Scott Cutlan is reasonable, capable and supremely fit.
Such being the case, the 48-year-old Evergreen resident’s bid to scale Mount Everest’s forbidding northern flank alone this spring was a reasonable goal. Long before coming within sight of the mountain, however, Cutlan found himself frozen in place by glacial bureaucracy and a wilderness of obstacles and frustrations that might reasonably persuade a reasonable man to find a different goal.
But Scott Cutlan would not be persuaded.
“I was on a path,” he says, simply. “I had to follow it however I could for as long as I could.”
Cutlan’s path to the summit of the peak Tibetans revere as Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Mountains, properly began in 2017. With a successful background in business consulting, in that year he founded the New Reach Foundation, a nonprofit focused on sustainable legacy programs worldwide. The organization’s method, and Cutlan’s personal ideology, stand firm upon what he calls the Seven Pillars, fundamental concepts including purpose, obedience, relationship and joy. Although not a mountain climber, Cutlan recognized the rigors of mountaineering as an effective way to validate his vision.
With an eye for symmetry and face raised toward the sky, he set his sights on the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain on each continent. His wife, Melanie, fully supported his undertaking, and his 14-year-old son, Caiden, was so inspired by it, he joined his father atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Cutlan’s daughter regarded it the way any 17-year-old would. “She thinks it’s cool,” he smiles. But Cutlan’s steady conquest of the storied Seven hit the wall in 2021 as he prepared to climb Mount Everest by the busy southern route from Nepal.
“It was a bad experience,” Cutlan says. “It’s haunted me ever since.”
He found the Base Camp chaotic, corrupt and cutthroat, teeming with glory hounds, opportunists, and dangerously unqualified adventurers who were ready to sacrifice anything, or anyone, for a shot at the summit. Adverse weather conditions in 2021 resulted in extra-perilous climbing conditions, and by the time Cutlan’s ascent window opened, the route had become decidedly deadly. Many climbers, including Cutlan, weren’t willing to subject themselves and their guides to the elevated risk. Many others forged ahead, demanding that their Sherpas get them to the top at any cost.
“They treated the Sherpas as expendable. I didn’t want any part of it. I decided to come back and take the northern route. Everybody likes to summit, but to me the most important thing was to have more pure mountain experience,” he says.
Everest’s northern route is certainly that. It’s also a lot harder, and it’s only accessible from Tibet, making it harder still.
“Tibet is completely controlled by China,” explains Cutlan, “and getting China’s authorization can be very, very challenging.”
China shut Tibet down tight at the outset of the 2020 COVID panic, and only this year announced the northern route reopened for business. Customarily and necessarily, those aspiring to Everest need to start high-altitude acclimating in early April, but Chinese authorities kept them waiting on the doorstep well into May.
With crucial preparation days bleeding away fast, Cutlan retreated to Nepal and started climbing like the entire mission depended on it, which it very much did. Happily, he was able to climb a personal favorite, Ama Dablam, a menacing fang of rock jutting 22,349 feet into the Nepali sky. Not at all happily, while traipsing around the Himalaya, he picked up a serious lung infection.
“I’m asthmatic, and it hit me pretty hard,” he says.
Cutlan was in a Nepalese hospital on May 5 when the Chinese finally granted access to the North Face. Grabbing his authorization papers and a fistful of medication, he hired a helicopter to fly him over the range, coming to rest in the 17,000-foot northern route Base Camp on May 11 with just two weeks to steel himself for the ascent. He wasn’t alone beneath the grand and grim North Face, but nearly so. During the frustrating weeks of China’s dithering, guide company after guide company had abandoned the uncertain north for the reasonable surety of the southern route. Cutlan was one of 12 non-Chinese climbers in residence, all of them save Cutlan attached to guide companies, and only nine of them aiming for the summit. While he’d engaged a logistics outfit to provide material support, Cutlan was very much on his own. If successful, he’d be the first American, and the first self-guided foreigner, to summit Mount Everest from the north since 2019.
But while he’d made it to the mountain, Cutlan’s path remained precarious. His physical preparation incomplete, he trekked high onto the precipitous North Col. The reasonable course would have been to trek back down and begin a new ascent, a grueling conditioning process called rotation. But with weather reports hinting at the approach of bad weather, he remained there for three days, alone in a tent perched at 23,000 feet.
“I needed time at altitude, and if I came down and the weather closed in, I could get stuck there. I know a lot of people would say what I did was stupid, but I made the decision to stay based on experience and known variables. It was the only way to stay on my path,” he says.
Cutlan was joined at the advanced base camp by a crushing and persistent headache, and at 27,230-foot Camp III by the Sherpa who would have his back during the final push. May 21 dawned bright and promising, a very good day to break for the peak. Cutlan and his Western colleagues spent that day idling restlessly in camp. They spent the 22nd on their heels, too.
“By law, nobody’s allowed to summit before the Chinese teams,” Cutlan says. “The 21st and the 22nd were for them.”
Early on the morning of May 23, Scott Cutlan trudged to that place where the Earth first meets the sky. It was for him a triumph of dogged persistence, of reasoned resilience, of fidelity to his path and to the pillars that guide his steps. He had scaled Mount Everest, but the mountain wasn’t done with him yet.
Waiting until the 23rd to summit meant coming down in a storm. Maneuvering carefully down the knife-edged North Ridge, he lost one of his crampons in the fast-accumulating snow.
“It was a bad moment,” Cutlan remembers. “Without that crampon, I had basically no chance of getting down alive.”
His Sherpa instantly handed over one of his own crampons and told Cutlan to keep going. It was a humbling sacrifice, but one Cutlan couldn’t possibly accept. “I told him I wasn’t going down without him. Luckily, we were able to find my crampon.”
Descending triumphant, he would see his most desperate hours on Everest in the relative safety of 25,300-foot Camp II. His lung infection had come roaring back and his med kit was thousands of vertical feet below.
“I was in serious trouble and I knew it,” he says.
All but helpless in his tent, he picked up the radio and sent an S.O.S to distant Base Camp. His call was heard, and a porter was dispatched with the med kit and supplemental oxygen. It was a near thing, but Cutlan rebounded quickly and was able to proceed the following morning.
He’s home now, safe and sound at 7,800 feet and sorting out the events of the previous two months. Endeavors of that scope often reveal truths of equal scale, and he’s bound to learn them all. He’s sharing them in a book he’s written titled “Unreasonable.” Not coincidentally, the value of judicious unreasonableness is one of the lessons he brought back from the top of the world. Cutlan doesn’t advocate for the stubborn, the rash or the contrary, instead exploring the benefits, personal and professional, of daring unconventional solutions to problems that defy accepted wisdom.
“It’s about calmly accepting all challenges, about the willingness to sacrifice to achieve a goal, and about knowing when to pivot. In Nepal and Tibet I was constantly forced to pivot, but I never lost sight of my path. Some things are non-negotiable, and it’s important to know what they are before you go after your goals.”
