted for 11 hours.
“Did you feel that!?”
I put the fastest climber in the lead and made myself the caboose of the climbing train. About an hour into our climb, we had traversed to the back side of the mountain’s spine and found ourselves clipped to the rock thousands of feet above the valley below. Out of nowhere, we heard thunder coming from the other side of the mountain. One of my buddies blurted, “Did you feel that!?” I had. Electricity had shot down the line we were all holding to climb. I maneuvered to a ledge big enough to sit down and pulled out my phone. The radar showed a surprise storm blowing through—moving away from us but dangerously close to us.
We couldn’t go back down the way we’d climbed. The course was designed to be completed only in one direction. There was only one way out. I prayed silently over and over again. I reminded my friends not to rush. Rushing leads to mistakes, and mistakes here came with really big consequences.
At least 15 answered prayers
My prayers were answered, and we climbed in sunshine for the next 4.5 hours. According to my hiking app, we had gained 3,900 vertical feet from the parking lot to the gondola station at the end of the iron way. We would’ve celebrated, but we noticed there were no gondolas arriving or departing from the station. Metal doors had been rolled down and locked to the platform. Every employee access door was closed and locked. We would learn later that the last gondola had descended 53 minutes before we got there.
The five of us were stuck on a mountain 10,000 feet up with almost no food, little water, no camping gear, and no layers to survive a night above a glacier. We surveyed the area and found no trail down from our position.
Fewer options than we wanted
I Googled “Italian version of 911” and called the number. Through a translator, the operator told me the only way down would require ice axes and crampons to cross the ice field made fragile in the heat wave. We had no such gear. She told me all helicopters were occupied. She insisted that we must stay there overnight.
I told the operator that we needed to get off the mountain tonight. She told me to call back in 20 or 30 minutes. I did, and she told me her team hadn’t found a solution and to call back later. I pulled the guys into a huddle, and we prayed. Nobody panicked. The guys found a couple of disposed lighters and some combustible materials. The door to an equipment shed was unlocked. We could at least get out of the wind.
Where do you feel embarrassment in your body?
When I called back at the designated time, the operator asked if anyone was hurt. My pride was bruised, but paramedics can’t treat that. My knee was throbbing; so, I said yes. Anyway, that was the magic word. She told me they were going to impress gondola employees into service and come get us.
A half hour later, I limped up the stairs to the gondola platform as men in neon jackets herded us onto the cable car. On the steep, scenic ride down, the only rescuer who spoke English informed us that we each needed to pay the gondola operators 120 Euros in cash. That was almost three times the cost of a one-way ticket, but we were glad to pay it. We were so happy, in fact, that we asked the rescue team for a photo with them.
A unique exclusivity
I apologized to the fellas. I was exclusively responsible for getting us stuck. But then I pointed out that we paid about 80 extra Euros and two hours of waiting for a story nobody else who vacations in the Dolomites would ever have. “Nobody we know will ever have this story!” I blurted with a huge smile on my face.
I noted that you can’t book an adventure like this from a tour guide. Then I laughed. “Dude. We’re going home with a bigger story than we came for!” That’s saying something. In 72 hours in Italy, we got an aerobatic paraglider flight, a proximity helicopter flight, and 6,000 vertical feet of mountains climbed. Somehow, we’d outdone ourselves, and the story we’ll probably tell the most was the one we didn’t plan on writing.
Making the oligarchs jealous
I’ve participated in epic adventures on every continent—surfing and doing survival training in the Arctic, jumping off buildings and mountains and airplanes, driving race cars, and swimming in dangerous whitewater. I tell those stories a lot. But the bigger stories—the ones I tell with laughter or tears, the ones I tell people almost in disbelief—are the stories I wasn’t trying to write.
So many times in my life I’ve been in the right place at the right time to witness a moment no billionaire can buy and no dictator can demand. I’ve found adventure and beauty where I wasn’t looking. More importantly, redemption found me in ways I couldn’t take credit for. 10-year-old me, 20-year-old me, and even 30-year-old me would hardly believe the life I’ve gotten to live. Some days, I pinch myself. My friends have heard 48-year-old me exclaim, “Can you believe we’re alive for this!?”
Those stories have often cost me a lot of time, money, dignity, or comfort. I have a lot of regrets, but I have even more stories of what grew out of the manure I could not avoid. I don’t know how my life’s grand narrative will end. Heck, I don’t know what challenges wait for me a month from now. But I’m learning to look for the story I can someday tell—tales of what love did or what serendipity showered on me.
The choice to search
We all have that opportunity to look for better, grander endings to the stories being written around us. We can do the hard work of finding beauty where it’s rare and calling it out for others. We can make good on the lessons learned only in failure. Even if only at the margins, we can add color and contrast to the black and white realities we face.
Think about it. The stories we tell the most aren’t about when life went smoothly, when events went exactly as we’d planned.
So, the next time you’re in the middle of a situation going sideways, take a deep breath. Then bolster yourself in this reality: if you look hard enough, you might just see that you’re getting a bigger, better story than you had originally planned.
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