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Mountain Highs
By Jennifer Maciejewski

Though he competed as a power lifter for 18 years, it was a freak accident during a 1996 cruise-ship game of beach volleyball that changed the course of chiropractor Tom Hyde’s personal and professional life. While diving for a ball, he and a teammate collided, bending Hyde’s left hand back to his forearm and causing massive damage to his wrist.

Until that moment, Hyde had devoted 20 years to building a successful practice focusing on the conservative management of sports injuries. At the beginning of his career, Hyde spent his time adjusting athletes at the local high school where his brother worked as a head coach, showing people at the gym how they could lift more weight by simply improving their technique. Over time, Hyde went on to treat players on the University of Miami’s football team and to serve as chiropractor for the Miami Dolphins. But without the full use of his left wrist, Hyde could no longer perform adjustments, and he sold his practice in 2000.

And since he could no longer competitively lift weights either, Hyde needed to find another athletic endeavor that would push him to his limits. During a five-year stint as a Marine in the 1960s, Hyde climbed Mt. Fuji, in Japan, several times, so he decided to see if he could handle tackling a mountain with one wrist. His first goal? Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania.

Hyde rounded up several chiropractors and chiropractic students to hike with him, and after securing the guide services of Wild Frontiers, the team of seven headed out on their trek up the mountain. “We started off, and the first few days were not bad,” Hyde recalls. “Then somebody got this wild idea that they wanted a little more challenge, so they suggested we go up something called the Western Breach Arrow Glacier. We’re at 16,000-plus feet, we’re absolutely freezing, and nobody can sleep because we’re excited about the summit. Well that first climb, my batteries didn’t work, so I had no headlamp, and it was dark. I didn’t know anything at all about how to protect my water, so my water bottle froze. The energy bars I had were like bricks. You could not bite into them.

“We wound up climbing approximately nine hours of very difficult terrain,” Hyde continues. “I got so sick with altitude sickness that I could not stop vomiting. There’s a point where you don’t cognate well, and I really wanted to jump off and end the misery. I’m a photographer also, and I threw my camera down and my pack down. I didn’t want them. I just wanted to survive and get to the top. You couldn’t go down. It was too difficult to go down that way, so the only option was to continue up. We hit a place that’s about 19,000 feet—the summit is 19,340 feet—but when I got there, I was so sick I couldn’t hold anything down, and I made the decision to go down, along with a young lady who was suffering from cerebral edema; she couldn’t stand up, and she was babbling. I was disappointed that I didn’t make the summit, but I was very happy to be alive.”

While some people would have sworn off the sport after an experience like that, it was only the beginning for Hyde, who has not experienced a bout of altitude sickness since his 1999 Kilimanjaro hike. During the Kilimanjaro ascent, chiropractor Terry Weyman proposed that they climb Aconcagua, Argentina, not just for personal pleasure, but to raise money to fight prostate cancer, which had claimed the life of his father.

Due to Aconcagua’s challenging terrain, Hyde and his teammates had to attend mountaineering school before taking part in what was to be the first of many prostate cancer climbs. The ropes proved tricky for Hyde as he climbed Mt. Rainier, in Washington, for mountaineering school, but he found an alternate method of using them that allowed him to work around his weak wrist. Unfortunately, a hand problem prevented Hyde from reaching the summit, but no one else in his group made it either because they couldn’t get around a huge crevasse.

Zero for two on summits, Hyde headed to Aconcagua for a two-week trek on the mountain. “It’s a long day with a lot of weight on your back—our packs averaged about 65 pounds a piece—and you’re going over rocks and worrying about your balance and sprained ankles,” Hyde says. By the time the group reached 19,000 feet, Hyde and another man had to turn back out of sheer exhaustion. Though Weyman considered giving up as well, he pushed himself to keep going, and he ended up being the only member of the group to reach the summit.

Over the years, Hyde has climbed many more mountains, reaching the summit a dozen times along the way. Although his wife is not an avid hiker and she doesn’t accompany Hyde on his trips, she’s warming to the sport now that the couple owns a cabin that’s located near 20 miles of hiking and biking trails in North Carolina’s mountains.

Despite the dangers, or perhaps because of them, Hyde heads out on as many mountain climbing trips as he can manage each year, both to make a difference in someone else’s life through charitable climbs, and to test his own limits. “With mountain climbing, you have experiences along the way that make you realize just how fragile life is,” says Hyde, who has seen people who are in excellent shape and health come down with cerebral and pulmonary edema and frostbite. “There’s just so much that you have to be aware of on a mountain. There are things at every single turn. You can’t leave your guard down.”

When you climb a mountain, “you’re doing something and going somewhere that not a lot of people go to,” Hyde continues. “It’s one thing to look at a mountain from the bottom. It’s another thing to look at everything below the mountain from the top. You get to see things from a different perspective.”