The Total Joy and Mayhem of Being Albert Lin

With all the expeditions he’s been a part of, all the technology he’s developed, all the discoveries he’s covered, I’m used to Albert Lin being one of the more interesting people in a room—or even the most well-known. But walking down the street in Quito, Ecuador, I didn’t realize he was this famous.

We are headed to a coffee shop when a woman with her son recognizes him and hollers out the window of her car.

“Excuse me!” she says. “We know you!”

She barely comes to a stop before getting out to take a picture, but in her hurry forgets to take the car out of gear. It lurches forward, and she dives back in to put it in park.

Fifteen minutes later, a young woman approaches to ask for a picture and tell Lin how much she loves his National Geographic TV show, Lost Cities, in which he goes looking for archaeological evidence of vanished civilizations. In fact, she wants to show him exactly which episode she just watched.

This happens pretty often in Central and South America. Lin has done a lot of work here. Unlike the programs that dominate cable TV by rehashing tired mysteries or paranormal encounters, Lin’s show lives in the freshly turned soil of archaeological inquiry. He’s usually sharing new findings during an episode about, say, the empires that once encompassed Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. Often, those findings show that ancient civilizations were a lot more sophisticated than we thought. His work helps dignify Indigenous history. But it’s not just that.

He played the part of a motivational icon, because being inspirational was how he moved through the world.

Before getting coffee, Lin toured the Range of Motion Project (ROMP) building, a converted split-level with balance bars in the living room and plaster dust floating out of a backyard workshop. That’s where a team of prosthetists uses recycled parts to design and build custom devices for amputees all over South America. Lin is himself an amputee and came to Ecuador as part of clothing brand Cotopaxi’s sponsorship of ROMP’s annual mountain climb fundraiser.

He shook a lot of hands at ROMP. He jogged with people testing out their  carbon fiber running blades. He played the part of a motivational icon, because being inspirational was how he moved through the world. Sometimes, it could be a little much.

“You know how some people lose their shit when they meet Taylor Swift?” sobbed Léa Richer, a United States–based prosthetist, when she met him. “You’ve been my Taylor Swift for years.”

When I met Lin eight years ago, he was more of a curiosity than a celebrity. This was before most of the TV shows, before most of the discoveries, back when LIDAR was still a niche technology known mostly to researchers and scientists (it’s like RADAR, but with lasers).

He had just made a splash using algorithms to search through satellite images to find archaeological sites worthy of in-person excavation in Mongolia. He filmed a National Geographic special about the search for the tomb of Genghis Khan. He had a research faculty position at the University of California San Diego. I was fishing for a story on a supposedly obscure project, only to find the campus plastered with posters of Lin on horseback crossing the Mongolian Steppe. He had an early virtual reality interface at his disposal. He had an office full of grad students mounting LIDAR on drones.

It was 2017. Lin had a PhD in materials science, two kids, and a reasonably amicable divorce that freed him up to jet around the world. The head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency wanted to discuss the technology he’d developed for the Mongolia project. He had also just sold a satellite imagery crowdsourcing company and launched another that used video games to teach kids science.

In other words, the guy had it all, except his right leg from about the middle of the shin down. He had lost that four months earlier when his friend flipped a UTV, and it came to rest on Lin’s tibia. He spent four weeks in the hospital with doctors trying to piece everything back together—two legs seemed like a prerequisite for life as a swashbuckling explorer—but the surgeries weren’t working.

You get your limb ripped off … that’s a big change. I think we tell ourselves anything’s possible—but we don’t always deal with the doubt.

Then someone showed him a picture of amputee surfer Mike Coots deep in the barrel on a wave on Kauai. He’d lost his leg to a tiger shark and become a world-class adaptive surfer and shark conservationist. “That one image meant so much to me,” Lin said. “It got me to call the doctor and say, ‘Enough is enough.’”

At Lin’s request, the doctors stopped trying to put him back together and instead did a simple procedure to remove his foot and ankle. He would navigate the world with a prosthetic limb, he decided, and have as many adventures as he could, as publicly as possible. People would see a guy with a prosthesis kicking ass and rethink the limits of life after amputation.

