Dr. Emily Johnston ’81 at Everest Base Camp with fellow guides. From here, they climbed five hours to Camp 1, where they slept until being violently shaken awake by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake.

By Carey Quan Gelernter

Much of what Emily Johnston ’81 has done in her life — has loved doing in her life — would scare the majority of people witless. Whether on Everest or in the ER she channels fear to take charge.

Start medical school at age 39. Guide people up the tallest mountains and down the wildest rivers of the world. Take charge, during the massive Nepal earthquake, of shepherding to safety the tense and traumatized climbers she was leading on Mount Everest (climbers who had their own ideas of who should be rescued first, and how).

But Johnston doesn’t see courage the way most people do. How she deals with fear — as an emergency room doctor, climbing and white-water river guide, sky diver — is a key to why she passionately embraces the challenges she does.

The roots of this trait can be traced back to her Lakeside days when she was a member of the Mongolian Running Academy, so dubbed by Hugh Tower, the powerhouse cross-country coach and her inspirational mentor. He encouraged Johnston (he nicknamed her “Namun, Woman Warrior”) and her like-minded pals in their love of the mountains and climbing. He also taught Asian history. Learning in his class about Buddhism and meditation, both of which she practices today, she says, “had a profound influence on my life.”

The idea of becoming a doctor lurked in the back of her mind, but for years she was having too much fun as an outdoors guide. Then a skier she was rescuing, who had an underlying heart condition, died. The death, in Johnston’s view the result of poor treatment, hit her hard and persuaded her of the urgent need for better rural medicine. She enrolled at Central Washington University to complete premed requirements she’d never taken during her college years at Middlebury and graduated from the University of Washington’s School of Medicine at age 44. Today her career blends her two worlds: She’s emergency department medical director in the mountain community of Leavenworth.

She works several shifts a month with emergency room doctors at Madigan Army Medical Center and teaches “wilderness and austere medicine” to Army Special Forces medics (she says she relates well to these “badass doctors”); and is an on-call medical consultant for the mountain climbing company she guides for during summers on Mount Rainier and occasionally elsewhere, like Everest.

Which leads to what happened to her on Everest on April 25 at 11:56 a.m., when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal — a quake that would kill more than 8,800 and injure more than 23,000.

She was in a deep sleep, exhausted after climbing for five hours from Everest Base Camp at 17,500 feet to Camp 1, at almost 20,000 feet. Her group’s tents were wedged in the tight spot between two mountains, just above the treacherous Khumbu Icefall. Awakened by violent shaking she assumed must signal an avalanche, she ran outside, where she was struck from behind by a powerful icy blast. “This is it,” she thought. “This is going to end badly. "