By Brendan Connelly & Matthew Dietz
This story is a part of the Cincinnati’s Storytelling of Journalism project, which represents a collaboration between Northern Kentucky University (NKU) journalism students, the NKU Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Students interviewed seven professional journalist winners and finalists from the Greater Cincinnati SPJ Chapter’s 2021 Excellence in Journalism Awards to create these Nieman Storyboard Annotations-inspired Q&As and story annotations that analyze and celebrate our region’s award-winning works of journalism.
2021 Excellence in Journalism Award: Best Feature Story
Winning Journalist: John Stowell, Cincinnati Magazine
Winning Story: 1,000 feet from the top of the world: Matt Brennan is still trying to climb Mt. Everest
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| Photograph Courtesy of Matt Brennan |
John Stowell never imagined he’d end up in Cincinnati. A graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in journalism, Stowell worked as a reporter in Kokomo, Indiana before working as a press secretary for an Indiana congressman. That job took him to Washington, D.C., where he met members of PSI Energy group. Those members eventually convinced him to become a lobbyist for the company and to open an office in Washington, D.C.
“I went from a reporter to a press secretary to a lobbyist, hence my decline as a human being.” Stowell says with a laugh.
Stowell came to Cincinnati in 1995 after PSI merged with Cincinnati Gas & Electric to form Cinergy. When he retired in 2015, he still had an itch for journalism. As he recounts, he cold-called Jay Stowe, then editor of Cincinnati Magazine, and convinced him to let Stowell freelance for the publication. He also took on the role of adviser for Newswire, the student news organization at Xavier University.
Part of Stowell’s process is that he likes to meet people and paint their stories. He says his inspiration came from watching the Watergate scandal unfold when he was younger.
“It turned me on to the power of the press,” Stowell says,” the ability of the press to ferret out the truth.”
As a freelancer for the magazine, Stowell largely has to come up with his own story ideas. He first heard about Matt Brennan at a community gathering. He says a coworker of Brennan’s mentioned his name and attempts at summiting Mt. Everest. With not much else on his plate, Stowell decided to pursue the story.
What started as a friendly conversation turned into a peek into Brennan’s life. His previous attempts to climb Everest are the driving force behind his quest to conquer the mountain, but also serve as the pinnacle of his misfortune. While preparing for Everest, Brennan also failed to reach the summit of Mt. Rainier in Washington, but those were circumstances beyond his control.
In his ongoing preparation for a third crack at the world’s tallest mountain, Brennan joined forces with Brian Cheripko, a fellow climber who has witnessed his previous pitfalls, and Jen Seger, a Canadian endurance coach who installed a “marathon thinking” process in Brennan’s regimen.
As Stowell puts it, Brennan is “undaunted”. Being on such a short list of climbers is what drives him. He is always looking for the next challenge, however far or near it may be.
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| John Stowell |
Stowell says he had to re-interview all his subjects to gather new material and restructure his story. Through his interviews with Brennan and his companions, Stowell began to realize the story’s true meaning. The two failed attempts were essential to Brennan’s story, but the disappointment they provided as well as the perseverance Brennan gained were the real subject.
NKU students Matthew Dietz and Brendan Connelly asked Stowell about the interviewing techniques he uses when speaking to sources, what he enjoys about writing for an audience in the field of journalism and the unique challenges that he has overcome while writing his story on Matt Brennan. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity and is followed by an annotation of the text.
You have held various positions across different sectors—what brought you back to journalism?
Now, I ended up retiring from Duke about six years ago, and even before I retired, I had started to think a little about what I wanted to do, because I didn’t want to sit in a rocking chair and get old. And journalism was a thing that rekindled my attention, and it really wasn’t anything more than the fact that I like to tell stories, I like to meet people, I like to get to a hidden truth, or if it’s not a truth, a facet of a human being that is interesting to a reader. So, I just cold called the editor of Cincinnati Magazine, he didn’t know who I was. Most of my job had been outside the community, and I said, ‘can I have a cup of coffee with you’, and before I was done with the coffee, I had talked him into giving me a shot, and I wrote my first story about a month or so after that.
This story is written in a narrative/feature style. Did you adapt your interviewing process to accommodate that kind of storytelling or did you just treat it like any other interview?
