In 1988, I had the good fortune of taking a leadership course developed and taught by Dan Pryor at Baylor University. During that semester, Pryor introduced his students to the notion of Servant Leadership, a concept coined by Robert Greenleaf after Greenleaf read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East:
The idea of the servant as leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey, probably also Hesse's own journey. The central figure of the story is Leo, who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.
From July 24-28, 2022, Ellie and I climbed Mt. Rainier with the Memphis Rox Summit Team. We started the summit team several years ago with the goal of taking kids from South Memphis to the summit of four progressively more difficult peaks over four years, culminating with Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America.
We intended for Mt. Baker to be the Summit Team’s first objective, but that was cancelled because of COVID. So we pivoted to Mt. Sneffels, which is near Telluride where we live part of the year. The North Face, which is a supporter of Memphis Rox (where I am on the Board), connected us with Andres Marin who is a North Face-sponsored professional climber. Andres graciously agreed to climb Sneffels with us. The whole group was immediately attracted to Andres’s high stoke, his technical ability, and his overall good nature.
The kids who summited Sneffels were all offered a spot to attempt Rainier, the next level up on our list of four objectives. Because climbing a mountain like Rainier requires month of physical preparation, we lost several of our team members, but the ones who remained committed themselves fully to preparing for the climb.
Ellie and I spent a lot of time in Telluride in the winter of 2022 and had the good fortune to do some backcountry skiing with Andres and his partner, Anna Pfaff. We enjoyed getting to know Andres and Anna better and soon we all planned for Anna and Andres to go with us to Rainier.
Unfortunately, Anna suffered severe frostbite climbing Mt. Huntington in Alaska and was not able to join us on Rainier. In the meantime, one of the other Memphis Rox Board members and also a North Face athlete, Conrad Anker, offered to step in for Anna and go to Rainier with us.
So here’s the set up. Our little group from Memphis was about to climb Mt. Rainier with Andres Marin and Conrad Anker. If you are not familiar with these two, you might consider clicking on the links above. Conrad may be the most famous mountaineer in the world and Conrad and Andres have both accomplished many amazing feats in the mountains. But that’s not really the point of this post.
The thing that struck me about being on Rainier with Andres and Conrad is that they served us fully the time we were on Rainier. They melted ice for water, they set up tents, and did countless other things that likely went unnoticed because they were so numerous. But the think that stuck out to me was how they took care of Ellie’s feet.
Ellie began feeling hot spots on her heels during he first hour of the climb to Camp Muir. Andres took her boots off and spent 20 minutes trying to tape them up so that her blisters would not get worse, but they got worse the higher we went. By the time we reached Muir, Ellie had open blisters the size of quarters on each heel.
Throughout the rest of the climb, Andres and Conrad each spent a lot of time trying to clean her feet, make donuts out of sleeping pads, and, in general, do whatever they could to help her mentally and physically so that she could summit. And it worked.
Don’t get me wrong; Andres and Conrad were flawless and as impressive as you would expect in helping us move up to the summit, but it’s their selfless servant leadership for the entire group that I will always remember and strive to emulate.
Conrad Anker pouring water on Ellie’s feet
