IN APRIL 2003, I was hiking alone eight miles from the nearest dirt road in Utah's Blue John Canyon, near Canyonlands National Park, when I pulled an 800-pound sandstone boulder down onto my right hand and forearm. The stone pinned me in place for five nights and six days. To survive, I drank my own urine, and then, finally, was able to escape by breaking the bones of my forearm and cutting through the remaining tissue with my El Cheapo multitool, amputating my hand just above the wrist. A highway-patrol helicopter on a search initiated by my mother found me nearly five hours later, bleeding to death on a futile march to my truck. I was saved.

I had a lot of time in the canyon to think about my life. More than anything else, I realized, what sustained me were thoughts of my friends and family—my parents, Donna and Larry, and my sister, Sonja. But I also had the self-knowledge, confidence, and determination I'd cultivated on the winter peaks, and it all came together to help me survive, even when the torture of dehydration, hunger, pain, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia made death the more pleasant option. After struggling through five surgeries and three weeks in the hospital, I was released into the nurturing care of my family.

Throughout the agony and improvements of that summer, my parents and I were amazed at how quickly I was able to relearn everything, from brushing my teeth left-handed to typing, tying my shoes, and driving my stick-shift truck. As much as I cherished that time, after four months living in my parents' TV room, I was ready to get out of Denver and return to the mountains.

It was a bold process to think about mountaineering when I had to rely on 18 pills of narcotics a day just to walk down the grocery-store aisle to pick up even more narcotics. But I sincerely felt that God had given me a new life, complete with the ability to walk in nature, and I missed the high country. Surely, I was content simply to be alive. But I needed the chance to prove to myself that I could regain my self-reliance. So I pushed. First to get off the painkillers, then the IV antibiotics, then to start walking and even running, all in the first month, just because I could.

Curiously, my recovery wasn't the most difficult thing I'd ever laid out for myself. That distinction goes to my decision to leave my engineering career. In the canyon, I realized how proud I was that I'd found the courage to resign, how right I'd been to give up security for adventure. All along in my fourteener project, I'd hoped to be the kind of person whose example stirred others to reach their potential as well. Once my story hit the media, there was astronomically more interest in that message. But I also had critics.

I don't mean the friends who teased, "Make sure you tell someone where you're going," which I've always done when I go solo into the backcountry—except for that one fateful trip. I'm referring, rather, to people who wrote to magazines or anonymously posted messages on online discussion groups or sent me letters saying that because I'd taken what were, in their view, unnecessary risks, I didn't deserve to be rescued from Blue John.

A few chastised me that I obviously hadn't learned my lesson or that I was a bad role model. Now, I'm not going to suggest that everyone should take up solo winter mountaineering. But we all bring risk into our lives, through our choices about how we make a living, how we drive, how we party, and how we eat: It's far riskier to be a McFood-pounding smoker than to climb solo. If it seems that I fill my days with moments that cause my heart to bound, my breath to rush, that's because those are the times I feel most alive.

Had it not been for the fourteeners project, I would not have recovered as quickly as I did. The ten months between my release from the hospital and my first post-accident attempt at a winter fourteener play in my memory like a Rocky comeback montage: At first, it's all I can do to walk out into my parents' backyard. But then the theme song kicks in as I go running up to 8,600 feet on the Incline, a steep abandoned railroad bed on Pikes Peak. Next I'm blazing up Kelso Ridge, on Torreys Peak, my first time soloing above 14,000 feet, and then my friend Jason and I are out traversing five fourteeners in 30 hours. The music climaxes as I cross the finish line of an adventure race in Minnesota, my teammates raising my left hand and my right stump in triumph.

Still, I lived with constant doubts about whether I'd ever be able to venture into the winter wilderness again. My truncated right arm was swollen, weak, and painful; it tingled with the phantom sensation of my hand and was extraordinarily sensitive to pressure. Unlike people born with limb differences, who build up a lifetime of calluses, I knew that if I wanted to climb I would have to do so with a prosthetic. Just after Fourth of July 2003—against the advice of my doctor and prosthetist and certainly to the chagrin of my mom—my friend Rick and I took my brand-new $30,000 myoelectric arm out for a test drive in Castlewood Canyon, southeast of Denver.

State-of-the-art as it was, the device wasn't meant for active outdoor use, and certainly not for rock climbing. But starting on easy crags that morning, I worked my way up to, well, still fairly easy but much longer walls over the next month. The evidence was clear to me: I could climb. The prosthetic, however, needed work. The smooth off-the-shelf hook slipped around on the holds, I scratched the casing to shreds, and the entire thing threatened to slide clean off my arm with the slightest perspiration.

Malcolm Daly, president of the Louisville, Colorado–based gear company Trango and an amputee climber himself, helped me design a more advanced device—consisting of the head of an ice ax mounted onto the end of a rubber-coated prosthetic casing, with a harness system that allows me to hang from the arm. Therapeutic Recreation Systems and Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics built the tool and arm in just a few weeks. Despite the fact that, like all prosthetics, the tool can't provide sensory feedback (I have to see the pick to place it on rock holds) and we hadn't solved the issue of wrist flexibility (imagine climbing in a wrist cast), it performed much better.

But what about skiing? Ice climbing? Snow camping? Most critically, could I self-arrest? With my right side handicapped by a total lack of touch response, flexibility, gripping strength, accuracy, and reaction speed, I was terrified that if I fell, I would die. Time and again, though, I worked through my doubts. That winter I made my first ice climbs, on a frozen waterfall near Ouray, and my first backcountry ski trip, up 13,316-foot North Hayden Peak, near Aspen. I also practiced setting up my tent, cooking on my stove, and packing my pack, paying special attention to tricky tasks like closing zippers.

By late winter 2004, I felt as ready as I'd ever be.