Lin wanted me to tag along at some point to write an “overcoming limb loss” story for Outside, but he had so many interests and a hand in so many projects that it was hard to say exactly what else the piece would focus on. Was he a cyborg Indiana Jones? Archeology’s David Attenborough? Or just an all-purpose mad scientist with a TV show? We began a strange sort of long-distance friendship where I would call him every six or nine months and ask what he was up to—was there a project coming up that would make a good scaffold for an article?

Nothing ever quite worked out. But he kept traveling the world, and his shows slowly outgrew the Lost Cities branding. Every year or so, a new one popped up: Lost Cities Revealed, Lost Treasures of the Maya, Buried Secrets of the Bible with Albert Lin.

Finally, after several near-misses and another eighteen months of phone tag, I got an email.

“Hey, my friend, I may have a story for you. Wanna climb a volcano with a bunch of amputees and me?”

By this point, it had been so long since his accident that there wasn’t much question of whether or not Lin could get to the top of a mountain or get back to his old life as an adventurer—he had been on the move practically nonstop since his amputation. If anything, his life had accelerated. He had learned to cross deserts, paddle rivers, and hack through the jungle with a mechanical limb. It was his job.

But learning to live with an amputation is an emotional journey as much as anything. And it turns out Lin had never genuinely grappled with that loss. When your life revolves around expeditions and adventure, it’s easy to mistake physical prowess for holistic recovery. You end up convincing yourself that you are healed, when it might just be that you’re finally ready for the work to begin.

Thanks partly to the growing ubiquity of motor vehicles in developing countries, limb loss is worsening worldwide. More cars mean more accidents. Diabetes-related amputation are rising in the U.S. as well. Today, 2.3 million people in the U.S. live without a limb. That number is expected to double by 2050. Worldwide, there are more than 13 million traumatic amputations each year, with higher concentrations among people living in poverty and least able to afford care. Firm numbers are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization estimates that only one in ten people who need assistive devices, such as prostheses, can get them.

For a few years, one of those people was twenty-year-old Carlos Aguinda, who was born in Santo Domingo, Ecuador. In 2021, when he was seventeen, his leg was crushed by a farm truck. After two years on crutches, he was introduced to ROMP through an adaptive sports club. They evaluated him on the spot and got him a prosthesis in November 2023. In early 2024, they invited him on their annual trek, in which a dozen or so amputees would hike, scramble, and climb to the top of Ecuador’s 18,996-foot peak, Cayambe, that year.

Aguinda was immediately on board and an easy choice for ROMP. It identifies prospective climbers from their recent patients to accompany the primarily American, mostly amputee mountaineers who fundraise as part of their participation. Built like a linebacker, Aguinda was an athlete before his prosthesis and took to it like a car takes a spare tire. He was running, jumping, and throwing javelin almost immediately.

In the weeks before the climb, Aguinda was paired with Lin as a kind of big-brother amputee. On paper, it made sense: Aguinda was a young athlete rediscovering his abilities; Lin was the poster child for post-injury adventure. They became a quirky little duo almost instantly, dressing alike, horsing around, goofing off despite barely sharing a language.

But while Aguinda shared his story with blunt honesty—life was hard before his accident; afterward it was harder—Lin kept his pain zipped up like expedition gear. The matching outfits hid very different inner lives.

Lin plays a sober, serious scientist on TV but is more of a goofball in person. He buys extravagant shirts and jackets off the mannequin while window shopping; with Aguinda on his heels, he buys two. He travels with a guitar and fills quiet moments with improvised songs. One night at dinner, he showed up in a black cowboy hat and white dress shirt embroidered with garish peacocks from the hotel gift shop. When he and Aguinda discovered a bullfighting arena on the grounds, they snuck in with Lin’s guitar and ran around the ring, playing Spanish bullfight music and charging each other.

