Kevin Cherilla '91
enthralls audience
with account of
record Everest climb
For more than two hours on Feb. 20, 2002 Kevin Cherilla '91 captivated an audience of over 125 attending Cuyahoga Valley National Park's Lyceum Distinguished Speaker Series with his account of the historic ascent of Mount Everest on May 25, 2001, when his colleague Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind climber to reach the summit.An exercise physiology major and physics minor at Carroll, Cherilla spent 10 years as a teacher and coach at an inner city school in Phoenix -- and had been climbing with Weihenmayer since 1993 -- when he accepted Erik's invitation to join the Everest expedition. One of the key factors for any mountain climb to succeed (the failure rate is about 80 percent) is having an experienced base camp manager, and that's the role Weihenmayer asked Cherilla to fill. At one point the team, confronted with a storm 2,000 feet from the summit, talked of turning back until Cherilla, pouring over satellite weather reports from an oil company based in Houston, assured them the storm would end. "I had 19 lives in my hands," he recalled, but within an hour, the skies cleared, leaving beautiful weather for the team's push to the summit.
Refuting naysayers who spoke out against the expedition before, during and after the climb, Cherilla emphasized that Erik climbed the mountain on his own ability. "He wasn't dragged, carried or short-roped." Having the first blind climber to summit was only one of four records set by the team, which was funded by the National Federation of the Blind: the climb was the most successful ever, with 19 of 21 members reaching the summit; 64-year-old Sherman Bull became the oldest climber to accomplish the feat; and when Brad joined him an hour later they became the first father and son outside of the native Sherpas to stand atop Everest together.