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The Color of Everything

A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

Author Cory Richards

Hardcover

$30.00 US

Random House Group | Random House

5.76"W x 8.51"H x 1.19"D | 17 oz | 12 per carton

On sale Jul 09, 2024 | 368 Pages | 9780593596791

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A renowned climber and National Geographic photographer shares his incredible adventures—and the early trauma that drove him to seek such heights.

“An extraordinary memoir of mental illness that reads like a thriller.”—Amy Ellis Nutt, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Becoming Nicole

“In order to escape madness, I will live madly. I will risk my life in order to save it.”

Growing up in the mountains of Utah, Cory Richards was constantly surrounded by the outdoors. His father, a high school teacher and a ski patroller, spent years teaching Richards and his brother how to ski, climb, mountaineer, and survive in the wild. Despite a seemingly idyllic childhood, the Richards home was fraught with violence, grief, and mental illness. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and dropping out of high school, Richards subsumed himself in the worlds of photography and climbing, seeking out the farthest reaches of the world to escape the darkness. Then, in the midst of a wildly successful career in adventure photography, a catastrophic avalanche changed everything, forcing Richards to confront the trauma of his past, evaluate his own mental health, and learn to rewrite his story.

The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: He’s stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark, and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter. But it is also the story of a tumultuous life—a stirring, lyrical memoir that captures the profound musings of an unquiet mind grappling with the meaning of success, the cost of fame and addiction, and whether it is possible to outrun your demons. With exquisite prose and disarming candor, accompanied by stunning photos from his career, Richards excavates the roots of his trauma and shares what it took for him to climb out of it.

“The thrills here are not the very real challenges he faces when scaling some of the major mountains of the world, complete with devastating avalanches and hair-raising escapes. It’s his lifelong challenge of maintaining mental health amidst a diagnosis of bipolar disorder that truly holds the reader’s attention. From panic attacks on Mt. Everest to childhood trauma, Richards embraces and shares it all.”—Parade, Best New July Book Releases

“An extraordinary memoir of mental illness that reads like a thriller. The Color of Everything is filled with brilliance and bravado, breathless in its pace and breathtaking in its consequences. Richards’s story is nothing less than a bullet train into the heart of darkness—and back out again. Readers will be grateful for every one of Richards’s hard-won insights.”—Amy Ellis Nutt, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Becoming Nicole

“In The Color of Everything, Cory Richards, one of the world’s most daring photojournalists, embarks on his ultimate adventure—he explores his danger-filled internal landscape, and does so with bravery, vulnerability, and extraordinary insight, all rendered in gripping, page-turning prose.”—Michael Finkel, best-selling author of The Art Thief and The Stranger in the Woods

“You might recall the look in Cory Richards’s eyes from the selfie he snapped after climbing out of an avalanche in the Himalayas at 26,000 feet, or maybe you remember him from a very public panic attack he suffered on Everest, his name on the front pages of newspapers around the world, or you might know him from his million Instagram followers of his iconic photographs, or you know him as a record-setting, world-class mountaineer. This book will make you laugh, will make you gasp, and is sure to make you happy in indescribable ways.”—Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich? and Sam the Cat and Other Stories

“The truth isn’t often told, it is lived. Cory’s journey, as told through his unique and daring vision, is as close to that truth as one can get. He lived it. I feel every stone under foot, every snow crystal, every piercing breath of cold air, struggling to breathe, as if I were right there with him. This book is as important as anything I’ve read in understanding the mind, the heart, and one’s deepest fears as he invites us on the journey of overcoming adversity through human spirit and triumph.”—Reinaldo Marcus Green, film producer and director of One Love and King Richard

“Cory Richards tells this hard story with the same ferocious intensity, wit, and elegant keenness by which he has made stunning photographs and climbed killer mountains. The combination of risk and aplomb is amazing.”—David Quammen, author of Breathless

“The noted climber and photographer writes about mountains and images—but more, about the mental illness that has dogged his every journey. . . . Love, work, health care: All mingle in this . . . affecting memoir that speaks to resolve and courage in the face of fear.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Cory Richards is an internationally renowned photographer, filmmaker, and author. He is the first and only American to climb one of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in winter. His documentation of the climb and the aftermath of the experience was made into the award-winning documentary COLD and appeared on the cover of the 125th-anniversary issue of National Geographic. Richards is a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, Photographer Fellow, and a two-time recipient of an Explorers Grant. He has photographed twelve feature assignments for the magazine. He has an active speaking career, in which he speaks about conservation, mental health, leadership, and vulnerability. The Color of Everything is his first book. View titles by Cory Richards

1

The past, she is haunted, the future is laced. —Gregory Alan Isakov

It’s December 28, 2010. I wake up in a blue room and panic for a moment because I’ve forgotten where I am. Curtains with delicate floral patterns and tattered hems bend the shadows of iron bars. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, moans though the windows. I brush the curtains aside and the damp air and words of the salāt al-fajr, the dawn prayer, spill in. Islamabad spreads out below me as clumps of dark shapes, interrupted by dots of orange and green. A streetlight. A kitchen window. A barking dog. The soft, sticky sound of tires on wet pavement. Several blocks away, the minaret of a mosque pierces the sky, illuminated against the darkness, and the muezzin calls out from the too-loud, tinny speakers. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate how they compel a quarter of the world to fall to their knees in prayer five times a day.

