The Climb

If Haverford offered courses in adventure, Robert Ocampo ’04 would have his doctorate, with a minor in thrill-seeking. After all, it’s not every alum who summits Mount Everest.

Ocampo, who majored in biology and psychology at Haverford with the goal of becoming an astronaut, has spent the last two decades racking up a laundry list of accomplishments in the great outdoors, including traveling the world to ascend mountains far higher than the tip of Founders Hall’s cupola.

Most of Ocampo’s journeys have been upward, into elevations where mountains meet clouds and the slightest mistakes can be perilous. He’s summited 1,200 peaks since graduation, including Everest, infamous for its “death zone.” He aims to conquer the tallest peaks on all seven continents and, after ticking off Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania last summer, only Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea and Russia’s Mount Elbrus remain.

But Ocampo says that Haverford, elevation 318 feet, is where his incredible journey began. “It always felt like my first big adventure,” he says. Being constantly encouraged to ask questions and to be open to different opinions, experiences, and the broader world taught him to push himself and step outside of his comfort zone.

And it was at Haverford where Ocampo, a kid from the San Francisco Bay Area who had never even been camping, began to feel an itch, the calling naturalist John Muir cited to go see the larger world, those wide open places and elevations that make your heart pound. Ocampo has been chasing those highs ever since.

Pushing His Limits
Haverford wasn’t on Ocampo’s radar in high school, but he applied at his father’s suggestion, and made up his mind after flying out to tour the campus one weekend. “I just remember going there to visit and it was a different world for me,” he says. “It’s a school where you could have deeper conversations and disagreements. I remember thinking, ‘I can do anything I want.’”

While he pursued double majors, hoping to eventually secure a career with NASA, Ocampo also tested his physical endurance on the track and field team running cross country. He found his niche in the 800 meter, a middle-distance race that requires a sprinter’s speed combined with a long-distance runner’s stamina.

Although he wasn’t the fastest athlete, Ocampo developed other skills that would serve him well on his later expeditions: mental toughness, a strong work ethic, and a dedication to a team ethos in a sport that’s generally about individual efforts.
“A lot of programs just measure themselves on what their fastest kids can do, but a lot of times, it’s those middle-range guys who really inspire the team,” says Tom Donnelly, who coached Ocampo and has since retired. “Robbie,” Donnelly recalls, “got the most out of himself and really helped his teammates get the most out of themselves, too. He’s obviously still getting the most out of himself today. He’s pushing his limits.”

For Ocampo, this is nothing unusual. His very first foray into outdoor adventure was a 2,200-mile hike, undertaken after he graduated a semester early. Inspired by a reading of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, in which the writer rediscovers America along the Appalachian Trail, Ocampo planned to make the trek from Maine to Georgia.

“I had no experience in the outdoors,” he says. “My first night on the [trail] was the first night I ever spent outside in a tent. It wasn’t arrogance, but more like naivete, the thought that, ‘I’ll be able to do this. I ran cross country, and I’m reasonably fit.’ To this day, it’s still one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

Despite his initial discouragement, Ocampo finished the trail in about four months, hiking south from Maine’s Mount Katahdin. “Something drives Robbie that is different from anyone I’ve ever met,” says Kristen Gwynn ’06, a longtime friend of Ocampo’s. “He has always been a goal-setter and will work towards that goal until he achieves it.”

Looking Up 
After his Appalachian Trail experience, Ocampo took a job in Boston studying vestibular perception—how the body maintains balance—in astronauts. That led him to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied aerospace. “I’d always been really fascinated with spaceflight, and so I wanted to kind of move into that direction,” he says. In his spare time he did—literally.

Over the next two decades, he climbed every mountain peak above 1,000 feet in New Jersey (there are 51) and every one above 3,500 feet in the Catskill Mountains. He summitted the tallest peak in every state. His fascination with altitude really took off in 2011, when he moved to Boulder, Colo., to start his doctorate at the University of Colorado.

“Colorado is really what opened the door into mountaineering for me,” he says. “Just being in that area, around all those huge mountains, it’s inspiring.” In addition to recreational climbing—which includes bagging all 58 of the state’s 14,000-foot-plus peaks—Ocampo volunteered with Rocky Mountain Rescue Group and broke the team record for most missions in a single year, twice, responding to more than 250 search, rescue, and medical operations.

