before any adventures for the magazine,

before I was out in Antarctica,

before any of this happened.

I'm gonna start by telling you how cool I was as a kid,

because honestly, I was pretty cool.

I was the first hipster ever, sideways trucker hat.

I was kicking OshKosh B'Gosh, popped collar, the whole deal,

but really, the point of this picture is to show you

that from a very young age, I was in campgrounds

and my brother and I were in campgrounds

and we were always raised to be in campgrounds.

As my parents would have it, they wanted us to go out

from the tiniest age, and go out and experience the world

and push our boundaries and try to understand

what the world was around us,

and that was very important in my family,

so they started us skiing when we were two,

climbing when we were five, and the whole point was

to sort of define our own borders.

This is me in the Wind River Range,

close to where I live now in Bozeman, Montana,

at about, I guess I'm 11, 12 years old.

You know, this is when questioning boundaries

started to take a different turn.

I was a smart kid.

I went to high school two years early

and you know, exploring boundaries took on

a completely different texture at that point,

and what I mean by that is I started exploring

social boundaries rather than physical ones,

and when you're 12 years old in high school

and you're hanging out with 18 year old kids,

you don't have that six years of experience

to prepare you for that, and so honestly,

by the time I was 14 years old,

I was completely dropped out of high school.

My parents sent me to rehab.

I ran away three times, and on the third time,

as they say, the third time is the charm,

my parents gave up, and it's not that they wanted to give up

or I blame them for that, but they said,

"Quite honestly, Cory, we're scared of you.

"We don't know what to do,

"and if you can't abide by our rules,

"then you can't live at home."

So I was 14 and homeless.

I look back on the privilege of education

and I shudder to think what I was thinking,

but that was the decision I made,

but that time period led me to observe

the world from a very curious place.

When I'm on the streets, which was rare,

because oftentimes, my friends helped me

and I wasn't actually sleeping on the streets too much,

but sometimes I was, and when I would see

people picking out of garbage cans,

it took on a different tone to me.

When I myself would have to look for food,

it took on a different tone, and what I mean by that is

I started to see this as closer to our natural state.

That is a forager foraging, and everybody in this room

is actually much further removed

than our evolved trajectory than we like to think.

That forager is far closer to the way we evolved,

and it was that story, that time, seeing people struggle

that actually got me excited about telling bigger stories,

and thank God for my parents because they did start me

climbing so young that it had a gravitational,

or I guess anti-gravitational pull back to it.

Climbing was the thing that got me out of this,

because I came back, I was driven to do something,

and oddly enough, visually

and just in the very nature of it

it's allegorical to human struggle.

It's perfect for telling the story

of what humans are capable of and how much

we can overcome, and not only that.

Visually, it's just stunning, and you can grab people

and you can capture their imaginations

So my early career was all about this.

I would go out and I would take pictures

with really crappy cameras,

and I would try to sell them to companies,

and with that money, I would go on other trips,

and I'd save it and I'd save more

and I'd go on bigger trips

and I'd sell to different companies,

and so that's my whole early career worked,

and for a while, it was very sustaining and I loved it

because I could say I was a professional photographer

and people would really respect me

and I was really proud of myself.

I was kind of proving people wrong at this point.

I was proving everybody that said

I wasn't gonna amount to anything wrong.

I was saying no, I'm gonna amount to something,

and I think a lot of my early career was dedicated to that.

A lot of it was dedicated to making single images,

and I call these single stories, right?

So a single story is an image that you provide

to a company that inspires some sort of inspiration,

that really inspires people to buy raincoats.

I'm a glorified raincoat salesman, which is fine,

or at least, it was okay with me early on,

but I started to see this divergence

between these single image stories that I was hired to tell

and the larger narrative that I was really engaged in,

the things that I really wanted to talk about,

which was not the heroic moment.

It was the absolute opposite; it was the anti-hero moment.

It was the thousand yard stare.

It was my version of conflict photography

in the outdoor space.

I wanted to talk about what it's like to hurt,

what it feels like, and naturally,

as you travel, for those of us

who have had the great privilege of traveling,

the more you travel, the more engaged you become.

You become engaged with culture and you start to grow

a certain sense of compassion, or at least, I did.

This is a picture that I took a very, very long time ago,

but I remember it distinctly because all of a sudden,

after looking at this image back in Huaraz,

coming out of the hills in Peru,

I remember looking at this and thinking,

oh, climbing's kinda dumb, and it's true

because it's a very self-indulgent act

and I realized I needed climbing,

A, because it sustained me,

and B, because it took me to these places,

but the most important thing was the thing

that I had missed to that point.

