qz.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.193.79 Public Scan

Back to summary

URL:
https://qz.com/768289/the-remarkable-story-of-the-google-engineer-who-died-on-everest-in-pursuit-of-the-silicon...
Submission: On September 27 via api (September 27th 2022, 7:11:49 am UTC) from DE — Scanned from DE

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

<form class="IyvZs">
  <p class="nPyFN location-article">📬 <!-- -->Kick off each morning with coffee and the Daily Brief (BYO coffee).</p>
  <div class="BkXFz">
    <div class="iW5ZZ">
      <div class="dfABn">
        <div class="lKoeH">
          <div class="Do40K"><input class="Jou4B email js-bound" type="email" id="email-signup-daily-brief" placeholder="Enter your email" aria-invalid="false" required="" value=""></div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="VrYg4"><button class="lDNd5 jdwCY" type="submit"><span class="LrBRk Jxv67 jdwCY"><span class="LJVmR">Sign me up</span></span></button></div>
  </div>
  <p class="idEYv">By providing your email, you agree to the<!-- --> <a href="https://g-omedia.com/privacy-policy/">Quartz Privacy Policy</a>.</p>
  <div>
    <div class="grecaptcha-badge" data-style="bottomright"
      style="width: 256px; height: 60px; display: block; transition: right 0.3s ease 0s; position: fixed; bottom: 14px; right: -186px; box-shadow: gray 0px 0px 5px; border-radius: 2px; overflow: hidden;">
      <div class="grecaptcha-logo"><iframe title="reCAPTCHA"
          src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/anchor?ar=1&amp;k=6Lev660hAAAAAIzt7I14GL6zH13TG9KjBASBwp6u&amp;co=aHR0cHM6Ly9xei5jb206NDQz&amp;hl=de&amp;v=ovmhLiigaw4D9ujHYlHcKKhP&amp;size=invisible&amp;cb=b5z0mtfy58oy" width="256" height="60"
          role="presentation" name="a-i5pmctukux7z" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation allow-modals allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></div>
      <div class="grecaptcha-error"></div><textarea id="g-recaptcha-response" name="g-recaptcha-response" class="g-recaptcha-response"
        style="width: 250px; height: 40px; border: 1px solid rgb(193, 193, 193); margin: 10px 25px; padding: 0px; resize: none; display: none;"></textarea>
    </div><iframe style="display: none;"></iframe>
  </div>
</form>

Text Content

Skip to navigationSkip to content

* Discover

* Membership
* Emails
* Podcast
* Field Guides
* Presentations
* Latest
* Trending
* Obsessions
* Featured
* Search

Editions

* Quartz
* Quartz at Work
* Quartz Africa
* Quartz India
* Quartz Japan

More from Quartz

* About Quartz
* Careers
* Help center
* Download our app
* Quartz Creative

Follow Quartz

* Facebook
* Twitter
* Instagram
* YouTube
* LinkedIn

*
* Discover
* Latest

*
* Featured

These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. Enjoy!

* Emails

Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every
morning, afternoon, and weekend.

* Become a member
*

FROM ARKANSAS TO EVEREST

THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE GOOGLE ENGINEER WHO DIED ON EVEREST IN PURSUIT OF
THE SILICON VALLEY IDEAL

Marc Fiorito/Gamma Nine
Dan Fredinburg loved Burning Man for its focus on radical self-expression, risk
and adventure.
From our Obsession
Life as Laboratory
*

By Aimee Groth

Journalist, Author, Strategist

Published September 8, 2016Last updated July 21, 2022This article is more than 2
years old.

Black Rock City, Nevada

Just before dawn on Sept. 3, 2015, about 100 people gathered in the middle of
the Nevada desert for a send-off party. It was a black-tie occasion, Burning-Man
style: extravagant feather headdresses, black fishnet tights, white fur coats.
They were there to bid a final farewell to Dan Fredinburg, aged 33, who had died
four months earlier in an avalanche on Mt. Everest, triggered by the earthquake
that killed thousands in Nepal.

He had been there as part of an ambitious, some might say reckless mission: to
get imagery from the summit of Everest for Google Street View, allowing anyone
to see the panorama at the top of the world from within Google Maps. Fredinburg
was head of privacy at Google X, the search giant’s “moonshots” division, and
Everest was his own moonshot. He had narrowly evaded death on his first attempt
to scale the mountain the year before, and had lobbied hard to win
approval for a second expedition.

And it was a group of like-minded thrill-seekers that largely orchestrated his
send-off on the Nevada playa: Summit Series. The invitation-only organization’s
stated mission is to “make no small plans,” and its members—totaling some 10,000
worldwide, though the core group is much smaller—elevate risk-taking above all
else.