I think my interviewing style is about the same. You guys have come to this interview with maybe half a dozen questions that you have written out that you thought you were going to ask. I tell my students (at Xavier) to do that, too. When you go to an interview, I say three to five usually, but the key is to listen to what they’re saying and formulate questions based off of that, to listen for detail or memories of in this case, Matt’s case, of the events going up the mountain. So, you want to always be able to keep yourself on track and that’s what I do. I’ll take the essential information I know I want to have, here’s the direction that I want to lead the conversation, so that he will give me more than I can read on the internet about the mountain.
What was your favorite part about writing this story?
I love the interviews. Interviewing him in person, and then I did a second interview with him on Zoom because he’d gone to Florida. And the other people that you’ll notice are in the story, I did those strictly by phone because they live far away. But they were interesting interviews. I think when I sit down to write though, part of the challenge is weaving all of this information together. I enjoy picking and choosing how I’m going to write the story sequentially and the quotes you pick out. What I really like is painting a picture so that the reader almost feels like they’re watching it on TV.
Do you have an approximation of how many different drafts you had before you reached your final story? And how much did the draft change over time?
You would be surprised; I don’t do a lot of rough drafts. I do an outline, to keep me focused and on track, so I am sequential, and I’m not leaving anything out there. Once I write, I let it sit out in the sun for about a day. I finished my story today and I printed it out, so I could scratch on it tomorrow. I also have the best editor in the world called my wife, who also looks at my stuff, and points out any egregious errors or if she is confused. When she’s confused, I know the reader’s going to be confused, but I don’t necessarily rewrite the whole thing. Sometimes I rewrite a paragraph or two.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact your story?
First thing it did was delay the story. That was probably going to go into the May issue, because that was when he was going to be ascending, had there not been COVID, and so we tried to time the story to that. When they closed the mountain, all of a sudden, my story was completely different, and had to take on a completely different tact. So that was probably the most challenging thing, and I had to call him up and get some fresh material, based upon on how he was now feeling about having lost yet again another opportunity to scale the mountain. That was really difficult, because he’s a pretty optimistic guy and very outgoing, talkative, great energy, but that day, it was painful, still painful. So, that was a challenge, to be able to get him to speak.
1,000 feet from the top of the world: Matt Brennan is still trying to climb Mt. Everest
By John Stowell, Cincinnati Magazine
Matt Brennan should be sitting on his patio right now, beer in one hand and cigar in the other, regaling friends with stories of snow, ice, and terror. Of the howling winds, the bottomless drops, and the blinding sunlight. Of the magnificently muscular Sherpas who seem to sprint, rather than scale, the world’s tallest mountain while carrying 80 pounds of gear.
Question: The lead has almost an alternate reality feel to it. Do you think that it sets the article up well, or gives away the plot?
Stowell: What I wanted to convey in the lede is, ‘This is going to be a story about a missed opportunity.’ Something didn’t go right, and I wanted the reader to know that right away. So I’m setting them up for what the story is all about, which isn’t about scaling. It’s about disappointment and perseverance.
But this is not the story of man standing on top of the world. It is, instead, a story of never-give-up grit and stubborn defiance of Murphy’s Law. Perhaps it’s a tale for our times.
When I first interviewed Brennan in mid-February, the COVID-19 pandemic was primarily a worry in Asia. The first U.S. coronavirus death had already happened, but we didn’t know it. Brennan, CEO of Loveland Excavating and Paving, was clearly ready to begin his third attempt to climb Mt. Everest. Mentally ready. Physically ready. And calm, because he’d already tried twice and was forced to turn back. He knew what he was getting himself into.
His first attempt, in 2018, ended when he pulled a groin muscle at the Everest base camp, a makeshift tent city perched at 17,900 feet above sea level. “It caused a hernia, and I had a lot of swelling,” Brennan recalls, looking down as if trying to forget the pain and disillusionment. “I got up to 20,000 feet and was worried about going higher because my leg turned purple. I figured this was no place to be.”
Question: How much time did you spend speaking to Brennan about each attempt in order to incorporate them into the story?
Stowell: I remember this really well. Probably my fault as much as anything, I was asking them out of sequence, and they were getting all jumbled up, and so we spent a lot of time pulling it back apart so that I knew what the first attempt was and what happened in the second.
His second attempt, last year, ended in a long rope line of climbers stuck in stratospheric gridlock just 1,000 feet short of the 29,035-foot summit. The photos of that rock and ice bottleneck went viral, and the stalemated queues contributed to the deaths of several of the 12 mountaineers who died on Everest in 2019.
