On Episode 293 of the Enormocast, I connect with paraclimber Jim Ewing. Jim grew up climbing in the storied days of 1980s North Conway in New Hampshire. In his formative climbing years, Ewing rubbed elbows with the likes of Randy Radcliff, Alison Osius, and Hugh Herr. He didn’t know it while eeking out a dirtbag life in New England, but that early friendship with Herr would become one of the most pivotal relationships of his life. Fast forward decades to Jim family-climbing in Cayman Brac, and a fateful day that resulted in a 60 foot ground fall and a broken body barely clinging to life. Later, while looking for solutions to a painfully destroyed ankle and leg, Jim found himself in the office of his old friend Hugh – now the preeminent inventor of leg prostheses in the world. Hugh laid out the argument for amputation, and Jim started down an experimental path to a better quality of life than he could have ever imagined while being stuffed into an ambulance in the Caribbean.
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