This energy is not unique or out of place at a ROMP gathering. It is a bear-hugs-for-everyone group, like one big summer camp reunion. Amputations are usually tragic stories of pain, loss,and restriction. But the peg-legged folks that assemble to climb mountains are mostly cut from a different piece of carbon fiber. Sort the U.S. population based on optimism, perseverance, and grit, and you might end up with this bunch—a group of prosthetically augmented trail runners, basketball players, and even an MMA fighter. ROMP’s crew includes a Paralympic hopeful, an adaptive snowboarder, and a climbing guide—all survivors of injury or illness. You get the gist.

ROMP was cofounded in 2005 by David Krupa, a tall, articulate Chicagoan born with a tibia and fibula that weren’t fused correctly at the left ankle. After his parents decided to have his foot removed when he was eighteen months old, he grew up with access to the best prosthetists and medical care. His childhood in the late-’80s and early-’90s also coincided with advances in materials and manufacturing that revolutionized prosthetic technology and made amputee athletics much more accessible. During growth spurts, he got a new leg every few years. Eventually, he trained to become a prosthetist.

People would see a guy with a prosthesis kicking ass, and rethink the limits of life after amputation.

“It’s creative. It’s artistic. Every case is different. And it means so much to me,” he said.

After a series of volunteer trips in Haiti, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Pakistan, which showed him that the need for prosthetic limbs far outpaced the supply, especially in the developing world, Krupa created ROMP and opened a clinic in Guatemala. A few years later, he launched another one in Ecuador, where he lives full-time. Together, they provide nearly 700 people with new legs each year, more than one each workday from each clinic—like factories putting people back together.

ROMP started climbing mountains in 2015 after an impromptu group hike through the Andes left a limb-different friend of the clinic weeping with happiness. He’d never done anything like it. The world was suddenly alive with places to go.

Seeing the impression that a pretty straightforward hike had made on his friend, Krupa applied for funds to take a group of people with lower limb loss to the top of Cotopaxi (the mountain, not the clothing brand) to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Shortly before their climb, however, Cotopaxi became concerningly active, and they pivoted east to Cayambe, just 351 feet shorter and directly on the equator. They’ve been sending groups up both mountains ever since.

However, if you’ve ever been to 19,000 feet, you know that kind of altitude doesn’t care whether you’re climbing with one leg or five. Returning climbers talk of previous ascents as the most challenging thing they’ve ever done. So, the first few days in Ecuador are devoted to team-building and training hikes to work out the kinks of moving as a group and preparing everyone to handle the altitude.

Lin was a genuinely ambitious climber in college and grad school, taking on multiday walls in Yosemite and big mountains worldwide. He hung it up when he had kids and a friend died at 20,000 feet, but the muscle memory is there. He’s been up high before.

The world was suddenly alive with places to go.

Perhaps because of this experience, plus his celebrity status in the amputee community, Lin appeared guarded initially. He showed slightly more concern about his media obligations than the mountain climb. Early on, he skipped a group dinner to sit down with me for an interview. A few days later, when it came time for everyone in the group to share their amputation story—a big emotional bonding session every year—Lin tried to skip it, saying he was in the middle of something with the film crew. He was prioritizing the campaign, which supported amputees who couldn’t afford prosthetics, over joining group activities. It was when the videographers insisted that they drop everything that he made it to the meeting.

So Lin may have more experience at high altitudes than a lot of the team, but in a small way, it seems like he might have lost track of why they were going up high in the first place.

The night before the big group sharing session, I woke up with a fever and headache and couldn’t catch my breath. A positive COVID test the following day meant I would be confined to my hotel room until further notice.

I queued up the rest of Lin’s shows and made plans for him to call me in my room at the end of each day so we could debrief what happened. Seven years and a flight to Ecuador, just to keep talking on the phone and watching him on TV.

Hosting a show like Lost Cities is tricky. Lin has to play a character that is both curious enough to ask questions and sharp enough to answer them. He pulls it off with drones, lasers, and swagger.