Brennan was two weeks away from leaving for the Himalayas on March 29 for his third attempt when the host country, Nepal, canceled the May climbing season. His heart was broken, but his head told him it was the right call. With millions of people being infected with a raging virus and more than 100,000 dying here in the U.S., the disappointment of missing out on Everest—again— seemed best to keep to oneself.
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The atmosphere above 26,000 feet is so thin that climbers need oxygen masks. As soon as Brennan took his first breath from the tank, he was on the clock. That’s why climbers call it The Death Zone. You don’t want to run out of oxygen going up—or coming down.
As he stood for hours in that stalled line in May 2019, legs burning from an awkward position on the ice, Brennan’s business mind went into gear. How much oxygen did he have? Not enough, especially after his Sherpa had dropped one of his tanks down the Triangular Face. How tired was he? Bone tired, and there was nowhere to get off his feet. He had fallen well short of the recommended rest period at Camp 4 before starting out for the summit. How fast was the line moving? Inch by inch as the ascenders were mixing with the descenders on a narrow ridge ahead of him.
Question: How did you get the idea to incorporate the questions and answers into the same paragraph? Is that a writing style that you have a lot of experience with?
Stowell: I don’t do this very often, but I think in this particular story, there were a lot of quick questions that a reader anticipated, but you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time with all these details. You don’t want to have so much jargon and if they’re starting to drift, it brings them right back into the story.
He figured—and his fellow climbers agreed—that he was still four hours from the top. And that ridge up ahead? Drops of more than 8,000 feet on each side. It wasn’t a good place for tired legs or a foggy mind.
Question: How much on-your-own research did you have to do to obtain this level of detail, and what kind of questions did you ask?
Stowell: It’s all about Google. I was on so many websites and I picked a lot of websites that had graphics in them to show the mountain from different angles.
“I was pretty sure I could make it to the top, but I was also pretty sure somebody would have to carry me down,” says Brennan, the distaste still evident. “I didn’t want to be one of those guys where it was gonna take four others to get me down. That’s not how I wanted my experience to be.”
One of the guides could see Brennan was struggling. Together, as the wind swirled, they discussed his dwindling options. Brennan thought of his wife and two kids back home in Loveland. He didn’t want to die on that mountain. “I’m within 1,000 feet of the top of the world,” he says, almost in a whisper, “and I’m not afraid to say I just cried.” He turned his back to the dream and began to descend.
Question: This is a very powerful scene. What strategies did you use to be able to get this type of emotion in the interview and connect with the source this way?
Stowell: Well that was the hard part of the interview. He’s kind of a tough guy, he’s probably got two percent body fat, and then it got to that part, and I remember feeling just deflated almost, because it was hard for him to talk about it. I thought it was a powerful scene too.
Back in Kathmandu, deflated and exhausted, Brennan decided he was done. “The grind on your body, both during training and then on the climb, is just so tough,” he says. He figured he had spent four months in a tent over the last year backpacking and climbing other mountains, countless hours training in the gym or on the Little Miami Bike Trail, and he’d now been away from home for two months trying to climb Everest.
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| Photograph Courtesy of Matt Brennan |
In Nepal’s capital, he spent some time reflecting on his trip and analyzing what went wrong. At first, he was simply happy to have made it off of Everest alive. Talking to his family, who had been following along online, gave him a lift. “And then,” he says, laughing, “I got mad.”
Why did an experienced Sherpa mishandle his oxygen tank? Why did he climb so fast from Camp 2 to Camp 3, causing him to “bonk” in his climb to Camp 4 the next day? If he hadn’t been so tired and so slow, he would have gotten to Camp 4 hours earlier, affording him the rest time he so desperately needed. Why had May’s weather been so fierce that it cut the 2019 climbing season almost in half? Everyone was on the mountain at the same time, competing for the same confined space. Traffic moved faster on the Brent Spence Bridge at rush hour, even with one lane closed.
Question: Did this analogy come naturally or from Brennan?
Stowell: He didn’t say that, I did. He talked about the fact that it was completely at a standstill. You try to relate that to your reader. Everybody in this town has been stuck on the Brent Spence Bridge, right?
For a little while, Brennan fell into second-guessing his decision to abandon the climb. Then logic reasserted itself. “I’m thankful that I even had the ability to make that decision,” he admits. “You can get tired enough that you lose all sense of judgment, and that’s where you get into trouble. I’m thankful I never got to that point.”
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When he arrived back in Cincinnati in June 2019, Brennan wasn’t gung-ho to return to the Himalayas. The failure to summit had left him deflated, and he recognized how the long hours of training and the trips themselves had taken time from his family. How could he ask them to sacrifice again? And, at age 58, he wasn’t getting any younger.
