Large Mouth Bass

You couldn't just meet Dick Bass.  You had to experience him. If he was awake, he was talking...a mile a minute. (and there are great stories about him when he wasn't awake) He had a story or a poem for every occasion...and he was quite a story in himself. The clergyman presiding at his memorial said he could imagine St. Peter, after meeting Dick, turning to God and saying "Are all Texans like this?" Rancher, oilman, ski area developer, adventurer, Dick went after everything he did with a vengeance. Why not the Seven Summits!?

It's hard to say who came up with idea to climb the highest mountain on every continent and call the effort the Seven Summits. But Dick and his cohort Frank Wells, then president of Warner Brothers, decided to tackle that daunting challenge in a big way.

I met them both back in the 80's when they started that journey and now, with Dick's recent passing, the story of their quest will be left to the history books.  Frank took a detour to be president of Walt Disney before he could reach the final summit of Mt. Everest, but Dick kept his eye on the prize. He finally put his name in the record books as the first person to reach the Seven Summits in 1985.

Persistence and tenacity were high on Dick's list of important traits and he wreaked of them. Four times he tackled Mt. Everest before he made it the final jewel and his crown of mountains. I'm personally disappointed and I might say even offended that the New York Times published a major obit, choosing to focus on the "paid assistance of professional climbers" who went with Dick on the Seven Summits adventure.  The majority of those climbers were not paid to be there.  They wanted the opportunity to go places they had never been  Dick and Frank gave the climbers that opportunity, while surrounding themselves with the best, like good leaders do when they tackle an unknown challenge.

Dick's mountaineering achievement has been credited and discredited for the the dramatic rise in guided climbs on the world's highest mountains. But Sir Edmund Hillary and Reinhold Messner were predicting the advent of guided (paid) Everest climbs long before Dick and Frank had their great idea. Governments and guide services both discovered on their own the opportunity to make money from the mountains with encouragement from their clients,

Do not mistake Dick Bass's business success and personal wealth as the reasons for his climbing accomplishments in the mountains of the world.  He took every step on his own.  He scaled every obstacle and avoided every danger to reach his goal under his own power. He earned the Seven Summits. And he did it with heart and soul and his own inspiration.,

When it was over, Dick celebrated as only Dick Bass could. Big Time. At Snowbird. And his partner Frank Wells was right there with him when they walked together to the top of Snowbird's peak. There, several hundred of his closest friends, even the mountain people like us, listened to his stories one more time and afterward the symphony choir echoed "Climb Every Mountain" into the valleys below. Frank was later tragically killed in a helicopter skiing accident but, fortunately, he was able to be there to relish the realization of the dream. It was an amazing celebratory moment in time. Well done and well deserved.

For several years after achieving the Seven Summits, Dick was the oldest person to have climbed Mt. Everest. Finally someone surpassed his record and immediately he began to get ready to win that honor back. During the ensuing years, I spent a lot of time working and playing with Dick at his home in Dallas, at Snowbird and around the world.  A few months ago, he made a special trip to Seattle to add his comments to a film we were working on about uber expedition leader and guide Lou Whittaker. Dick credited Lou with opening the door for him to the mountains of the world that he came to love. We spent the day with him telling stories and he was still planning his next Everest climb and looking for the next $80 million development deal,which he always seemed to be chasing.  He was always moving ahead. "If you never stop, you can't get stuck" he used to say.

At the time of Dick's Seven Summits quest, I formed a group called the First Team made up of interesting and exciting individuals who had all achieved a first in some kind of sports endeavor.  The tag line I coined to describe it was "Records are made to be broken, but a first lasts forever."

My long-time friend Phil Ershler, a member of the First Team who, with his wife Susan, became the first married couple to reach the Seven Summits, went with me to Dick's memorial service in Dallas.
Phil spent more time with Dick on the Seven Summits and Mt. Everest, specifically, than anyone. As we sat in the honored row of "Mountain People" next to his family at the service, we listened closely to one of Dick's best and oldest friends paint a water-colored picture of Dick's life.

In summing up, his friend said he asked Dick which was more important to him, being the oldest person to climb Everest or being the first to reach the Seven Summits. He said that Dick replied without hesitation, '"The Seven Summits, of course, because there can always be somebody older but a first lasts forever." Phil and I just looked at each other and smiled.  Dick is with us and always will be.

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