BASE CAMP

Sagarmāthā. Chomolungma. Zhūmùlangma Fēng. Everest. In March 2017, Glass was at the foot of the 29,035-foot peak at South Base Camp in Nepal about to embark on his first Everest climb as a guide with International Mountain Guides — alongside three other guides, two expedition leaders, about 50 Sherpa and 23 clients between them. Every year, thousands of climbers visit Base Camp, which sits at 17,598 feet, but most don’t continue up the mountain. For Glass and his team, it was only the beginning.
The first time Glass ever clipped into a climbing rope was when he was a teenager in rural Alabama. He’d grown up outside, hunting and fishing with his father and grandfather, but there weren’t a lot of rock-climbing opportunities — until he went to a Boy Scout camp in the southern Appalachians. “There’s a wood-framed tower there that they had you climb, and that’s where I was really first exposed to climbing,” he says.
Before long, Glass was working after school at a climbing gym that opened in Birmingham, where he was mentored by the gym’s owner, a well-known Alabaman climber at the time by the name of Maurice Reed. Glass was climbing at least once a week in those days, but it never occurred to him that his hobby could become a career path.
Born into a die-hard Auburn family, Glass says it was all but assumed he would go there for college. But he gives his parents credit: They wanted him to choose Auburn rather than go there by default. So one fall, the family made a trip to Clemson to watch a football game against Wake Forest and tour the forestry department. At the end of the weekend, Glass was sold.
“We’re driving back through Atlanta, and I’m terrified to talk to my parents because I really wanted to go to Clemson,” he says. “My dad just looks at me as we’re driving, and I won’t ever forget this conversation because he started it with, ‘What will it take for you not to go to Clemson?’”
Glass thought for a moment before answering, “I want a senior trip. I want to go ice climbing in Canada, and I want all the gear.”
“Done,” was his father’s reply.
In the end, Glass couldn’t bring himself to take the deal. “I had to go to Clemson,” he says.

“[Dallas] also doesn’t seem to have the need to prove anything to anyone. He does this all because of his passion for the outdoors — a quality that will keep him alive in a dangerous profession.”

Lhotse Face

At Camp II, the team began to prep for the scale up Lhotse Face, which Glass describes as “pretty much an unbroken wall of snow and ice that rises very steeply for 3 or 4,000 feet straight up.” About halfway up Lhotse Face, hacked into the side of the ice, sits a small cluster of tents: Camp III.
“Don’t roll over,” Glass jokes, half serious.
On the brink of Everest, Camp III manifests just how fragile life becomes on the mountain. One misstep, one wrong turn, and it could be over. Glass knows from personal experience.
After Clemson, he headed to the University of Nevada, Reno, to get his master’s in hydrology and work with Dale Johnson, professor of natural resources and environmental science. As Glass was finishing his degree, Johnson sent him a job posting to work as an ecologist for the federal government in Alaska.
That job turned into a permanent seasonal position where Dallas spent his summers on the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve working for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. In the winters, he needed something to do, so after dabbling in some Lake Tahoe-area skiing, he thought of ski patrol.
“I’d only been skiing for three years, but I was like, ‘Whatever, I can do this,’” Glass says. “So, I applied to all these different ski patrols and wound up working at a ski resort called Mount Rose Ski Tahoe, which is on the mountains between Reno and Lake Tahoe.”
Ski patrollers are responsible for keeping the slopes safe: putting up ropes and signage and administering medical attention in the event of an emergency. If an avalanche threat is located, they’re also responsible for reducing that risk to the best of their ability, whether by intentionally using explosives to set off the avalanche or closing off areas so guests don’t accidentally trigger the snow slide.
About six weeks into his job at Mount Rose, a veteran ski patroller was caught, carried and buried by an avalanche. The incident, Glass says, was ingrained in his mind in “insane detail,” especially since he was one of the first to respond to the emergency. The patroller had to be airlifted to the hospital — he was badly injured but managed to escape with his life.
“After that accident, the patrol director, my boss, was able to secure funding for a position dedicated solely to thinking about snow,” Glass says. “And I became Mount Rose’s first avalanche forecaster.”
Glass was now responsible for watching weather forecasts and studying the snow pack in an effort to predict when and where avalanches might occur, and how intense they might be. Differences between each layer in the snow pack are what cause avalanches, so the bigger the difference, the bigger the danger.

Summit

Glass took off his frosted oxygen mask and set down his pack. He turned slowly, “taking in what felt like the whole world in one turn.” He had reached the summit.
It wasn’t long before he saw another group of climbers approaching the summit from the other side of the mountain. His first thought was, “Huh! Fancy seeing you here.” The moment was surreal even though he knew that the mountain was often climbed out of Tibet as well as Nepal.
“My hypoxic brain struggled to understand how they were coming from a different direction,” he laughs.
Despite the language barrier between IMG and the other team, there was a lot of high fiving. On May 21, 2017, they’d both reached their goal.
Considering the months of climbing it took to get there, the summit celebration was short. It was critical that the climbers get in and out; they only had so much oxygen in their tanks. Glass spent only about an hour on the summit (and each client about 20-30 minutes), but he still struggles to find words to describe it: “You’re just like, ‘I’m on top of the world.’ I always used to kind of laugh at that description, but it’s literally what it feels like. Everything is below you at that point. Everything. Most planes are below you!”
Moments like this keep Glass climbing, guiding groups to new summits.
“I hope that these experiences shape [my clients’] lives in ways that actually have positive impacts on how they view their friends, their family, the environment, public lands,” he says. “For me, the outdoors and the mountains have shaped so much of my life, Everest included.”
Glass continues his avalanche forecasting work at the Northwest Avalanche Center in Washington, spending days off climbing with his wife and backcountry skiing with his black Lab, Belle. He returned to the Himalayas in 2018 to guide Cho Oyu for the second time, but he hasn’t made it back to Everest yet.
Still, every now and then, memories of the mountain sneak up on him: “The draw of Everest is still there. That magical place hasn’t lost any of its mystery. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the opportunity to go back, but for the moment, I’m left with my memories — left with my dreams.”