This story appears in the March 22, 2015 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Eighteen inches of rope once kept Wes Edens from plummeting 800 feet to his death.
The New York hedge fund manager and Milwaukee Bucks co-owner grew up scaling mountains near his family's Montana ranch.
He gave it up after college--but four years ago, with his youngest child about to turn 13, he climbed Grand Teton, the highest peak in Wyoming. "I was established enough that I didn't have to worry about getting killed on a mountain and having a bunch of kids left behind."
Having mastered Teton, he conquered the Matterhorn in Switzerland. In August 2013, though, he nearly slipped into a fatal free fall while rappelling Pingora Peak, a 12,000-footer in Wyoming's Wind River Range. During his descent, Edens spotted a ledge beneath him and broke two cardinal mountaineering rules: Never go past your guide and never be close to the end of your rope. He came to a halt with just a bit of slack to spare. "If I had kept going to the ledge, I would have come off," he says. "I had trouble sleeping for a while."
Mounting Grand Teton (Courtesy of Wes Edens)
That didn't curb his high-altitude hunger, though. Now 53, Edens dreams of scaling Everest; he owns ice axes signed by famed climbers Sir Edmund Hillary and Reinhold Messner.
He has actually suffered more trauma jumping horses, his other hobby. In the last five years he has endured three surgeries, overcoming a herniated disk in his back, a torn tendon in his finger and a clean snap in half at the humerus of his right arm to ride again. He boasts that the 10-and-a-half-inch rod doctors screwed into his arm after last accident four months ago gave him “a bit of a Wolverine look to it.”