ERIK WEIHENMAYER, LONNIE BEDWELL

Erik Weihenmayer and Lonnie Bedwell

When Erik Weihenmayer decided he wanted to kayak the Colorado River in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, he ran the stretch of river in a motorboat to make sure the goal seemed feasible, then spent six years meticulously developing his skills as a paddler. When Lonnie Bedwell decided he wanted to paddle the Colorado River, he hauled a borrowed kayak across his pasture to his pond, where he practiced his roll 1,500 times. When he got in his kayak at Lee’s Ferry to paddle more than 200 miles of the biggest water in the United States, he had a total of 14 days of white-water experience.

“It's absolutely the embodiment of adventure kayaking,” says Timmy O’Neill, a kayaker, climber, and adaptive sports mentor with Paradox Sports. O'Neill has run the river 14 times and served as backup and support should something go wrong. “The river is immense, and it's so remote. You're not just a couple of hours from the takeout; you could be a couple of weeks away.”

Adventure kayaking doesn’t necessarily mean highly technical kayaking. The biggest rapids on the Colorado don’t exceed Class IV white water—not outrageous for an experienced paddler. It's a river people kayak all the time. But Weihenmayer and Bedwell are both blind.

Weihenmayer, 46, best known as the first blind person to climb Everest and all of the other Seven Summits, lost his vision at age 13 to a disease called juvenile retinoschisis. Bedwell, 49, lost his sight in a hunting accident at age 31, three years to the day after the Navy released him from active duty. Neither of them knew how to kayak before they lost their vision—or before they began preparing to paddle the Grand Canyon.

“I felt like I was getting worked in a washing machine in agitation mode on steroids,” says Bedwell, who lives in Dugger, Indiana, population 908 and not exactly a hotbed for kayaking.

The trip lasted 21 days, between September 7 and 27, and covered 277 miles. The first two and a half weeks went remarkably smoothly. Bedwell navigated the rapids by following a guide in front of him who yelled instructions upstream. Weihenmayer’s two guides followed him, giving him directions via waterproof Bluetooth radios. Both men flipped and rolled back up countless times, but neither swam out of his boat—until day 15, when they hit the most infamous rapid in the Grand Canyon: Lava Falls. As Weihenmayer paddled in, the massive rapid grabbed his boat and flipped it, sending him over the falls upside down, head underwater. He released his kayak skirt and swam to the bottom to avoid getting smashed into a rock, sucked into a hole or trapped by his overturned boat.

The next day, unwilling to accept defeat, Weihenmayer hiked back around to the top of the offending rapid.

“Part of me wanted to just say, ‘No way! Why would I ever go back to that and do that thing again?’” Weihenmayer admits. “I just felt like I had to. Three rolls later, I was upright in my boat at the bottom of the rapid. There was a lot of hugging and crying. Mostly from me,” he laughs.

Weihenmayer and Bedwell originally decided to attempt to paddle the river completely independent of one another. Bedwell had actually kayaked 225 miles of the Grand Canyon in August 2013. Weihenmayer convinced him to run the river again in September 2014.

Bedwell gladly agreed. Despite their differences in approach and background, the two men have one thing decidedly in common—they both want to use their adventures to inspire others to transcend their own barriers.

“When one guy who's blind goes down and kayaks the Grand Canyon, it's easy to write him off as an anomaly: ‘That guy's just crazy.’ But two blind guys doing it, [and] it becomes more of a story about what's possible for a lot of people,” Weihenmayer reasoned. “I could care less whether people climb mountains or kayak, but we're hoping that people look within themselves and say, What am I capable of doing?”