Discovering GRIT's Foundations: The Ledge

Night falling on the canyon river

I sat down recently and tried to think of the earliest moment in my life that actually shaped the man I've become. Not the highlight reels, not the wins, but the kind of moment that fuses pain, fear, instinct, and responsibility into something you never forget. A moment where every lesson I now teach through GRIT showed up long before I had the words for it.

I kept coming back to one night in Kings Canyon, when I was a teenager. It wasn’t dramatic in the way movies make things dramatic, and it didn’t feel heroic at the time. It was just me, my dad, a friend Josh, and a bad decision that spiraled into something none of us expected. But it was the moment that set the tone for how I’ve handled fear, pressure, leadership, risk, and resilience ever since.

This is that story.

We’d been in Kings Canyon for a few days when my dad suggested a long hike. I was 15 years old and arrogant. After years of playing hockey at a high level and training various martial arts, I thought I was in the best shape of my life. I didn’t realize yet that endurance, confidence, capability, and grit aren’t the same thing, and that the mountain doesn’t care how many goals you scored last season.

The plan was simple: hike out along a trail that followed the river and canyon wall, loop around, and make it back before sunset. Just my dad, my close friend Josh, and me. In the beginning everything felt easy. We pushed a little farther than planned, talking, joking, adding “just one more ridge” because it looked interesting. We even found a cool looking piece of driftwood that the flowing water of the river had made smooth to commemorate the hike.

But, It didn’t take long to realize we had misjudged the distance, and daylight was dropping fast.

Going back the way we came would’ve taken too long. We'd be trudging in the dark through some serious uneven terrain for hours. The other option, the one that made sense to three confident males who didn’t like the idea of admitting we’d screwed up, was to cut straight up the canyon wall. A shortcut. A faster line home. It looked doable from where we stood.

Josh and I split up slightly to find our own routes, while my dad spotted us from the ground. The plan was for one of us to find a safe route and then we'd all follow that out. I climbed fast at first, testing holds, shifting weight the way a lifetime of athletics had trained my body to do without thinking. I made a dynamic movement to grab a higher ledge and landed it, but the moment my hands hit the rock, I knew something was wrong. My feet had nowhere solid to go. I couldn’t pull up. I couldn’t drop down. I was stuck. I was several feet away from any other hand holds and I didn't have the training or the confidence in rock climbing that I do now. And, of course, no protection or top rope.

What started as an “oops” became the new problem.

The canyon around us was steep, narrow, and unforgiving. The drop to my father from where I was? Approximately 200 feet. Directly beneath my dad was another 150-foot drop into the River, swollen, violent, and loud enough that I could hear it over my own breathing. The sun kept sinking, shadows filling the canyon until everything blurred to the same dark blue.

My dad was able to yell what was wrong to Josh, wherever he was, who was having his own issues that I would learn about later. I could faintly hear him promise to get help. Then, there was nothing from him. Silence, except my own breathing, heartbeat, and the roaring river.

A few minutes quickly turned into an hour. I was holding myself up with nothing but finger strength, small shifts of my body, and a ledge too narrow to fully rest on. Every so often I’d try a new angle, new grip, a different attempt to commit to a move, but every one of them risked a fall to my dad. I envisioned him attempting to catch me and us both plummeting to our deaths into the river. An image I continuously had to shake away.

Through it all, my dad kept talking to me, steady and loud enough that his voice cut through the panic and the cold. Calmly telling me to hold on. Telling me I was doing great. Telling me not to quit. There’s something about hearing your father’s steady voice in a moment like that, it cuts deeper than the fear. I didn’t want him to watch me fall. And I didn’t want the last thing I ever did to be a stupid teenage decision I couldn’t take back.

Meanwhile, Josh somehow managed to claw his way up and out of the canyon; scraped, bleeding, and lucky by the way he tells it. As he began to head back to our camp on the main road, my mother, sister and her friend happened to be driving by on their way back from the river, in bathing suits. My mom jokes that, at first they were thinking, "who is this crazy looking, dirty and wet guy, jogging on the side of the road?" After recognizing him and pulling him into the car, they went to get help. The park rangers spun up immediately, but they quickly realized the canyon was too tight for a helicopter to get in.

Light was going fast, winds had kicked up, and the temperature had dropped. My hands felt like they were burning one minute and dead the next. My muscles ached. My mind would whisper, "Just let go. Relax. It'll be fine." My dad's calm coaching would slice through those voices like a knife and remind me of what's at stake.

Hours passed in slow motion. 6 of them... 6 long hours.

Eventually, they brought in a climber from another city, someone who had the technical skill and qualifications to get into a place you’d normally avoid. I began to hear voices above me and I could see flashlights flit down the rock face toward me. He called down to me, assuring me that this would be over soon and to hold on. He rappelled down until his headlamp finally found me on the wall. He calmly told me what he was going to do, got a harness on me, cinched it tight, clipped me into his rope, and for the first time in 6 long hours, I let my arms relax.

Park rangers look for me on the ledge

After he hauled me up, he went back down and grabbed my dad. He’d stayed beneath me the entire time, ready to catch me if I fell, even though we both knew he wouldn’t have been able to. There are different kinds of courage; that was his. As he crested the ledge, I noticed he was still holding that piece of driftwood. He lifted it casually and we smiled at each other, glad to be alive. We ended up burning the date into that piece of wood and my dad still has it to this day.

Looking back, what happened on that canyon wall wasn’t just a close call, it was the first time the core ideas behind GRIT showed up in my life, long before the company existed, long before I understood how much those principles would matter.

I saw what grounded mentorship really looks like in the sound of my dad’s voice cutting through fear. No yelling, no panic, just steady leadership from someone who cared enough to stay beneath me, ready to do the impossible if I fell. His presence anchored me.

I felt resilient fitness in my own body. Years of hockey and martial arts training didn’t teach me how to climb rock, but they taught me how to suffer, how to breathe, and how to hold on longer than comfort allows. Strength bought me time; mindset kept me alive.

The whole trip was an immersive peak experience in the rawest sense; unforgiving terrain, darkness closing in, a bad plan getting worse by the minute. Nothing was hypothetical. It was real, and it had consequences. That’s where you learn who you are without the padding of safety.

And whether I knew it or not, we stumbled into the early seeds of tactical thinking. Route planning matters. Terrain matters. Timing matters. Small decisions compound. A shortcut that “looked fine” from below turned into a six-hour fight against gravity and fear. It was my first taste of what happens when confidence outruns judgment.

I didn’t walk away feeling like I’d survived something heroic. I walked away with a deeper understanding of myself. Of what pressure does to you. Of what true leadership sounds like. Of how quickly things can go wrong, and how grit is sometimes nothing more than refusing to let go.

You hold on for the people who believe in you. You hold on because the alternative costs too much. You hold on because deep down, you know you’re not alone and you’re not

done.

Those lessons have followed me through every stage of my life: athletics, the SEAL Teams, combat, fatherhood, coaching, and business.

They guided me in discovering GRIT's foundations.

And they all trace back to that cold ledge in Kings Canyon.