Six weeks later, on the side of the thirteenth-highest mountain in the world, I’m praying to anyone who might listen and I remember the salāt al-fajr, the first morning in Pakistan, and every morning before it. I’m not religious but this morning I’m being buried alive. I will slowly run out of air and suffocate under the snow. It seems as good a time as any to pray.

They’ll find my body in the spring when my orange down suit emerges from the melting snow and feathers float from the tears. After months of uncertainty, Mom and Dad will finally have closure, and all the fights and fuss and anger we endured together will seem silly compared to my death. I wonder if my eyes will be open or closed and if they will still be blue.

These are my thoughts while dying.

Like my childhood, the avalanche becomes sharp fragments of memory as bits of life’s strata overlap and blur. A cold blast of snow shoved into my open mouth as I gasp for breath. Snow up my nostrils and down my collar. I’m wet and annoyed that I can’t scream because I’m choking. Colorful splinters appear amidst violent flashes of black and white as the weight of my body is sucked deeper into the debris. Down is up. Up is down. Up and down become concepts and concepts are useless in this moment. My joints feel loose and limp in their sockets as fear is replaced by instinct, instinct is replaced by anger, and finally, anger is replaced by resignation. Time dilates and my brain thrashes to make sense of everything. Of anything. One second. One year. A birthday. A date. A bowl of Cheerios. Parking tickets. Song lyrics and books and movies. Faces and things unsaid and words I wish I could unspeak and actions I wish to undo and things I never did, and I remember that I have taxes to pay. I hear Dad say, “Nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes.” Life does flash before my eyes but there is no poetry to it. It’s just Polaroids of a collection of things, emotions, and questions.

My senses expand and blend into a single, encompassing sensation. This is dying. I hear the snow in my mouth and taste blue and smell frozen as everything becomes something different altogether before crashing back into a life unfinished. The fragments get sucked from my brain into a black hole, a singularity. I’m not ready to die. But I am dying and no amount of swimming, no god, and no prayer can save me. I summon all the force I have left and thrust my hand and head and life toward what I hope is the sky. In sha’Allah . . . if God wills . . .

I stop fifteen seconds and lifetimes later. I’m entirely buried aside from one arm extended and shoved under my chin, cocking my head up toward a gray sky. I’m tangled in purple rope as the snow in my mouth melts and tastes like metal and drips down my throat and I drool. My breath comes in jerking, frenzied gasps that move too quickly to fill my lungs. I free my arm and dig around my head and neck and chest, working frantically to free myself from the snow before another avalanche comes. Simone and Denis are dead and buried and I will leave their bodies under the snow and crawl down the valley alone and I will scream.

I thrash and dig and whimper. Another minute passes before I hear Simone, which doesn’t make sense because he’s dead and it’s too soon for a ghost to be talking to me. Ghosts take time to gestate and find their immaterial voice in the material world. Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts—I’m an atheist again. But now the ghost is on top of me and I feel his hands. He’s not a panicked hallucination and says, “Cory, everything is okay.” I’m alive and everything is okay, yet nothing is okay. I hear another voice step back into the world as Denis says, “Simone! I too am okay!” No one is dead.

I untangle my camera and turn it toward my face as I begin to cry. It’s a reflex now. It’s all I know how to do to stop my brain when life is going too fast, when it all becomes too big to understand. I am the snow collapsing on itself and I feel myself breaking into a thousand pieces. Maybe a picture can hold them together. The world is small around me as I kneel in the snow on the edge of my own death and cry tears of shock, pain, and relief.

Forty-seven minutes pass. Frozen sweat and tears hang from my beard in salty globs of ice. My expression is full of confusion and exhaustion and terror. The reflex comes again. I turn the camera on myself and press the shutter five times as I stumble down through the icefall. My legs feel soft. This moment is a single grain of sand and will be suspended forever in the neck of the hourglass of my life. I am at once the same and different as overlapping versions of myself—my life bisected by a great swath of snow.

For those of you who are here for adventure and climbing and pictures, that’s all in here, but this is not a book about that. It is a story of me, and a story about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the brain and the heart: mine and maybe yours. It’s a story of the binaries that draw us to the middle. It is black and white and right and wrong and joy and despair. It is success and failure and madness. It is the before and the after and everything in between.