Brennan has had an ongoing love affair with mountains since he was 14 and accompanied his sister on a church group visit out west. The Badlands and Mt. Rushmore intrigued him, but the Tetons blew him away. He gradually increased his skill level from hiking to backpacking to rock-climbing, and, not long after graduating from UC, he started leading extremely challenging trips into the Rockies.
After turning 40, Brennan says he wanted a more demanding challenge. A friend turned him on to an alpine climbing class in Washington state that culminated in a two-day trek to the top of 14,411-foot Mt. Rainier, a difficult and dangerous sleeping volcano that’s truly the definition of fire and ice.
As Brennan’s group headed up the mountain, he knew he was where he was supposed to be. He drank in the majesty of the landscape, reveled in its demands on his body, and tensed to the dangers of every step. He was in the moment until his guide’s radio suddenly crackled. “He just yelled, We gotta go, we gotta go,” Brennan remembers, “so we started hauling ass up the Ingraham Wall and I thought, Geez, we’re going awfully fast.” The Ingraham Wall is a two-and-a-half-mile-long towering glacier and the site of Rainier’s worst mountaineering accident when, in 1981, an avalanche killed 11. Typically, climbers trudge carefully through the icefall.
Brennan and his team were the first on the scene where three climbers had fallen into a deep crevasse. One, the experienced guide who was also an ordained minister, was just pulling himself up, and Brennan could see his head pop up from below the ice cliff. The other two, an engaged couple planning to marry on Rainier’s summit, were dangling below on their rope line. Brennan helped pull them up.
When the rescue helicopter arrived, Brennan assumed his group would continue its ascent. “I was mad as hell,” he says, now able to laugh about it. “They said our trip was over, and I thought, Like hell it is. I wasn’t the one who fell.” To add insult to injury, he discovered his expensive new down jacket had been ripped in the rescue.
Question: In this paragraph and above as well, there is great dialogue. How did you go about including that dialogue and finding the best spots for its placement?
Stowell: Well, it’s telling a story and so this is another example of just him trying to get to the top of this mountain, and I thought it was a very interesting story. This one was completely out of his control, someone else had fallen in and he and his group were being good samaritans and they end up getting penalized for it.
Back at base camp, Brennan let the guide company know he wasn’t a satisfied customer. “And they said to me, Well, you can come back anytime, and we won’t charge you,” he recalls. “So, I said, Good, I’ll be back next weekend!” And he was. Brennan flew home to Cincinnati, worked a few days at his business, packed his bags, and returned to Seattle. On the following Saturday, he stood atop Mt. Rainier. The guide company even gave him a new down jacket.
Question: This anecdote sets up Cherpiko’s introduction so well. How did you decide on its inclusion and placement?
Stowell: You can’t let the subject of your story be the only one telling the story. They have a limited perspective even though it’s all about themselves. So I asked him who he had climbed with before and he gave me several names. I picked that one, primarily because he was there for the first disappointment.
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Well, that’s Matt,” Brian Cheripko says of his Everest climbing buddy. “That’s a testament not so much to his physical strength as his mental strength, his fortitude, and his work ethic.” The CEO of a San Diego engineering consulting company, he met Brennan on the 2018 Everest trip. They became instant friends and confidants. When he made it to the top, Cheripko says he felt a “sense of loss” that Brennan wasn’t there with him.
“We were hiking together from the Khumbu Icefall to Camp 1, and he was really struggling with his groin injury,” Cheripko remembers. “We talked about it, and it was just so sad when he realized he wasn’t going to make it.”
Cheripko has followed Brennan’s training regimen ever since, talking or texting with him regularly before the 2019 attempt and in the months leading up to the planned May 2020 expedition. “He works so hard,” says Cheripko. “We talk a lot about the mental game, pacing, and burnout. That’s what’s so hard about losing this trip. You’ve got to pace yourself, and he had. Now he’ll have to start over.”
That’s Jen Segger’s worry, too.
Question: Did you interview others beside Cheripko and Segger?
Stowell: I did not. The only other thing that I did was I went to REI because Matt had mentioned that he was friends with this guy at the Oakley REI and was in mountain climbing. So I wanted to see the equipment for myself that they use when they climb.
The veteran endurance coach from British Columbia might be described as Brennan’s secret weapon. After the 2019 attempt, Brennan decided he needed a new training strategy. He was in great shape, but he’d been in a fog of fatigue at 26,000 feet. What he needed was someone to get him past that last wall. He chose Segger and her specialty in anaerobic training.
