Ben Mattingly, MD, tries to live by the adage, “One should be adventurous and daring, but not reckless.” The challenge is that the line between adventurous and reckless is often paper-thin. Take, for example, his recent expedition to Nepal to summit Mount  Everest. When he arrived at the base camp, he found out three rope-fixing sherpas had just been killed in the famously dangerous Khumbu Icefall. When he began his acclimatization climb, he and his guide kept getting stuck in long lines of fellow climbers, and his feet were on the verge of frostbite. Later, when another climber who was attached to his same fixed line slipped, Dr. Mattingly was also yanked off his feet and slammed into the ice, narrowly avoiding a broken leg. Risks are everywhere, and it’s enough to make anyone second-guess the quest.

Stranded by the excessive crowds of fellow climbers waiting to summit, Dr. Mattingly was considering giving up and turning back toward the base camp. Suddenly, the weather cleared, and his sherpa convinced him to keep going. Resolute, he committed himself to finishing the climb. After six weeks in Nepal, he reached the peak of the highest mountain in the world. Dr. Mattingly checked off the last peak on his quest to climb the Seven Summits and entered an elite club—only about 500 people have achieved this feat since it was conceived in the 1950s.

Starting Small

For Dr. Mattingly, climbing the Seven Summits wasn’t a lifelong goal. His first true adventure started when he and his wife, Jenni, had their first child when he was only 16 years old. This only fueled their desire to succeed and to “prove everyone wrong.” He first cultivated his love of climbing at the Red River Gorge in his home state of Kentucky while in college. They have always managed to incorporate their young children and family into their adventures from the very beginning. By the time he was in medical school, he and Jenni were proud parents of three children, and Dr. Mattingly used to promise his friends, “One day I’m going to travel the whole world.” Dr. Mattingly eventually made good on his promise, and now his children Jared, Adam, and Amber are old enough to join him on his global adventures.

It wasn’t until he started his emergency medicine residency at Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts that he learned all about winter activities and reignited his love for extreme sports. When he had the opportunity to take his family to New Zealand for a year, he found himself teaching for the first wilderness medicine program outside the United States.

“I always loved that stuff, but I didn’t realize I could incorporate it into my professional life,” Dr. Mattingly said. “That was just like heaven for me.” Returning to Baystate Medical Center, he founded the program’s wilderness medicine fellowship.

Wanting to give his fellows unique educational experiences, he started Wild Med Adventures to organize global wilderness medicine trips where attendees could earn CME. “I wanted [our fellows] to be able to go on any trip they could imagine and be able to teach and think about the organizational aspects of an expedition,” Dr. Mattingly said. As his fellowship program and company gained momentum, they branched out into mountain biking, dive medicine, skiing, hunting, and more.

The First Six

It was with his first wilderness medicine fellow, Joseph Schneider, MD, that he reached the first of the Seven Summits, Aconcagua in Argentina, in January 2013. The owner of that expedition company was looking for someone to teach Carstensz Pyramid, the highest peak in Indonesia.

Dr. Mattingly summiting Mount Everest in May 2023. (Click to enlarge.)

“I told him, ‘I’ve never heard of Carstensz Pyramid, but I’ll do it,’” Dr. Mattingly laughed. From there, one thing led to another. While summitting Carstensz in Indonesia in October 2015, he and his wife led a Wild Med Kilimanjaro Expedition and summited Kili in March 2016. On that same trip, they put together a trip to Russia climbing Mt. Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, through contacts on his Indonesia expedition and summited in August of 2016. He also became close friends with Chris Imray, a vascular surgeon and leading frostbite expert, on that 2015 Indonesia climb, and they reconnected to summit Mt. Vinson in Antarctica together along with Ben’s Dad, Bruce, in Jan. 2019.

“At that point I was like, well hell, I’ve done five of them,” Dr. Mattingly remembered.

The only two peaks left to climb were Denali and Everest. At this point in his mountaineering career, Dr. Mattingly’s confidence had grown, and he felt ready for new challenges. He decided he wanted to summit Denali on his own, without professional guides. His first expedition in 2017, was cut short after 30 days of being “crushed by the weather.” Despite an unsuccessful summit, terrible weather, and descending the ridge in a huge snowstorm, Dr. Mattingly said it was “still one of [his] favorite trips.” he remembered. Alaska kept calling, so Dr. Mattingly took his oldest son, his dad, for his second attempt at challenging mountain. They summited in June 2021.

Summiting Denali without a guide became his proudest accomplishment—and remains so even after he finished his Everest climb this year. “We carried all our own food, we packed all our own stuff, we did all our own navigation,” Dr. Mattingly said. “We decided when to go, when not to go, all our own self-rescue stuff. When you’re a team of four, you really have to work together.”

Once he crossed Denali off his list, only Everest remained.

Highs and Lows

True to his “adventurous but not reckless” approach, he promised Jenni that he wouldn’t travel to Nepal until their daughter graduated high school.

They ended up planning a group CME trip to Everest’s base camp for April 2023, and their daughter was able to come along. Jenni and her fellow instructors trekked with Dr. Mattingly to base camp and led the team back to Kathmandu while Dr. Mattingly, his dad Bruce, and a sherpa set off at 1 a.m. for a preliminary climb to Loboche to warm up for his main trek by practicing on Loboche’s ice, rock, and snow formations.

Their trip was fraught from the start. Bruce started with congestion that quickly turned into severe cough and fatigue, so he was unable to reach the summit. While he descended, Dr. Mattingly and the sherpa, Pemba, topped out and returned to meet Bruce at High Camp. They managed to eventually get back to Everest Base Camp, but his dad’s condition was worsening quickly. Dr. Mattingly was really worried.