He accomplished all this while simultaneously earning his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. Although he has worked at Boeing and Blue Origin, the space travel firm founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, Ocampo has yet to conquer his ultimate summit: spaceflight. “Maybe that’s also part of the draw of mountains for me,” he says. “I’m exploring what I couldn’t do with NASA.”

His friend and teammate on Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, Page Weil, says that while Ocampo is deeply driven and focused, he also tends to brush off extraordinary feats as if they were no big deal. In 2016, Ocampo became the first person to complete the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, approximately 740 miles from central New York to northern Maine, on a stand-up paddle board. Weil, who accompanied him for several legs of the journey, recalls, “When he gets to the end, after doing this ridiculous, over-the-top accomplishment, he barely wanted to tell anyone he did it.”

Asked by a reporter if he’d do it again, Ocampo replied, “I don’t do things twice. There are too many other things to do in the world.”

Although Ocampo can be methodical about pursuing his passion, checking off mountains he has scaled the way most people would check off  a grocery list, Weil says he has lightened up a little. “I think the biggest change I’ve seen in him in the last five years or so,” Weil says, “is that he’s admitting he’s having fun while doing this.”

New Heights
“He’s always had an internal restlessness that he’s translated into greatness, into pushing boundaries and bursting bubbles,” says Jillian Scavone ’04, a longtime friend who befriended Ocampo in psychology classes. “For as long as I’ve known him, it’s been in his nature to not take the typical path.”

Ocampo’s chosen path has taken him from Boston to San Francisco on a solo cross-country bicycle trip, scuba diving in the Raja Ampat archipelago in Indonesia, and even far above the mountains he scales. He has a commercial pilot’s license and once soloed a single-engine Piper Arrow from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Little surprise that when Haverford magazine first reached out for this story, Ocampo was on a boat in Indonesia with limited reception.

The one thing all his adventures over the years have had in common is that, just like his days running cross country, they push his limits, physically and mentally. “There’s the typical stuff—peace and nature and getting out and getting away—but I also have this component to me where I want to test myself,” he says. Last May, he completed what is, for most climbers, the pinnacle, literally and figuratively: Mount Everest in the Himalayas, Earth’s highest mountain at 29,032 feet.

“The last few vertical meters to the summit take slow minutes, but the going now is easy, almost effortless,” he wrote on Substack of the journey. “Finally and without fanfare, we’re on top. Before I can process what’s happening, I’m standing on the highest point, the clouds a sea below my feet, the horizon bending with the Earth’s curvature.”

Although the journey took a year of training to prepare for, Ocampo says that Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, was even more rewarding than Mount Everest, in part because of how daunting it was. “There’s no Sherpa culture there, so you’re carrying your own stuff,” he says. “You essentially have 120 pounds of gear on you that you’re huffing up the mountain, and you’re super isolated. The weather is a little less predictable and, overall, it was more frightening,” he says. A member of their expedition died during the journey.

But danger is part of the challenge for Ocampo. “There’s so much of a mental aspect to it for me, about facing fears and facing internal negativity,” he says. “I ask myself if I’m capable of doing this. Will it be too hard? Will I be too lonely?”
That last question is one that comes up more and more for him lately. One of the few territories Ocampo has yet to explore is that looming “summit” called middle age. Should he get married, buy a house, and have some kids, or sneak over the border into Russia to climb Mount Elbrus? He admits to thinking about domesticity more and more as he checks off high peaks.

“I think for me, the next big challenge is probably going to be settling down and staying in one place for a long period,” Ocampo says. Although that kind of lifestyle seems to run contrary to his very nature, the problem with mountain climbing is that they’re a finite resource. If you have enough time and dedication, you can tackle all the peaks worth bagging in a lifetime. And Ocampo is close to that goal. He already has his sights set on Carstensz Pyramid next.

Perhaps, for him, the only peak left is his lifelong goal of spaceflight. “If NASA came calling, I would take it in a heartbeat,” he said. “It’s been a dream of mine since I was a kid.”

—Jason Nark