A Bay Area woman with degenerative blindness is set to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro with her closest friends as guides in October.
The strenuous feat is expected to be just the latest accomplishment for the never-say-quit Harvard graduate who has learned to snowboard and completed the Boston Marathon
At age 9, Kristie Colton was diagnosed with Stargardt disease — a genetic condition that affects the central portion of the retina and leads to gradual vision loss. School teachers noticed that she was resigned and unresponsive in class as she concealed her vision symptoms as best she could. What began as a subsequent visit to the eye doctor for a pair of glasses ended up becoming a life-altering diagnosis.
“I put a lot of mental energy into trying to hide it, but it did become harder and harder to hide,” said Colton, now a 28-year-old Mountain View resident. “The hard part about degenerative eye disease is you don’t wake up one day and realize ‘Oh, I should use my cane now for the rest of my life.’”
Colton, however, was attracted to athletics from a young age. She joined the National Ability Center in Utah, which specialized in adaptive sports, so that she could learn to snowboard with accommodations.
She would later attend Harvard, where she met Jungyeon Park and Grace Eysenbach, who both participated in the Boston athletic scene. Colton and Park were running partners, and the former trained the latter as a guide for longer routes, with Park acting as a responsive set of eyes. The pair ran the Boston Marathon last year.
“Kristie was the first person that I had met who was blind,” Park said. “She spent like two weeks teaching me how to snowboard, and I became proficient enough to become a guide… We started guiding each other, and then running.”
Colton and Park would later help to establish the Vorden Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate sighted individuals to assist those who are blind, including teaching them to become an athletic guide and offering educational resources to bolster partnerships between blind and sighted people.
“Resources are rather limited on the internet,” Park said. “There’s a lot of nonprofits and resources for blind people to do things a certain way or to learn new things, but there really isn’t a resource for sighted people to become allies.”
At an adaptive sports session early this year, the group made contact with Walt Raineri, a former paralympian in sailing with retitnitus pigmentosa — a hereditary disease that attacks the retinas. A few months later, Raineri invited Colton — and her two friends as guides — to a treacherous weeklong hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro.
“My immediate gut reaction was, ‘No,’” Colton said. “He was just telling us more about the trip, and he gave all these details, and it kind of dawned on us that this is going to be a really once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Eleven blind climbers, each accompanied by one sighted individual — aside from Colton, who has two guides in Park and Eysenbach — will hike to the near-20,000-feet peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania on Raineri’s exhibition. Before the pandemic, around 30,000 people attempted the hike each year with a 66% success rate, including several visually impaired climbers.
To prepare for the climb, Colton and her guides have focused on heavy cardio training. They recently began their first practice hikes.
“I’m still working out how to use my hiking poles to sort of feel the ground, and I think guiding looks really different going uphill versus downhill for me with all the different lighting conditions on the trail,” Colton said. “Grace and I have been working out the kinks there… I’ll be going pretty much every weekend.”
The trip will not only be personally significant, but will also be an opportunity to educate on the condition of blindness, both Park and Eysenbach said.
“One of the things that I have really enjoyed about being a part of guiding Kristie is meeting people who have a spectrum of visual impairments, and encouraging other people to realize that it is such a wide spectrum, and how it affects people is very different,” Eysenbach said.
The group will begin their trip in late September and begin their ascent on Oct. 1, Park said.
Colton said she could not have imagined such a possibility when she sat in school, feigning that she had no answers to teachers’ questions simply because she could not see the board.
“When I was younger, I really didn’t know what my disease was going to lead to in my life… I didn’t know what my life was going to amount to,” Colton said. “I am a 28 -year-old woman who lost her eyesight and yet I get to live independently with some of my best friends… Now these best friends get to go on all kinds of adventures with me, from backpacking the Grand Canyon to running the Boston Marathon, and now Kilimanjaro.”
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