Some are based in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, and some at the
group’s headquarters: Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, which its
co-founders purchased for $40 million in 2013. Many are nomadic, embracing a
carefree lifestyle, often fueled by a fortuitous tech IPO or acquisition. But
they always find their way back to one another on the festival circuit, and
Burning Man—a pop-up metropolis and rave in the desert that draws around
70,000 revelers—is one of those central points of reconnection.

When the question “why?” is put before Fredinburg’s family and friends, many
turn it around: “Why not?” In a community of risk takers, his endeavors were the
status quo, something to aspire to. Indeed, far from deterring them, his death
has galvanized Summit’s members to lean even harder into risk. Sitting on a
broken couch at Summit’s Utah headquarters, a lodge overlooking the majestic
Ogden Valley, Jeff Rosenthal, a Summit co-founder, said, “Attracting people like
Dan is the greatest litmus test of whether we’re doing our job.”

Marc Fiorito/Gamma Nine
The Summit community gathered at Google engineer Dan Fredinburg’s memorial
service in Napa Valley. Summit co-founder Jeff Rosenthal is front and center
(red shoes); Ashley Arenson is second from right (black shirt).

THE PATH TO GOOGLE

Alfred Lin is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture firm that has invested in
the most iconic entrepreneurs of our time, including Google co-founders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin and the PayPal Mafia (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin).
He says the very best entrepreneurs, the truly unstoppable ones, all share a
similar trait. “I’ve never met someone who is really well-adjusted who is an
entrepreneur,” Lin explains. “They all have a chip on their shoulder, something
to prove, and they do it.”

Fredinburg certainly had something to prove.

His parents, Paul Fredinburg, a bank appraiser, and Debbi Willis, a nurse,
divorced when their son was young. He spent his school years in Arkansas, just
on the periphery of the Deep South, with his mother and his older sister,
Tricia, and summers with Tricia and their father and stepmother, Cathy, in
Orange County, California.

Fredinburg had a mischievous streak—his mother, he recalled, encouraged him to
“break all the rules”—but his parents knew that he was smart and encouraged him
to apply to the Arkansas School of Mathematics, Sciences and Arts (ASMSA),
funded by Arkansas native President Bill Clinton. The school was his best chance
at a life outside of Arkansas, but he risked getting kicked out for bad
behavior. If not for a compassionate headmaster, his parents say, his life might
have looked very different.

“If he hadn’t graduated from ASMSA he wouldn’t have been accepted to the
University of California system,” says Paul Fredinburg. “If he went back to the
high school he was going to previously, he would have never been admitted.”

At the University of California, Irvine, where he earned a computer science
degree, his friends remember a very Southern Fredinburg—sometimes joking and
playing into the stereotypes of the small-town Southern frat boy, but sometimes
genuinely being one. “I don’t think he knew any different,” says Owen Egan, one
of his fraternity brothers. “I don’t know how much exposure he had to other
people his age at the time.”

But UC Irvine was also where Fredinburg met someone who would turn out to be
the key to his future: Alex Abelin, a student up the coast at Berkeley, whom he
met at a fraternity event in 2002. Abelin would go on to work at Google, and
when the two reconnected at a party a few years later, he recommended
Fredinburg—by then working for Boeing’s Future Combat Systems division—for a
job there.

The sprawling, fast-growing tech giant, which he joined in October 2007, was
arguably the perfect place for someone like Fredinburg to flourish. He was a
skilled engineer; at Boeing he had developed a system to improve the security
network even though he didn’t yet have a security clearance. But he also had a
high emotional intelligence, a rare trait in Silicon Valley. (He never stopped
honing it, either; after his death, his girlfriend Ashley Arenson discovered
stacks of books on human psychology in his bedroom.)

Combined, these two traits made him a powerhouse at hacking Google itself.
Fredinburg got to know all the key players at the company, studying the
organizational chart and determining who had influence where.

“He would know everything about what was going on at Google, from politics to
legal to pop culture,” says Nirdhar “Ninu” Khazanie, a Google product
manager who was to become Fredinburg’s close lieutenant. Says Abelin: “Dan just
knew how to beat systems. He was a master chess player. He knew the flaws and
weaknesses of the people who interviewed him, and used that sixth sense against
them so they felt he had to have a seat at the table. Once he got in, he did
whatever he wanted.”

That included making good use of the “20% time” that Google back then granted
its employees to work on projects outside their core jobs. Paul and Cathy
Fredinburg recall how their son always maxed out his travel budget and found
ways to convince his managers to send him to exotic locations around the world,
trips that he would segue into vacations. When Fredinburg married his college
sweetheart Leslie Eggers in 2010, he negotiated his way to living in Zurich for
a few months, which allowed for an extended European honeymoon.

