Two years after Erik's Mt. Everest expedition, he received a very compelling letter from Sabriye Tenberken, an extraordinary blind German woman who had begun a school and training center for blind children in Lhasa, Tibet. Her note described that in Tibet, blindness is seen as a punishment for something a person has done bad in a past life. "People laugh at them and call them blind fools," she wrote. Sabriye began Braille Without Borders after a trip to Tibet where she rode horseback through remote villages and found blind children four years old who hadn't been taught to walk. She now trains more than forty blind students to use long white canes to navigate the chaotic streets of Lhasa, to use computers with voice synthesizers, and to read Braille in three different languages: English, Chinese, and Tibetan. Sabriye actually developed the system for Tibetan Braille herself. Sabriye asked if Erik would consider coming over for a visit, and that was the conception of Climbing Blind, Tibet 2004.

Erik and his Mt. Everest team went to Tibet for two trips, the first to train six of Sabriye's most fit and motivated students, and the second to lead the six teens from age 13 to 19 on a month-long climbing expedition. After a month of pushing through cold and wind, along steep, rocky, and narrow trails, and across jumbled crevassed glaciers, the six blind students, Sabriye, Erik and his Mt. Everest team all stood together at 21,500 feet on the north face of Mt. Everest. Blind kids who were told they had evil spirits inside them, who were tied to beds in dark rooms, who were sold into slavery, ultimately stood higher than any team of blind people in the world. Said Erik, "Strength, courage, and resiliency exist in everyone, but they start as a tiny spark and it's only through facing challenges that they grow and blaze into the force that directs our lives and ultimately creates change in the world."

To learn more about the expedition, click here: www.Climbingblind.org

To learn more about the award winning documentary, BlindSight, including a trailer from the film, click here: www.blindsightthemovie.com

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