Erik Weihenmayer, age 35 www.touchthetop.com I live in Golden, Colorado  with my beautiful wife, Ellie, and our four-year-old little girl, Emma. I make my living as a speaker, author and climber. I enjoy skiing, mountaineering,  and ice and rock climbing. In 2002, I achieved my seven year quest to climb the "Seven Summits,"  the highest peaks on each of the seven continents, when I stood atop Australia's Mt. Kosciusko drinking Champaign in a fifty mile an hour wind storm. Most of the Champaign wound up on my gore-tex jacket but it still ranked as one of the proudest celebrations of my life. Since I went blind at age 13, I've desired to breathe in as much joy, fulfillment, and accomplishment as humanly possible, to blast through expectations, and to set a good example which would give others courage and hope to pursue their own vision.

After I stood on top of Mt. Everest with my 18 team mates, our climb was designated as one of "Sports Best" by Time Magazine; We got to visit the Oval office and meet the president and I even got to climb the outside rock wall of the Matterhorn ride with Mickey Mouse at Disney Land.

For six years, I was a middle school teacher, until I made the leap into the full-time world of adventuring with the help of great supporters like Mountain Hardwear. In September, I, along with my three team mates, completed the Primal Quest, referred to as the toughest adventure race on the planet - 460 miles through the rugged Sierra Nevada mountain range - 60,000' of elevation gain - no time-outs. We were one of only 42 teams to cross the finish line out of the 80 elite teams that began.

After Everest, I wrote a memoir, Touch the Top of the World, which  became the catalyst for our project in Tibet. The six blind Tibetan teens, who we'll be leading on the expedition, attend Braille Without Borders, a Lhasa-based school and training center.  Sabriye Tenberken, the German founder of the center, read my book to the kids. Said Sabriye, "I Told the children all about your childhood, how you became blind, how you dropped your canes from bridges, how you finally met other blind people, and then how you became confident in wrestling. All of them were  very impressed and They compared your experiences with their own ones. They realized that it doesn't much matter if you are a blind child in Germany, USA, or Tibet; The  experience one has who becomes blind, the embarrassment at first, the confidence which builds up slowly but steadily, the reaction of the sighted world, is probably for every blind person the same."