But as idyllic as the situation seemed, it wasn’t enough to ensure a happy
marriage. Soon after returning to the states, Fredinburg and Eggers separated,
though they never divorced.

“That’s when Dan started [partying hard] and climbing mountains,” recalls
Abelin.

Marc Fiorito/Gamma Nine
Alex Abelin speaking at Fredinburg’s Napa Valley memorial service. Abelin opened
the most important doors in Fredinburg’s life—to Google, to Summit Series, to
the people who would change the course of his life.

SETTING SIGHTS ON EVEREST

In October 2011, Fredinburg—by then one of the early members of Google’s privacy
team—and a few other Googlers trekked to Everest Base Camp. They brought with
them a wide-angle lens camera owned by the Google Street View team, which was
busy capturing images of every road on the planet. The photos turned out to be
good enough to publish.

When he returned from the trip Fredinburg sent an email out to Google’s internal
mountaineering group, asking if anyone wanted to join him on his next adventure.
Only one person showed up to the video-conference: Michele Battelli, a member of
the company’s Enterprise Search Group, who had just returned from a climbing
trip in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in northwest India.

The two had met some years before during an internal startup competition. They
agreed to meet in Argentina in December 2011—less than a month later—to climb
Mt. Aconcagua, one of the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each of the
world’s seven continents. Although they nearly lost their toes, for
fledgling mountaineers they fared well. Fredinburg again brought a Street View
camera, and again the photos turned out well.

Together he and Battelli co-founded a new team, which they called Google
Adventures. Its mission: to scale and capture all Seven Summits for Street View.
The photos from Mt. Aconcagua would be part of a portfolio that the two planned
to use to make the ultimate pitch—asking Google to fund their expedition to
Everest.

First, though, Fredinburg needed some recovery time. Ever since separating from
Eggers he had been operating at an extreme pace—climbing, partying, and
experimenting with recreational drugs—and wanted to get grounded again. He asked
Abelin to join him in doing a “Sober Q1” for the first quarter of 2012. Abelin
agreed, and started inviting Fredinburg to charity galas in New York. At one of
them he introduced Fredinburg to Amanda Slavin, a charismatic young woman who
worked for the events team at Summit Series.

Slavin recalls that Fredinburg was sporting a mohawk. He asked her why she found
value in supporting charity when there were no clear returns. “He was kind of
polarizing,” she says. “He had no real need or want to be a part of it. His mind
was on logistics and engineering.”

And yet, he was open to a new way of seeing things. “I told him that what I
found is that when I do good, more comes back to me,” Slavin says. “A lightbulb
went off for him.”

By summer 2012, Fredinburg was ready for his next adventure. He and Battelli
planned to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro that July—Africa’s highest peak, and the
easiest of the Seven Summits to climb. Fredinburg even invited his younger
half-sister, Megan Ezell, to join them, convincing her that it would be good for
her college application. She agreed, and celebrated with the team by joining in
a dance party once they reached the summit, watching as her brother jumped
around in an orange “Pokey” cartoon character costume.

So when Florian “Flo” Nagl, an online sales manager based in Google’s
Dublin office—and arguably the best mountaineer in the company—sent out a
message through the internal network asking if anyone wanted to join him in
climbing Mt. Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, Fredinburg and Battelli
responded “yes” immediately. “In climbing terms [Kilimanjaro] is not a mountain,
it’s a hike,” says Nagl. “Mt. Elbrus and Aconcagua are different; they require
proper mountaineering. On these two mountains if you make a wrong decision it
can be fatal.”

Two other Googlers also opted in. At the last minute Battelli couldn’t make it,
but the others continued with their plans. In August 2012, after a few days of
partying, instigated by Fredinburg, the four trekked up Elbrus.

It was brutal. One of the Googlers turned around early due to frostbite. For
Fredinburg it was so physically and psychologically grueling that Nagl tied a
leash around him and carried him the last 100 meters to the summit. “He had no
orientation anymore, he was so altitude sick,” recalls Nagl, who is several
inches shorter and has a slimmer frame. “On the summit he sank down. I got the
[StreetView] equipment ready and told him to push the right buttons, and we got
the collection in.”

Fredinburg later joked about the experience on Facebook: “It didn’t feel
badass,” he wrote to a friend. “It felt like I was absolutely going to die.”

But the difficulty didn’t deter him. Instead, he was thrilled to have found such
an experienced mountaineer in Nagl for his Seven Summits quest, and invited him
to join the Google Adventures Team. He, Nagl and Battelli would go on to style
themselves “the Three Musketeers.”

“I’m the project manager,” Fredinburg told Nagl. “I’m the politician. I need
someone on the ground to make sure it becomes a success. If one day we get to
Everest I’ll make it happen, and you make sure we get to the summit.”