One day, we may look back on LIDAR in archaeology the way we do the microscope in biology: a breakthrough that sparked a wave of discoveries. Lin first used it in Guatemala with archaeologist Tom

Garrison, mounting the tech on primitive drones to scan the forest and effectively “delete” the canopy. They uncovered thousands of ancient structures—entire civilizations lost to the trees.

His prosthetic leg is never mentioned on screen. That’s intentional. To viewers, it’s normal to see an amputee scuba diving or rappelling into pyramids. His own amputation, he says, is “a paper cut” compared to those who lost a leg above the knee or at the hip.

Behind the scenes, though, it’s not as easy as it looks.

Blisters on the interface between his residual limb and prosthesis are a constant problem. Ingrown hairs are torture. His stump swells and changes size throughout the day—starting swollen in the morning, shrinking down as his body gets moving, then swelling up again in the afternoon—which means that he continuously has to adjust and change the thickness of his liners. On shoots, he has to manage all of this and host a TV show without drawing any attention to himself.

“If I start complaining to my team about certain parts of my experience,” he says, “they’ll listen. And they’ll adjust and they’ll say, ‘Oh, well let’s not go as big then, let’s try something else.’ And I don’t want to do that.”

He has to go all-in on every expedition, he says, because someone might be watching from a hospital bed, trying to imagine life without a leg. So he does it all and never slows down. But here in Ecuador, that idea starts to reveal its flaws.

It begins on the first training hike. It’s a grueling day. First, the buses got stuck. So the hikers unloaded and began picking up two extra miles of slick, red mud.

“There were folks getting up the side of this mountain with literally one leg, on forearm crutches,” Lin said. “And it wasn’t a mellow hike.”

After a long climb up a grassy ridgeline to 14,000 feet, the sky erupted with hail and lightning. Within a few minutes, everyone was soaked. There was hypothermia. There was altitude sickness. People were puking the entire bus ride home.

But for Lin, the most incredible part of the day was hiking with people who already understood everything he was going through. People he didn’t have to explain anything to or hide anything from. For the first time since his amputation, it was OK to struggle.

“Up until today, I’d never gone on a big outdoor adventure with anybody else that had a major physical difference,” he said. “Today I felt like I could go up this mountain without having to put on a show.”

It is fairly surprising that Lin would be blindsided by the experience of spending time with other amputees. He thinks about this community all the time and is naturally interested in deep questions about the human experience—often slightly more interested than the people around him.

At our first dinner in Quito, he gushed about the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—he was reading his original journals—and how these big Ecuadorian mountains shaped our understanding of the natural world. Chimborazo is where von Humboldt first conceived of ecosystems as an interconnected web. After the second glass of wine, he recited a poem from memory about Chimborazo.

To some extent, he’s always been like this. The son of a musician and an astrophysicist who ran in the same circles as Stephen Hawking—the Hawkings were godparents to Lin’s older sister, and he remembers playing with Stephen’s wheelchairs as a kid—he spent much of his childhood in Cambridge, England, and most of his teens in Palo Alto, California, during the rise of the internet. It was an upbringing where inquiry was encouraged and big existential questions about the universe were taken seriously.

Then, his accident refocused that energy.

In the days and weeks after his surgery, the normal sensations in his leg were replaced with torturous, white-hot, bone-crushing phantom pain that followed him everywhere. The nerves that used to connect to his lower leg fired randomly, and his brain had trouble sorting through the new sensations. It felt like his leg would catch on fire, but the part of his leg that was burning didn’t exist. He could feel his shinbone breaking in half every time he had to pee. Other times, the arch of his foot would suddenly bend underneath itself like it was caught in a trash compactor.

When you’re constantly pondering man’s place in the cosmos, it’s tough to focus on a detail like where the loss of your right foot fits in.

“I was nearly ready to die,” he told me back then. “I would have done anything to stop it.”

Relief eventually came from a relatively new, experimental thing called mirror therapy. By arranging a mirror to make it appear like his leg was still there, the phantom pain disappeared.

