David Breashears 1955-2024

In 1983, I visited David at his rented home in a suburb of Boston. I was a young producer and writer for ABC’s The American Sportsman series, which had recently changed its programming emphasis from hunting and fishing to edge-of-the-world adventures. David showed me into a large, echoey room with the furniture pushed against the walls. The wooden floor was organized into four rows of scraps of paper, numbered 1-45, and by each was a daily allocation of GORP trail mix, headlamp batteries, toiletries, and assorted gear. “You don’t mind if I work as we talk, do you,” David said, “I’m just feeling under the gun.” As we walked through the production details of an upcoming expedition that we hoped would result in the first live video from the summit of Mt. Everest, David took a hand-saw and almost absent-mindedly cut off the handles of a few toothbrushes. I asked if he had something against his dentist. “Oh,” he startled, “no, you don’t want any extra weight at high altitude, everything feels like 10x sea level.”

Exacting, humorless in the task, but full of humor and brightness for life – that was David. We shared the same birthday, became fast friends, and later cofounded Arcturus Motion Pictures. We lapped the world over and over, executing maybe a dozen adventure documentaries that called for David’s unique capacity for risk and restraint.? There are few alpinists, if any, who spent months of their lives every year, for over 40 years, scaling the world’s highest peaks, without succumbing to disfiguring accidents or death. Still, we had fun dealing with the many times things went wrong – pre-GPS, pre-mobile phone, navigating our trips with paper maps, magic markers, and bribes. We took the actress Sally Field (then best known for her TV role in “The Flying Nun”) on a hot air balloon safari to view wildlife in Tanzania. Using a telephone pole climber’s seat harness, we rigged David and his camera to the outside of the wicker gondola so he could get close-ups of Sally and the record-setting balloonist, Ben Abruzzo. The balloon rose too quickly to about 11,000 ft., then fell too fast, amidst high winds, crashing into a pool of somnolent hippos, who burst from the water and scattered like kernels of black rice across the plain. David was covered in mud, hugging his camera to his chest. In the crash, Sally injured her knee and had to be evacuated; she was soon due to begin filming in Texas for the movie, “Places in the Heart.” The next day, as we watched the Land Rover take her away, David stared straight ahead and without missing a beat he said, “You know if we get in trouble for this, I’m going to tell everyone it was your idea.”?

After my documentary years and a few career changes, I coincidentally settled in Boston. David was a regular visitor, the goofball who got down on the floor and wrestled with my three young sons. He even suggested we take the boys to the nearby Bloomingdales at the Chestnut Hill Mall to teach them how to climb a brick wall. The boys jumped up and down with enthusiasm as David, with his wry smile, turned to my wife and said, “ It's not that dangerous, they only fall like three times out of ten.”

David was closed off and directed in ways that allowed him to achieve greatness among his generation of climbers but also caused him hardship. I can't sum up the empty hours we spent together waiting for the rain to stop, for a functionary to stamp our passports, or for our equipment to arrive at a remote airstrip. Our 20s flew by and all of a sudden we were older. In all those hours and years, I learned very little about David from David. Most of it came through our network of close friends who enjoyed a prank on location as much as David did.?

The dysfunction of his early family life made it hard for him to sustain intimate relationships. Women adored him: the rugged dark-featured mountaineer. But nothing seemed to last long. He had a son who gave him new purpose, though the mother took the boy to an island off Seattle and made it hard for David to be a remote father. He could be immensely generous, improving the lives of many Sherpas and their families in Nepal. He sided with them – the happy, under-recognized heroes of Everest, though he never saw himself as a hero. Always he remained under the spell of high places.?

With age, David began to think of the Himalayas in new ways. His Glacier Works conservation project was visually expressive and accessible, as he became convinced that education was critical to tackling climate change.? An avid reader, he never went to college, lectured on leadership for corporations, and liked to hang out with scientists. He did finger pull-ups into his 60s. Over the years as our phone calls became less frequent, I had the terrible feeling of David slipping away, sliding into more isolation. Still, when we spoke, he would quiz me on my fitness regimen, and no matter the answer, he would always conclude with mock disgust, “Obviously you've let yourself go.”

David made it to the summit of Everest in that 1983 expedition, and through grinding hard work and some luck, the show transmitted the first live pictures – live to tape –? from the summit. I hustled back to New York from Katmandu to help with the final edit and write the voiceover. I didn't see David again until he was home from the mountain, an instant climbing celebrity who later won an Emmy Award for his achievement. I asked him what he thought of the show. As always he was immediately self-critical, pointing out tiny flaws in his camera work. But he also said, “You know I'm glad you didn't try to overwrite the summit scene, people need to see it as it is; I mean they're never going there and Everest does a pretty good job of speaking for itself.”

David took me places I never would have gone myself and made me see things I never would have seen for myself. When I think of him, I’m always looking at his back as he is forever out in front of me, walking uphill.?