The boy from rural Arkansas had come a long way. But he was about to take his
skills to a whole new level. And once again his friend Alex Abelin would be the
one to unlock the door.

DAN 2.0

By the fall of 2012, Amanda Slavin—the Summit events team worker who had found
Fredinburg “polarizing” when they first met—had left Summit to
launch CatalystCreativ and produce events for Tony Hsieh, CEO of the online shoe
store Zappos. As part of his own personal odyssey to reinvent business culture,
Hsieh had launched the Downtown Project, an ambitious effort to revitalize the
area around the Zappos headquarters in downtown Las Vegas.

Hsieh wanted to attract enterprising, entrepreneurially minded people in the
hope that they might contribute or invest in the area in some way. When Slavin
invited Fredinburg to attend a retreat she and Hsieh called Catalyst Week,
starting the week before Thanksgiving, he said yes.

The week involved days of talks followed by nights of partying. The guest list
consisted primarily of members of Summit Series. Invisible Children co-founder
Bobby Bailey danced on stage to The Killers’ “All these things that I’ve done”
as he talked about his organization’s campaign (later much criticized) against
Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Adventure Project co-founder Becky Straw spoke
about her mission to eradicate poverty. Fredinburg talked about patent trolls.
(Google had offered pay bonuses for filing patents and he had filed a number of
them.)

The retreat culminated with an emotionally charged evening hosted by Slavin and
Abelin. As part of a “vulnerability exercise,” attendees were invited to share
their biggest weaknesses, or make a confession. Vulnerability is one of the key
values of Summit Series, which likes to see itself as recognizing
the shortcomings of the Silicon Valley myth. “In the tech space, there’s this
success porn that’s propagated non-stop around unicorns,” says Andrew Horn, a
Summit member and startup founder. “It creates this culture where everyone feels
the need to propagate the image and aura of invincibility. Everyone is scared of
sharing their struggle because they think it’ll alienate friends and investors.”

Fredinburg, however, seemed conflicted. At one point he stood on the threshold,
with one foot inside the room and the other outside in the hallway, scanning the
room. His fraternity brothers happened to be in Vegas and were waiting for him
out on the Strip, but he wanted to see what would happen next.

Finally he made a choice, and stepped forward. “I feel like all of you guys have
this incredible ability to feel all these emotions,” he said, eyes searching the
room. “I have a Tin Man heart. A robot heart.” The engineer in Fredinburg was
always looking for new ways to hack parts of his life, and now he was expressing
a desire to reverse-engineer empathy.

“In that moment when Dan spoke up, I decided I wanted to help that man find his
heart,” says Nyla Rogers, founder of nonprofit Mama Hope. “He was looking for
the biggest hearts that he knew, and he knew that we could help him.”

JOINING THE WOLF PACK

Fredinburg’s gesture sparked an initiation process. He was introduced to the
Summit team and went on a New Year’s trip to Panama. There he met Sophia Bush,
an actress who was one of Summit’s core members. She took to Fredinburg and
invited him to attend one of the young organization’s traditions, Wolf Pack
weekend, in early 2013.

The tradition had begun a year earlier when the Summit founders invited around
50 of their closest friends, including Bush, to board a 737, and flew them to
Eden, Utah. There they brought everyone to the top of Powder Mountain and told
them they were going to buy the land and build a community there. The event’s
guest list included those who were felt to embody the true Summit ethos.

At first, the core group didn’t take well to Fredinburg. “Sophia brings Dan to
Wolf Pack, Wolf Pack is family,” says Sean Carasso, founder of Falling Whistles,
which campaigns for peace in the Congo. “It’s the nearest and dearest, the tried
and true, the compatriots—and she brings Dan. In the beginning we’re like,
‘Who’s this clown?’ He was still so stiff. He was very engineer, very Google.”

But Fredinburg’s relationship with Bush would be transformative. “Sophia
completely changed the trajectory of Dan’s life,” says former Googler Max
Goldstein. “This incredibly powerful, smart woman was madly in love with him and
enabled him to operate at the highest levels of society and business.”
Fredinburg, too, fell hard for Bush, and soon he was appearing on red carpets
and gaining attention from paparazzi.

The relationship also amplified Fredinburg’s pursuit of the Silicon Valley
ideal. Bush introduced him to influential people. She also taught him, friends
say, a skill that would stand him in good stead as he built towards his Everest
expedition: creating compelling story arcs around adventures and connecting them
to social enterprise.

Jordan Strauss/AP
Sophia Bush “completely changed the trajectory of Dan’s life,” says former
Googler Max Goldstein.

Around the same time, Fredinburg began working for Google X. Friends and family
say he didn’t secure the job through the traditional channels of applying for
one, but tailgated an employee into a building where he knew a Google X meeting
was being held. There he pitched the Google X leadership, guided by the
division’s head, Astro Teller, on involving his privacy team in their
operations. (Teller declined to comment.)