The key to making the change permanent, to get his brain to accept this new reality, it turned out, was psychedelics. He did psilocybin and ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects at higher doses. Sometimes with the mirrors, sometimes in a sensory deprivation tank. But the pain always returned. It wasn’t until his then-girlfriend took him to Joshua Tree, gave him a massive dose of magic mushrooms, put the mirror in place, and led him through a kind of ceremony that his nervous system realized his leg was gone. His experience led to an academic paper, clinical trials, and the creation of UCSD’s Center for Psychedelic Research. In fact, after thirty minutes in what he calls a trance, he came out of it fully cured of his phantom pain and convinced that there is more to the world than meets the eye, more to our brains than science can currently explain.

In other words, losing his leg made big existential questions mandatory.

One night on the phone, in different parts of the same hotel, Lin told me about an incredible archeological discovery he thinks about a lot. In 2020, researchers working in a remote part of Indonesia found a 31,000-yearold fossilized human skeleton with a missing lower leg. From the fossil, they could tell that the loss was not an accident but a deliberate surgery by someone with knowledge of human anatomy, who accounted for blood loss, shock, and infection. Subsequent bone growth indicated that the patient lived for six to nine more years.

“Same exact amputation as mine,” Lin said. “No modern pain medication. Blows the mind.”

But Lin was not so interested in the medical achievement as much as why it happened. Why did a tribe of hunter-gatherers decide to operate on, and then hunker down with, someone who couldn’t walk? Why make yourselves less mobile when that’s such a survival disadvantage? His theory is that the amputation forced the group to look at their world differently, much like losing his leg changed him. It prompted them to ask questions about what was truly important, what it took to survive, and whether the loss of a limb was worth losing the whole person.

“It makes more sense for them to leave this kid and continue to hunt and survive,” he said. “But when you add in this other intangible thing, which is love, the whole situation changes.”

In the aftermath of his accident, Lin has continually zoomed out, asking bigger and bigger questions about what it means to be a whole person, part of society, and part of humanity. This may be because his recovery has synced up perfectly with his on-screen investigations into the rise and fall of entire civilizations.

“I’ve spent time in the hearts of pyramids,” he said. “I’ve sat amongst the terracotta army of the first emperor of China. I’ve sat in all these ritualized monuments to our questions about what lies in the realm beyond.”

With every new series, every new civilization, he is making connections about who we are and what we have in common across the farthest reaches of history.

“Like, dangling off the side of a cliff, surrounded by mummies, looking into the eyes of an 800-year-old skeleton, face to face,” he said. “That does something to you over time.”

In other words, when you’re constantly pondering man’s place in the cosmos, it’s tough to focus on a detail like where the loss of your right foot fits in. So, in some ways, it turns out, he’s been ignoring the question.

After five days in the Quito Hampton, I finally tested negative for COVID and was picked up by a bus full of local mountain guides headed to Cayambe. Yesterday, the rest of the group had taken a bus and then a 4×4 to the Refugio Ruales Oleas Bergé, a stone building just beneath the historical start of the glacier. They had slept there to acclimatize, and tonight, they would climb 1,000 feet on exposed rock and dirt to the glacier, then nearly 3,000 vertical feet up the glacier to the summit. The guides would lead us in roped-up teams of two. The plan was to start the climb at 9 p.m. for a sunrise summit eight hours later.

However, when I entered the refuge, Aguinda was head down on a table, silently crying. Lin had his arm around him and made a hand motion to indicate that he was OK, just feeling a lot of feelings. On the drive up here yesterday, Lin explained later, they had passed through the city of Cayambe, and at a stoplight, a guy on crutches had hobbled up to sell something through the window.

This guy picked the right bus because instead of buying something, an entire busload of amputee mountain climbers filed out to meet and talk with Johnny from Venezuela. Johnny had been on crutches for the last six years, ever since he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident.

He hadn’t let himself cry about his leg since leaving the hospital. Not once. Most of what Lin could teach Aguinda was about how to climb mountains.

