Dave Williams
Adventurer, athlete and outdoor education teacher
Dave Williams, 31, has always had a passion for the outdoors and is currently midway through a challenge that he set himself – Sea2Summit7.
His goal is to become the first person to climb the highest mountain in each continent from the nearest feasible coastline. To date he has conquered four of the seven summits – Mt Kosciuszko, Australia; Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; Mt Aconcagua, Argentina; and Mt Elbrus, Russia. In April [2017] he flies to Alaska to climb Mt Denali which is an estimated 19-day walk and 21-day climb. In December his sights are set on Vinson Massif along the ice shelf coast to the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica. Then in 2018 he’ll begin training for the seventh summit and the roof of the world, Mt Everest in Nepal – the equivalent of running 32 marathons.
However, his inspiration is bigger than reaching each summit. His larger goal is to raise $100,000 and awareness for the Male Mental Health Foundation, and make vulnerability cool and seen as a strength as opposed to a weakness in the Kiwi male. He does this by showing his vulnerabilities and promoting his adventures in a really raw way. “I was doing a sea to summit of Mt Taranaki and when I came back down I learned about my friend who had taken his life… it was someone I thought I knew so well and it just shows how good we are at hiding things. I didn’t even know he had been battling some of these demons.”
By making the challenge bigger than himself, Williams believes that is what has kept him going when the going has been tough. “This isn’t about me. I like to think that I’m not the only one climbing the mountain, that I’m taking a whole bunch of people with me and that’s how it relates to my passion and the purpose,” Williams says.
On a particularly bad day on Kilimanjaro Williams received a message from a guy who said: ‘ What you’re doing is amazing. I’ve been couch-bound with an injury for four months and I’m depressed. I’m really not liking the direction I’m going in my life but after reading about your journey I’ve gone out and bought a new pair of running shoes that fit properly and I’m on a programme and it’s changed my life. I’ve told my partner about why I have been like this for the last four months and that I’m suffering from depression and it’s brought us closer.’
“That was exactly what I needed at that time to pull my own feelings out of it and realise ‘okay’, it’s not just me’,” Williams says.
He also had an epiphany on his third attempt at climbing Mt Aconcagua. He’d been battling against the mountain and was angry with it. He wanted to be in Raglan surfing over the summer – not on this mountain, again. Then as he stood there the whole sky turned a beautiful red and the clouds transformed into swell lines. “It was the mountain’s way of telling me ‘this is actually where you need to be right now: I’m beautiful too and embrace what is in front of your eyes not what’s in your head’. It totally changed my perception of the mountain and mountaineering and what I needed to do. I started working with the mountain as opposed to against it… instead of going into a battle I was able to let go and enjoy the experience.”
While Williams hasn’t personally suffered from mental illness these experiences have given him an understanding of how powerful the mind can be, and that it can be the most destructive or empowering tool.
“I think by having a goal that you really believe in… and set that as a priority in life, keeps you fresh and makes you feel like you do have purpose,” says Williams. “As humans we need to feel like we have purpose because there’s that whole question of ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what is life?’ and if you’ve got something to believe in that you are working towards, it helps.”