However it came about, soon Fredinburg and his team were involved in the
company’s hottest projects: self-driving cars, Project Loon (an attempt to
deliver high-speed Internet to remote regions of the world using a fleet of
balloons), and smart contact lenses (embedded with a wireless chip that
helps diabetics measure their glucose levels).

With his newfound freedom and status, Fredinburg became obsessed with taking
risks and plotting with graphs how he could use his networks. He would often
strategize how to make the “maximum impact possible,” says Wayne Price, a
filmmaker who is documenting the Summit story and met Fredinburg that fateful
week in Las Vegas. His friends called the new phase of his life “Dan 2.0.”

JAILBREAKING

By April 2013, the Google Adventures Team was ready to attempt another of the
Seven Summits. These trips were still on their own dime and vacation time, but
they carried the Street View equipment with them, and a few other Googlers had
joined in. This time the target was Carstensz Pyramid, also known as Puncak
Jaya, located off the coast of West Papua, New Guinea, and Indonesia’s highest
peak.

One of the party, Sara Pelosi, split her elbow on the trek up, and developed a
fever, but she kept pressing on and they reached the summit. On the way down bad
weather caught them. By now Pelosi was dehydrated and in bad shape. To get her
back faster, most of the team opted to take a shortcut and go down through the
Grasberg gold mine inside the mountain. But in the mine, Indonesian security
forces stopped them.

The Googlers were brought to a small jail cell. They explained that they
had taken the shortcut so they could get back faster, but the guards accused
them of trespassing—and worse, carrying drugs, an offense punishable in
Indonesia by the death penalty. They poured out the packets of dry energy mix
the Googlers were carrying and told their captives to drink it so that they
could observe the effects. Then they demanded ransom.

Fredinburg called the one person he knew would come through—Owen Egan, his
fraternity brother from back in the days at UC Irvine. “I need your help,” he
whispered over the phone into Egan’s voicemail. “We’re being held hostage.” He
asked Egan to wire money to a bank in Bali. Egan says it was one of few
times he had ever heard real fear in his friend’s voice.

Egan called Andrew Swerdlow, one of Fredinburg’s closest colleagues at Google,
who arranged the ransom, and they were let go. Friends and family say that
Fredinburg managed to escape the Grasberg mine with a piece of gold, which he
had made into a piece of jewelry for Bush.

But Fredinburg’s friends also say that—notwithstanding Pelosi’s injury—he was
planning to test his luck in the gold mine no matter what. “Dan wanted to get
himself into prison,” says Nagl. “It’s an adventure. He wanted to get captured
for the story.”

He got his story, and the Google Adventures Team got their photos. And by now,
after conquering four of the world’s Seven Summits, they were confident they
could approach Google about funding a mission to Mt. Everest.

They secured funding from the Emerging Markets team. That snowballed into
funding from the Street View team, with matching funds from marketing, to send a
crew of photographers to document the mission. They partnered with International
Mountain Guides (IMG), a Seattle-based adventure-travel company, for their
mission. All told, Google agreed to invest just shy of $1 million to fund their
moonshot.

“Dan loved the politics of Google,” says his friend and fellow engineer Mike
“Doc” North. “For him there were two Everests: One was going out and climbing
Everest, the other was getting Google to pay for him to climb Everest.”

FIRST ATTEMPT AT EVEREST

The Google Adventures Team named their expedition E14, short for “Everest 2014”.
Everything was in place. Then, at Wolf Pack weekend in early 2014, just a few
weeks before their departure, Bush ended her relationship with Fredinburg. He
was devastated.

Friends rallied to help him stay motivated for Everest. He spent the next couple
of weeks at Sean Carasso’s place in Eden, Utah. “Somehow, he managed to get
himself up every morning and carried a large backpack on his shoulders and
climbed to the top of Powder Mountain,” says Carasso. “Every single day for a
month, he did that.”

A week before the trip, Fredinburg joined a group of friends at The Battery, a
club in San Francisco. There he invited Price, the filmmaker, and a few others
to join the first part of the expedition, to Everest Base Camp. Price noticed
that his friend was still in rough shape from the breakup. Yet he agreed and
purchased a ticket for Kathmandu for the following week. “No one else in the
world could have convinced me to do that,” says Price.

Wayne Price/31 Squirrel
Fredinburg playing the traditional Nepalese board game “Tigers & Goats” before
attempting Mt. Everest for the first time in April 2014. Friends describe
Fredinburg as a master game theorist—to the point of wanting to get into prison
in order to see if he could escape.