Aguinda basically saw an alternate version of his life standing in the intersection, Lin said, and you could see something inside him break open. Aguinda told Johnny about ROMP and how to get fitted for a leg. They made plans for Johnny to visit ROMP the following week, and efforts to connect him with prosthetic care are ongoing.

Afterward, on the bus, Aguinda was still feeling emotionally raw, and while Lin was supposed to be his big-brother figure on this climb, he realized he didn’t have much to say about processing these feelings. After waking up from surgery, Lin had gone straight to the jungles of Guatemala, ground truthing the LIDAR scans. He hadn’t let himself cry about his leg since leaving the hospital. Not once. Most of what Lin could teach Aguinda was about how to climb mountains.

When they got to the refuge, Krupa gave a speech to the group about ROMP’s first attempt on Cayambe nine years ago and how much it meant for them to be out there. And it made Lin think about how these climbers had all been through something rare and terrible. They had done it alone for the most part, but now, on this mountain, they were together.

“He gave that impassioned speech and just started weeping,” Lin said. “And I had a moment of like, I couldn’t really handle it.”

Since losing his leg, Lin’s energy had gone toward traveling the world and trying to be as inspirational as possible.

“This big protective shell came up,” Lin said. “So I never really had to take on the pain of it.”

But emotional pain has a way of waiting for you. And now his protective shell was cracking open.

He walked out of the refuge, into the darkness, and stared up at the beaming white glacier. It was so big, bright, and otherworldly, it did not look like something humans could ever summit, much less a group of amputees on a charity climb.

As Lin stood in the cold, crying into the wind, Aguinda came outside and put his arm around him.

“I remembered that feeling when I was lying in that hospital bed, like, wondering what I was going to be able to do,” he said. “You get your limb ripped off of you. That’s a big change. I think for a lot of us, we tell ourselves that anything’s possible. But then there’s those moments of doubt. You suppress and sort of push them away and don’t really deal with them.

“When I lost my leg, I just went through it. And now, being around a bunch of other people who can relate, trying to do something audacious is just churning up all this stuff. I can’t put it into words, but it’s all coming out in tears.”

The climb does not begin at 9 p.m. Instead, a storm rolls in, pushing it back to 11. Then it’s moved to 4 a.m. A sunrise summit is no longer possible. The glacier will be too warm and unstable.

We leave the hut thinking we’re just climbing for fun.

By the time the sun comes up, Lin and Aguinda are getting out ahead of everyone, little dots in a couloir above us, and suddenly the guides are saying the snow conditions are good, the team is moving well, and the high-altitude cloud cover is going to keep the sun off the glacier a lot longer than planned. Do we want to go for the summit?

There is a whoop, then even more hollering because the ROMP team on Cotopaxi— visible in the pink distance—has made improbable contact via walkie-talkie, and they are also summiting.

Losing a leg can add a sense of wonder to your life. It can make you feel like a kid again.

Aguinda chants with every step: “Sí se puede.”

Then, on a steep section, the lead guides dig a snow pit, and the summit push ends as quickly as it began. There is an unstable snow layer from last night’s storm and borderline extreme avalanche danger going forward.

The climb is over.

Aguinda and Lin pause where they are, and Aguinda takes in his home country from the side of a mountain he never would have been on if not for his injury. Lin spreads the ashes of a friend who recently passed. They have a moment alone together.

Then, someone throws a snowball. And it’s on.

Crampons skitter across the ice. Helmets get pelted. Someone dives behind a backpack. Another shrieks as ice water trickles down their spine.

Later, I asked Lin what to make of this moment, the unbridled celebration of what could be considered defeat.

He said that after the heartbreak of losing a body part fades, it’s actually pretty fun to figure out what your body can do. To test your new limits. Replace stoicism with curiosity, he says, and losing a leg can add a sense of wonder to your life. It can make you feel like a kid again.

“Just laughter all around at 17,000 feet,” he said. “Total mayhem and joy. And then we got off that mountain as fast as we could.”

This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 print issue of Outside Magazine. Subscribe now for early access to our most captivating storytelling, stunning photography, and deeply reported features on the biggest issues facing the outdoor world.