“At night, his oxygen saturation dropped to 49 percent, and he was blue with severe cough and congestion,” Dr. Mattingly said. “We started antibiotics, steroids, and acetazolamide, and we had back-up oxygen available if things worsened. We contacted Global Rescue, who was amazing at coordinating a helicopter evacuation. However, due to bad weather, we had to spend one more night at base camp.”

With his dad headed back to Kathmandu to recover from his illness, Dr. Mattingly was alone with his thoughts at the base camp. “Is it really worth it?” he asked himself. While he was fueled by his strong desire to climb the highest peak in the world, he was worried about the risks and questioning if he made a selfish decision by placing himself in harm’s way. Normally surrounded by friends and family who were on the adventure with him, the solitary nature of his Everest climb gave him almost too much time to think.

Dr. Mattingly posing on Mount Everest. (Click to enlarge.)

He was saved from his swirling thoughts by a 2 a.m. start to his next acclimatization rotation, a hike to the dangerous Khumbu Icefall. Soon, he realized everything he’d heard about Everest was true: It’s commercialized. It’s overcrowded. After its pandemic pause, too many permits have been issued to too many people, many of whom are unprepared for the difficulty. Waiting in the line of 50 to ascend the first vertical ice fall, Dr. Mattingly’s feet grew dangerously colder, inching toward frostbite. They pressed on, surviving a three-hour delay on the hike due to the excessive crowds. He was this close to turning back, but when sunshine poured over the mountain the next morning, Dr. Mattingly felt fresh energy to tackle the challenges ahead.

Once he completed his acclimatization hike, the next step was to rest at the base camp and wait for a good weather window. The weather worsened, so Dr. Mattingly and Pemba descended another 12 miles down from the base camp for safer waiting. After three days of waiting, they ascended back to the base camp so they’d be ready for the next safe weather window. A few days later, they made a run for it, donning their headlamps and departing for Camp 1 at 2 a.m. to avoid the lines.

They grinded it out, progressing steadily from Camp 2 to Camp 3 while overcoming oxygen shortages and excessive waits. There is only one route with a fixed line that all climbers must share, and the lines were excruciatingly long. It took them so long to get to Camp 4 that they no longer had time to sleep before starting their climb to the final summit.

“This is where being a night owl with no circadian rhythm came in handy,” joked Dr. Mattingly.

Again confronted with a clog of climbers trying to use the same fixed line, Pemba and Dr. Mattingly leaned into the “reckless” side of his philosophy. They took a calculated risk, knowing that standing still in those temperatures is unsafe, and the weather could get treacherous any time. They unclipped from the shared safety line and worked their way around eight to 10 climbers at a time, focusing on moving toward the summit as fast as they could.

“I just love those experiences on the mountain,” Dr. Mattingly said. “You’re not distracted by the noise of society. All you have to worry about is getting from point A to point B.”

When they finally reached point A, a whopping 8,800 meters above sea level, they had the entire South Summit, Hillary Step, and Summit Ridge to themselves. Dr. Mattingly and Pemba took time to soak in the stunning vistas, snapping pictures and resting for 30 minutes before beginning the descent. “I’m only halfway,” Dr. Mattingly told himself. “Be safe and don’t rush.”

Descending the mountain came with its own lows. Another climber slipped while attached to the same fixed line, suddenly pulling Dr. Mattingly off the surface and slamming him back into the hard ice with unexpected force. His knee was in severe pain, but Dr. Mattingly was almost certain that nothing was seriously injured. Still, the journey down became much more painful. (A later MRI showed a medial meniscus tear with bone marrow edema.)

“I couldn’t help but imagine that if I had broken my left leg, I would have died on the mountain,” he said.

Again stuck on the same rope as hundreds of other people, Dr. Mattingly and Pemba were tensely aware that one person could take out a whole group, and they endured a couple of close calls. The downward traffic was brought to a halt as they watched a deceased sherpa’s body being returned down the mountain. It was a gut-twisting reminder that as long as they were on the glacier, they were not out of the woods.

As they inched downward, Pemba’s phone fell out of his pocket, careening 2,000 feet off the side of the mountain and losing all their photos from the summit. He was distraught, but there was nothing they could do but carry on. Dr. Mattingly told Pemba not to worry about the photos because he had nothing to prove. “We enjoyed the summit together, and that is all that matters.”

Days later, after safely traversing the final icefall, relief poured over them as they made it back to the base camp. As Dr. Mattingly called Jenni to let her know he was safe, he celebrated by pouring himself a very cold glass of the Buffalo Trace bourbon he brought from his home state.

The Next Adventure

When you’ve reached the Seven Summits, what do you do next? True to his nature, Dr. Mattingly is not sitting still. To quench his adventurous side, he’s halfway through his pilot license and wants to learn about sailing and dive medicine.

He has a big heart for helping others, so he’s reflecting on how the next third of his career can focus on giving back. He wants to continue to grow his Wild Med Adventures wellness retreats so he can help other physicians and health care clinicians find the same peace he gets from being outdoors. He also wants to use his personal experience as a teen dad to help show at-risk youth that they can accomplish more than they may think.

“I could spend two hours talking to these kids. Most of them just need guidance and confidence and somebody to tell them that they can actually do something with their life, you know?” Dr. Mattingly said. “You could take these kids to Kilimanjaro and show them something they’ve never seen … You can combat like all kinds of things by giving them some other meaning.”

For Dr. Mattingly, the Seven Summits feels like the start of more to come. He’s always been goal-oriented, and his overarching goal is to use his experiences as a father, husband, emergency physician, business owner and extreme adventurer to make a positive impact on others.

“I think you can change people’s lives,” he said. “I really do believe that.”

Jordan Grantham is senior content manager at ACEP.