Fredinburg documented his 2014 climb in a series of Instagram images, many of
which also included a related quote or reflection on the psychology behind the
challenge:

But Google’s well-funded camp became a point of contention with other climbers.
In a tense exchange, one woman in a neighboring camp made it clear to Fredinburg
that her team would start climbing first thing the next morning, before the
Google team. Although he consented, Fredinburg resolved that he wanted to be
first and convinced his colleagues to depart for the Khumbu Icefall, Everest’s
most treacherous zone, in the very early morning. They made their way through
safely and arrived at Camp 1 just after dawn broke on April 17.

The Three Musketeers triumphant in the Khumbu Icefall: Googlers Florian “Flo”
Nagl, Fredinburg and Michele Battelli. They were stranded above the icefall for
three days after the 2014 avalanche.

Fredinburg’s competitiveness may have been unsporting, but it may also
have saved their lives. Had they left the next day, there was a good chance
they would have been caught in the deadliest day in Everest’s history up until
that point. At 6:45am on April 18, 2014, an avalanche swept through just below
the icefall, killing 16 Sherpas who were carrying supplies up for the next group
of climbers.

The Google team, having gone up the day before, were stranded above the icefall
for three days. When they finally returned to Base Camp, Fredinburg infuriated
other climbers by dressing in costume and dancing, as he had on Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Nagl says he was just trying to break the tension.

After the mountain was evacuated Fredinburg went on a 10-day vipassana (silent
meditation retreat) in Nepal. He followed that with a trip to Thailand, where he
partied hard. At a nightclub he created a VIP section in the center of the bar
where he charged guests to enter, and they willingly paid him. “After escaping
death, Dan had this newfound sense of confidence and invincibility,” says Breton
Carasso, Sean’s brother. “Like he was unstoppable.”

REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

Back in the US, newly single and riding on the hubris of defying death,
Fredinburg sought out his close friends Doc North and Max Goldstein. He had
another adventure in mind.

“Dan wanted to go on a trip together somewhere between the Baltics and the
Balkans,” says North, who owns engineering consultancy North Design Labs. “And
he said that we needed to have some social good component around it, so we
created Save The Ice (to bring awareness around climate change). Dan did some
research to come up with the narrative. Around 1550, the Baltics faced the
greatest threat of their time, fending off Ivan the Terrible. The Swedish
Vikings came down through Scandinavia to support them. So we were Americans
coming down from Sweden to fend off the greatest threat of our time: climate
change.” They played the part, dressing in Viking costumes and driving around
Europe in an art car, Burning Man-style, that they had decorated—somewhat
ridiculously—to look like a ship.

North and Fredinburg traveled together often and created a ”reality distortion
field,” as North describes it, an alternate reality where they made up their
story as they went along. ”To be perfectly honest we didn’t really understand
what’s going on,” admits North about the “Save The Ice” mission. “But it doesn’t
mean you can’t do it. Both of us were very comfortable operating in a place
where we didn’t understand what’s going on.” He and Fredinburg had bonded over
that mentality: ”You have to just start doing stuff,” he explains, ”and when
people see it’s working eventually they’ll get behind it.”

That was the approach Fredinburg took in lobbying Google to return to Everest.
Understandably, the company was reluctant to send its employees back after they
had barely escaped death the previous year. When friends and family asked
Fredinburg if he was going, he would tell them “not yet.” In reality, “Dan never
stopped training after the 2014 expedition,” says North. “He would say he was
training for Burning Man.”

Marc Fiorito/Gamma Nine
Fredinburg officiating Mike “Doc” North and Marnie Brumder’s wedding on the
Burning Man playa in August 2014. Fredinburg and North were Burning Man soul
mates; they were as close as brothers.

By fall 2014 the Google Adventures Team had the green light from Street View to
climb Everest again in 2015. The Access & Energy team, which Battelli had joined
as a technical program manager, agreed to contribute funding if the team tested
new wireless technologies at Base Camp. They called the new mission,
naturally, E15.

Before each of their adventures the Three Musketeers would calculate what
they idiosyncratically labeled the MROD, or “Mild Risk Of Death.” The
calculation took into account the number of previous deaths on any particular
mountain, and their causes (accident, natural disaster, etc.). Scaling Everest,
they initially concluded, posed a 5% MROD. For the second expedition they raised
the number slightly, to account for the 2014 avalanche and the increasing
effects of climate change.

Fredinburg continued to operate at a breakneck pace. Ashley Arenson, whom he had
recently started dating, pleaded with him to decline parties and get more sleep.
She was particularly concerned after he stayed up for 48 hours before the Dublin
Web Summit in November 2014, where he sat on a panel to discuss Internet
privacy. ”But you don’t understand, this is training,” he would tell her.