Anaerobic training focuses on sudden bursts of energy. Your heart can be racing up to 165 beats a minute for two minutes as you intentionally overexert yourself with quick sprints. It leaves you gasping for air and with burning muscles, just like a mountain does. It also, over time, builds red blood cells, and a reserve bank of those come in handy at 26,000 feet. Brennan trained the last four months of 2019 anaerobically as Segger tracked his heart rate and pace from her home near Vancouver. They spoke by phone or texted almost daily, analyzing the crushing workout regimen and adjusting it occasionally to keep Brennan fresh and the rest of his life manageable. In the weeks leading up to his expected late March departure, Segger moved him to a more traditional aerobic training program to build up his long-term endurance. Brennan, she says, was ready.
“I was gutted,” Segger laments, describing the moment she read Brennan’s March e-mail. “I know what he put into his training, and to see that and then not being able to go?” She lets out a moan. “He was so prepared, but I am really impressed with how fast he’s regrouped and refocused.”
It’s his focus and his desire to get back on the trail that concerns Segger the most. Brennan can’t continue training at the level he was when Nepal closed its 2020 climbing season.
Question: The timeline shifts several times, but always comes back to March 2020. How did Brennan talk about that period of time?
Stowell: That was when the Nepal government made the decision (to close the mountain), and I remember him saying he wasn’t terribly surprised by that. That date is important in the story because that’s kind of where the story ends.
Seventeen hours a week and three days in a row of high intensity training wearing a weighted vest works well in the short term. Over a longer period, it breaks you down physically and mentally. She talks passionately about the need to move Brennan’s state of mind back to what she calls “marathon thinking.” That’s especially important since he can’t make his next attempt until May 2022.
“My daughter is graduating from college next May, and I just won’t miss that,” says Brennan. “It’s a big deal in our family, and we’re really proud of her.”
In the meantime, he has other mountains to assault. Mont Blanc in the French Alps, Switzerland’s iconic Matterhorn, Pakistan’s Broad Peak, Alpamayo in the Andes, and Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia are among the rocks in his above-the-clouds schedule. When Brennan finally stands atop Everest, if he does make it, he will join the most exclusive club of mountaineers on the planet: scalers of the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. That, he says, will keep him going.
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Deflated as he is, Brennan doesn’t consider this year’s cancelled trip to be strike three. He’s just on a different path and still at bat.
The charm of Kathmandu and the broad smiles of the Sherpas beckon him. The allure and danger of the Khumbu Icefall with its shifting crevasses and walls of ice larger than a house thrill him. He looks forward to the glare of the sun off the snow, the deepening blue of the sky, and the crunch of his crampons. He is undaunted by the nighttime trek across the Western Cwm glacial basin and face of Mt. Lhotse. He thinks about that spot just below the Southeast Ridge, where it all ended last year, and how good it will feel to take the first step past it. And then there’s the summit.
How will it feel? He might be surprised, says Cheripko, who reports there were the usual hugs, photos, and gazing at the majestic views of dozens of other formidable ice-capped peaks that shaped the wild landscape below him. It’s still all business, though, because more climbers have died descending than ascending. So, he admits, it wasn’t until a few hours later and out of the Death Zone that he could celebrate. “Then it just hit me, and I was simply overwhelmed with emotion,” he recalls.
Three weeks after an e-mail ended his 2020 quest, Brennan and I speak over Zoom. He’s in Florida for some sun and family time, and his voice still bears the sting of disappointment.
But he’s undaunted, and we talk about this story and how it might look to a reader in July. Will it appear trivial when compared to the disruptions we’ve all experienced in our lives? Will it seem oblivious—or worse, disrespectful—to the pandemic’s brutal toll? Or will readers enjoy a story about fighters who pull themselves off the mat, who face adversity with audacity and don’t give up on their dreams?
I wish I could end the story with a triumphant Matt Brennan standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, bright sun shining off his Ray-Bans, eclipsed only by the smile on his face. I’m looking forward to adding that paragraph in two years.
Question: You used first person in this story, albeit sparingly. How did you make that decision, as well as when to insert yourself?
Stowell: This story had gotten off track, and there was a lot of emotion. And I felt like, almost for the credibility of the story, that I needed to. Reporters aren’t supposed to necessarily bond with their subjects, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I did. But I sort of wanted the reader to think that I had.