I was so engaged in my own struggle and telling that story

that I was missing everybody around me,

so culture became a very focal point

in my early development, but again,

I wasn't a photographer of any note at this point.

Nobody was gonna hire me to go tell a cultural story.

I was always gonna be hired to go tell

the story of mountains, and that's okay.

This is a picture of Mount Everest on the left.

The little one in the middle is Lhotse.

In 2010, Conrad Anker, one of our other explorers,

asked if I would go here and install time lapse cameras

on the Khumbu Glacier to monitor deflation,

and it was for Jim Balog's movie, Chasing Ice,

'cause we wanted to look at the impacts of climate change

on the glaciers in the Khumbu region.

Coincidentally, Conrad could kinda sense this.

I mean, Conrad's been a climber for a long time

and he could just see me looking up,

kinda like, I mean the time lapse cameras are cool

but that's really cool.

Like, you know, I wanna go there.

And so we actually finagled, we called down to Kathmandu

and I got a permit to climb Lhotse.

There was no way I was gonna get a permit

to climb Everest at this point; it was too late,

but they got me a permit to climb Lhotse,

and it was unlikely that I was gonna do it.

There was no way, because most people take about eight weeks

and they go up and down and up and down to get acclimatized.

I had been there for three weeks.

I hadn't been higher than base camp,

and you know, I had six days till the summit window,

so people were like, well, good luck, have fun.

You know, go up, don't die.

That's a common theme in my life.

Have fun, don't die.

But I ended up climbing it.

I ended up climbing it in six days,

so a total of three and a half weeks from my house

to the top of the fourth highest mountain in the world,

and that got noticed.

It got noticed by a guy named Simone Moro.

Now, Simone Moro is an Italian climber.

He's known for hard first winter ascents,

and he called me after this climb and he said

in this awesome voice, I'm gonna do it again.

You guys ready?

He talked like this.

I'm not kidding, he calls like this, he said,

"Cory, do you want to go Gasherbrum II?

"Winter time, meet with us."

And I said, "I don't understand what you're saying,

"but I would love to go with you because you're my hero."

Where are we going? Gasherbrum II.

I'm like, okay, that sounds great, where's that?

And he goes, "It's in Pakistan,"

and for those of you who don't know,

there's 14 8,000 meter peaks in the world,

so 14 peaks that are above roughly 26,000 thousand feet,

and nine of them are in Tibet and Nepal,

and five of them are in Pakistan,

and the nine in Tibet and Nepal have all been climbed

or had at this point all been climbed in winter,

but none of the Pakistani 8,000 meter peaks

had ever been climbed in winter

because they're about 600 miles north,

the weather's much more severe,

and a lot of people at this point, I think,

16 expeditions over 26 years had tried and failed.

But here's the thing, I jumped, I leapt before thinking.

I didn't even know any of that.

Likewise, I didn't know that if I did this,

I would be the first American

to climb any 8,000 meter peak in winter,

but of course, I said yes, and all of a sudden, I was here

on the literal, physical border of India and Pakistan,

so that's something to pay attention to.

I remember taking this photo

mostly because I saw it happening.

I knew the sun was gonna crest

and I knew that we're on our summit push here,

so I ran ahead in crampons, that's really hard.

It doesn't look cool, you're like...

I ran and because I ran, I was just so out of breath

that I immediately vomited, and then I get my camera out,

I take my mittens off, I think it's actually minus 50

and I pull it up and I realize I can't take it.

It's frozen, I can't turn it off shutter priority,

so I can't change the shutter speed, I can't do anything,

and it's at a 50th of a second,

which for those of you who don't know, that's very slow

especially when you're just vomited

and you're like trying to do that,

and I took this picture, and that was that.

I knew that moment was special

because I also knew in that moment

that we were very likely gonna summit.

But the summit there was just the beginning.

Like I said, I didn't know I'd be the first American.

I didn't know any of that, and to be fair,

had I known, I don't think it would have been good for me.

I was climbing out of pure joy and I loved it.

As we got to the summit, a storm hit

and on the way down, we were hit by a massive avalanche.

Six days out onto our summit bid, one day,

the last day to base camp, we were hit by an avalanche

and I sent this picture to my mom when we got back