He spent several weekends at Summit’s headquarters in Eden, Utah, and ran with
Marshall Birnbaum, an ultra-marathoner, around the grounds on Saturday mornings.
Once Fredinburg spotted a man carrying logs on a mountain road, so he decided to
find a log, too, and carry it up the mountain.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, weeks before the climb, Street View decided to
withdraw its funding from Google Adventures. Instead of having Googlers go all
the way to the summit, it would have a manager at Base Camp—Sara Pelosi, who had
been on the eventful climb up Carstensz Pyramid—coordinate the Street View
images with Sherpas and mountain guides, who were trained on how to use the
cameras. The Three Musketeers had to find another way.

The Access & Energy team was still willing to send them to Base Camp to test its
wireless devices. But it was only providing partial funding for the expedition.
Fredinburg and Battelli decided to pay the rest, covering their own and Nagl’s
expenses out of their own pockets, and joining a different camp at Base
Camp instead of Google’s expedition with IMG.

That also meant the Three Musketeers were traveling without the Street View
cameras that were the whole reason for the Everest expedition in the first
place. But by that point, it didn’t matter. Everest had become part of
Fredinburg’s identity; he was obsessed. ”There was absolutely nothing stopping
Dan from that mountain,” says Slavin.

Price, the filmmaker, agrees: ”Dan had this almost sick joy telling people about
the Death Zone on Everest, where many people don’t make it. Their bodies
eventually break down. If you rest your muscles for a second you can never get
up. When people asked if he was worried, Dan said no. But you still knew he was
worried.”

In the days before his departure for Nepal, Fredinburg said his goodbyes. He
carried Arenson on his back through the steep streets of San Francisco, training
up until the last minute. She gave him a parting gift with letters of
encouragement from all of his friends to read throughout his journey. Another
night, with North, he picked up a few final items, including toilet paper and
whiskey. (The previous year, to Nagl’s dismay, Fredinburg had put glass bottles
of rum in his climbing shoes to protect them from breakage.)

Sean Carasso was one of the last to see Fredinburg. “Stay safe!” he told
Fredinburg over and over again that night. He texted Fredinburg the message once
again before going to sleep, and woke up to a reply: “Stay strong.” It was the
last time Carasso heard from his friend.

THE FINAL CLIMB

Like any high-functioning startup that has defied death, the Google Adventures
Team went into their 2015 climb with high confidence and an air of
invincibility. Climbing conditions were ideal and the Three Musketeers were all
in peak physical condition. Surviving the avalanche the previous year had only
made them stronger, they felt. At Base Camp, Fredinburg took what was to become
an iconic selfie.

Quartz reporter Svati Narula, who trekked to Base Camp with David Breashears, a
famed mountaineer and filmmaker, met Fredinburg and Battelli over tea and a game
of Tiger & Goats. The two, she recalled, wouldn’t reveal their last names or
their mission for Google.

Around noon on April 25th, Battelli and Fredinburg were looking through
photos in their tent. Suddenly the ground shook and they heard a loud crack
beneath them. “We said to each other, ‘Let’s get out, let’s get out!” says
Battelli. He ran out of the tent and saw Nagl outside. Together they looked up
at what appeared to be a mile-long avalanche of snow and debris coming straight
toward them.

Both jumped into a ditch and covered their heads as the wind blasted them; when
Battelli put his finger into the air, debris cut it like a knife.
Battelli thought Fredinburg was behind him, or maybe had run in the other
direction. Now he surmises that he probably never even made it out of the tent.
“Maybe he lost two seconds grabbing a jacket, grabbing his phone,” says
Battelli. “Those few seconds were fatal for him.”

Once the avalanche had subsided, Battelli and Nagl plodded through the snow to
find their friend lying face-down near a boulder. Battelli slowly turned
Fredinburg around, careful not to aggravate any injuries, and felt for a pulse.
“Dan? Dan?” he said into the eerie calm. Nothing. Fredinburg’s eyes and mouth
were wide open. An Everest doctor walked over and took one look at
Fredinburg. ”He’s gone,” she said, kissing Fredinburg on the forehead. ”That’s
how we die,” says Battelli. “Gasping for our last breath.”

There was nothing else that they could do, so they covered their friend with a
sleeping bag and worked to help others survive. Operating on pure adrenaline,
they couldn’t feel the cold as they dug through the snow with bare hands
to search for other bodies and supplies to help the injured. With Battelli and
Nagl standing next to her, Google’s Pelosi called the Fredinburgs from a
satellite phone to give them the news. She reached Fredinburg’s older sister,
Tricia Curreri. Curreri remembers Pelosi apologizing over and over again.

At dusk the two remaining Musketeers trekked down to Gorak Shep, a village
in the valley, to avoid the risk of aftershocks. Neither could sleep. The
nightmare just played in their minds like movies. Every few minutes they’d turn
to one another:

“Flo, you OK?”

“Yeah. … Michele, you OK?”

