09/10.19After Kirstie Ennis lost her leg in Afghanistan, she climbed some of
the hardest mountains in the world. And she’s just getting started.
By ANNA CALLAGHAN
UN-
STOPPABLE
ADVENTURE
2019
In 2012, Kirstie Ennis was on
her second tour as a helicop-
ter door gunner in Afghanistan
when her chopper crashed. She
lost her left leg, sustained spinal
injuries and brain trauma, and
had extensive facial lacerations.
Four years and 43 surgeries later,
she took her first step. “It was
the moment I knew it was going
to be OK,” she says.
Ennis, now 28, didn’t grow up
as an outdoor athlete; she played
team sports as a kid. But after
her recovery she started climb-
ing, mountain biking, snow-
boarding, and mountaineering
near her home in Glenwood
Springs, Colorado— anything to
get away from hospitals and pain
meds. She spent hours welding
and tinkering with prosthetics
to better suit her increasingly
ambitious goals. In 2017, she
decided to complete the Ex-
plorers Grand Slam (climbing
all Seven Summits and reaching
the North and South Poles), in
addition to swimming the Eng-
lish Channel, biking the 3,084-
mile Great Divide route, and
running a marathon on all seven
continents in seven days. All by- “These endurance feats
aren’t being done by the adap-
tive community, because the prosthetics
don’t exist,” Ennis says. “The design of my
mountain-bike leg took ages before I came
up with a system that worked.” There’s also
a lack of role models, she says. Ennis wants
to fix both problems.
She has already climbed Aconcagua,
Carstensz Pyramid, Mount Elbrus, and Kili-
manjaro. In May, she was on Everest, just
650 feet from the summit when she made
the call to turn around. Her team members
were running out of supplemental oxygen,
and she wasn’t going to leave them behind.
“It wasn’t lining up,” she says, “and there’s
no dollar amount that’s worth death. I’ll
scrape my pennies together and do it again.”