Sometimes, the best lessons and the strongest motivations come from our hardest experiences in life.

Quinn Simons and I met in college in Colorado and became fast friends. We did quite a bit of climbing together over the years. We climbed in the Peruvian Andes in 1996, and went on countless excursions into the Colorado Rockies during our college years.

After graduating from college, I went on to guide nearly full time. In the autumn of 1997, I was hired by International Mountain Guides to co-lead their Cho Oyu climb that year. Quinn, along with his friend Soren Peters and father Tom Simons, planned a trip with a Colorado guide to a rarely climbed, highly technical route on Gurla Mandhata, a high peak in remote west Tibet. Quinn and I planned to meet up after our expeditions in Kathmandu and take motorcycles across Nepal.

Neither of us knew that would never happen.

After returning from Cho Oyu, I was living in Kathmandu and waiting for Quinn, Tom, and Soren to return so we could begin our adventure. Time passed, and no word came. (This was 1997, in the stone age of mountain communications, and the modern conveniences of on-mountain email and phone calls was in its infancy.)

Eventually, I got word from the United States that Quinn and his team had been involved in an accident and were headed back to Kathmandu. I eventually tracked them down at the Annapurna Hotel, right across the street from the CIWEC Clinic, the best care in Kathmandu at the time.

To put it simply, I wasn't at all prepared for what I was about to see. Quinn was gaunt, a ghost of himself. His hands and feet were "Q-tipped" - wrapped up in bandages to protect horribly frostbitten limbs. When we re-wrapped one hand, the extent of the frostbite blew my mind: his once strong fingers had turned to shriveled, hard black appendages barely resembling human flesh. They were, in a word, dead - and Quinn knew it.

The amazing thing was, he was alive. The team had endured catastrophes that would have killed most climbers: raging Himalayan blizzards, feet of snow, faulty equipment leading to dehydration, and a 1,500 foot fall down the mountain, cart wheeling over seracs and crevasses along the way. For Quinn (and Soren, who also suffered severe frostbite), the difficult journey was just beginning.

Frostbite is literally a burn, just one caused by extreme cold rather than extreme heat. Quinn had deep-tissue frostbite on both hands and both feet, all the way down and into the bones. His was, so far as I know, the single worst case of frostbite ever recorded for someone who survived their ordeal.

In the next two years, Quinn would undergo many surgeries. He battled severe staph infections in his recovered tissue. He lost both feet at the ankle, having what is known as a Symes amputation. His doctors had managed to save more of his hands than would have been possible just a few years before, but he nonetheless lost most of his fingers on both hands.