“Yeah. … Flo, you OK?”

They continued the same conversation over and over again, until dawn the next
day, when they made their way back to Base Camp.

SEND-OFF ON THE PLAYA

“Can you grab a paint brush and help us?” Courtney Boyd Myers, a Summit staffer,
called over to some young women who were testing bikes still covered in the
previous year’s playa dust. It was a hot evening in August 2015, and the team
was preparing for Burning Man.

It was a large-scale operation: Summit, for all its ambitions, is still at its
heart an events company, and a warehouse near the town center was filled with
supplies for shelter, food, and transportation for many of its members. About a
mile across town, a few of the Summit founders and their friends were working on
an art car in a garage. The double-limousine was designed as a hover board, a
nod to Michael J. Fox’s time travel to 2015 in Back To The Future.

Arenson picked up a brush and began painting the large V-shaped wooden
structures with grey paint. Since Fredinburg’s death in April, she had spent a
lot of time at Eden. Just as the Carasso brothers and the group took care of
Fredinburg after his breakup with Bush, they were now doing the same
for Arenson.

In the aftermath of his death the community has been forced to confront its own
mortality—accepting that making “no small plans” and going to the edge sometimes
means dying. Yet it seems entirely comfortable with that.

“What is 33 years, or 43 years, or 53 years?” asks Abelin, who left Google to
launch Liquid Talent, a startup that supports gig-economy workers. “Dan’s death
was not a tragedy. The real tragedy is in not living.” Adds Slavin, “We all knew
Dan would never make it to a hospital bed. Everyone knew it would be something
like this, but not this soon.”

Rosenthal, the Summit co-founder, told a story about flying in a test plane with
a friend, doing negative-G loops. “If I die like this it’s not going to be
surprising, but a tragedy that will affect my loved ones,” he explained. This
is a tradeoff many Summit members choose to make. “By putting yourself in these
experiences and feeling the edges of life, it made Dan feel alive, and it makes
a lot of us feel alive.”

The following week at Burning Man, Sean Carasso was among those who made the
pilgrimage to Fredinburg’s memorial in the deep playa. His friends drove the art
cars from Utah; he took his motorcycle. “100 mile-per-hour winds, my bike broke
down, I had no food, no water,” he remarked as he approached the art car,
cracking a smile. “The journey made it all worth it.”

As the dawn broke, friends, colleagues, and curious onlookers made their way to
the Disco Space Shuttle, not too far from the Robot Heart theme camp—a place
that held special significance for Fredinburg. For all his outsized adventures,
he once said that the biggest risk he took was to become emotionally
vulnerable—a direct result of his encounter with Summit Series that evening in
Vegas, when he confessed to having a “robot heart.”

The farewell on the desert playa was exactly the sort of send-off he would
have wanted. Before his death he had arranged for his friends to host parties
around the world in his honor should he die—no doubt a sign of hubris, but also
of wanting his friends to celebrate life instead of simply grieving.

The growing party around the Disco Space Shuttle was a strange combination of
both. Many revelers had bloodshot eyes, from a mixture of mourning and
recreational drugs. They passed around bottles of whiskey and danced without
inhibition. North was there with his partner Marnie Brumder; Fredinburg had
married them on the playa a year earlier. They were wearing matching bright
yellow onesies.

North and Brumder mourn Fredinburg in matching onesies at Burning Man in
September 2015, only a year after their friend married them on the playa.

Arenson, wearing black fishnet tights, walked over to a young woman who was
fully covered in a white slip. Arenson took one look and tore the dress off the
woman, revealing only a bra and underwear. Then she christened her with a disco
ball necklace, nodded approvingly, and disappeared back into the crowd.

Arenson has taken it upon herself to carry on Fredinburg’s legacy. She is a
force behind the hashtag #LiveDan, which symbolizes living fearlessly, and is
still going strong more than a year and a half after Fredinburg’s death. Friends
regularly post photos of themselves wearing the navy-blue “Live Dan” T-shirt
with antler ears from places like the Antarctic tundra or atop the Andes.
“Immediately after his death we went on the Inca Trail [to Machu Picchu],” says
Summit member Max Stossel, a social media strategist and storyteller. “We
realized what Dan might have loved about being so high in the air.”

“There is a component that is Icarus,” Rosenthal acknowledged, in the
lodge at Powder Mountain. “Of all of our friends, he was most certain of his
immortality.” Then his voice lifted, buoyed by the thought of his friend on
Everest. “If you asked Dan how he would have liked to have died, he would have
said, ‘Closer to the top.’”

📬 Kick off each morning with coffee and the Daily Brief (BYO coffee).

Sign me up

By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.

Copy

qz.com Open in urlscan Pro 151.101.193.79 Public Scan

Form analysis 1 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

qz.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.193.79 Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM