For Dr. Bruce Terry, the journey began one morning at breakfast, when his wife, Susan, tossed him a copy of Outside magazine. “She’d read this article about a guy who climbed Mount Rainier and hated it because it was so hard and miserable,” the Wayne-based endodontist recounts.
Susan thought her husband would love it, so she offered the trip as a birthday present. During his six days tackling the 14,410-foot Washington State peak, the 64-year-old dentist “caught the bug” when he was introduced to the idea of the Seven Summits, an extraordinary challenge met by only about 500 people.
Upon his return, he set his sights on Tanzania’s 19,341-foot Mount Kilimanjaro. The climb lasted a week before he returned home and continued training. Weekends often included 50-mile bike rides and long hikes with a weighted pack. As his next trip approached, a climb up Russia’s 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus, training intensified. He spent six hours at a time dragging a tire along the Schuylkill River Trail, waking up in the wee hours so he could spend time with his family during the day.
Terry summited Elbrus in 2010, then tackled Argentina’s 22,838-foot Aconcagua two years later. With the tallest peaks in Africa, South America and Europe crossed off his list, he headed to Alaska in 2014 to face the 20,310-foot arctic behemoth Denali. He survived an unexpected storm, which pinned down his group for almost 24 hours as temperatures plummeted. The next year, Terry reached the 16,024-foot peak of Australasia’s Carstensz Pyramid. In 2016, he completed Antarctica’s 16,050-foot Vinson Massif.
Three years later, Terry found himself at a Nepal base camp looking up at Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world at 29,032 feet. On his trek up, he scaled ridges with 14,000-foot drops on either side, cared for teammates nearing collapse and saw the bodies of recently deceased climbers. “I didn’t let it get into my head that I could slip—that I could have an accident or there could be some sort of act of God,” Terry says. “I just tried not to really think about that.”
At age 58, Terry conquered Everest, joining the elite Seven Summits club. These days, he’s toned it down somewhat, skiing across Antarctica to the South Pole and, most recently, doing the same across the Greenland Ice Cap, covering 375 miles in 30 days with a 170-pound sled.
In November, Terry and his wife are planning a journey to South Georgia Island, where Susan will spend her time birdwatching and her husband will follow the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s failed 1916 expedition that crossed the island overland on its return from Antarctica.
“You learn to figure out how to manage yourself both mentally and physically,” Terry says. “It comes down to controlling your emotions and doing it in a way where you’re not suffering any more than you have to—because there’s a lot of suffering.”
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