Terry graduated from the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine in 2004. Before starting residency and as a post-medical school project, Terry returned to Mt. Everest with an interest in helping to start a health clinic on the Tibetan side of the mountain, a place with essentially no healthcare infrastructure. During that trip, he was able to climb up to 24,000 feet on Mt. Everest from Tibet. He then moved to Portland, OR where he trained in the emergency medicine residency at Oregon Health & Science University. During residency, he received an opportunity to return to Mt. Everest as the expedition doctor for a Discovery Channel expedition, and he summited Mt. Everest on May 14, 2006. 

He became a board-certified emergency medicine physician and worked for a couple of years at Providence St Vincent Medical Center in Portland before joining the St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center emergency department staff in Ketchum, Idaho in 2011. He also served as Clinical Faculty in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, as well as Clinical Instructor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Washington.

In 2015, in addition to his work as a full time emergency medicine physician, Terry became Director for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in Blaine County and Stanley Ambulance District.  In order to better understand and serve his role as the EMS Medical Director, Terry enrolled in and completed the Blaine County Fire Academy in 2015 and would sometimes respond to ambulance calls with Ketchum Fire Department and with Wood River Fire and Rescue. That was the kind of thing Terry would do in all walks of his life; he would figure out what needed to be done, and then he would seek out how best to learn the skills he needed in order to more effectively help others.

A life of service to others was central in Terry’s ethos and legacy.  Following the massive April 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Terry raised earthquake relief funds by running and biking three ultra marathons in a few months: the Leadville Silver Rush (50 mile run, 50 mile bike) in Colorado, the Standhope Ultra Challenge (60 km run with >11,000 feet elevation gain - he still holds a course record) in the Pioneer Mountains of Idaho, and the Idaho Mountain Trail Ultra Festival 100 mile run near Salmon, ID.  He then traveled that Autumn 2015 to Yangri, Nepal to help with the rebuilding of homes and a school, as well as helping to deliver remote medical care (including a memorable high risk infant delivery) as medical director for the JRM Foundation.

The following year in 2016, Terry traveled with a group from the Wood River Valley to Laos to bike on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Their purpose was to explore the countryside and its people and to raise awareness about the issue of unexploded ordnance while raising funding for the Mines Advisory Group.

In 2017, Terry began to act upon his realization that there was not much national or international physician leadership in the area of policy addressing the impact of climate change on public health. He began working with the University of Colorado Consortium for Climate Change and Health, a collaboration that spurred him on to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to pursue a Masters in Public Health. His visionary leadership helped launch the University of Colorado’s Diploma in Climate Medicine Program, which trains clinical leaders on the impact of climate change on public health.

Terry spoke at 2017 TEDx Sun Valley on the topic of adventure and its central role in the human experience of awe as a source of inspiration for altruism and the development of a global consciousness, invoking astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s awed response to looking at the Earth from space describing, “a people orientation, a dissatisfaction with the state of the world but a compulsion to do something about it.” 

Adventures weren’t infinite for Terry, though to the outside observer they sure seemed to be, and they often overlapped with service...Everest 1999, Denali 2000, Everest 2005, Everest 2006, Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc 2009, Iceland 2010, Norway 2014 and 2015, Italian Dolomites 2015, Laos 2016, Japan 2017 & 2023 and Switzerland 2018, seemingly countless forays in the California, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Canadian Rockies. He frequently combined adventure with service, teaching search and rescue techniques as well as wilderness and avalanche safety with the Wasatch National Forest in Utah, at Mount Hood in Oregon, informally advised Sawtooth Mountain Guides, and served as medical advisor for Sun Valley Trekking and as professional observer and research collaborator for the Sawtooth Avalanche Center. He served as climbing ranger at Mount Rainier National Park, and worked in high mountain search and rescue in the Tetons and Idaho Rockies, Rainier, Sun Valley Ski Patrol, and Tahoe Backcountry Ski Patrol.

Ever introspective and seeking to help without causing inadvertent harm, while reflecting on the his 2018 travel to Nepal and from there to the slums of Kolkata, India, where he spent a few weeks providing volunteer medical services, the memory of treating a young man there who had been displaced from his home in Bangladesh due to rising sea levels bothered Terry. “I had come all the way across the world to help, but did my flight alone cause more harm than I could possibly repair in a few weeks of volunteering? If we as a health care community are to be true stewards of global health, we must not only seek new solutions to fight disease in this changing world, but also reconcile with our own contributions to these problems.”

In 2018, Terry founded The Adventure Activist, a nonprofit platform and meeting place for athletes, adventurers and activists to share their endeavors with each other and with wider audiences. He described The Adventure Activist, as “a path of personal adventure woven with paying it forward into the greater good. On that path, I’ve found athletes and explorers in adventure side by side with humanitarians doing good work in the arenas of climate change, social justice, environmental conservation, disaster relief, international health and more. We have planted trees in Borneo, studied the recession of ice in Greenland, cared for the “untouchable” in Calcutta, advocated for porters in Pakistan, removed mines from Laos, brought bikes to Africa, and more. We are physicians, professors, philanthropists, explorers and athletes. We are a community of friends who have made the same marks in finding our way.”

In the Fall of 2019, Terry was invited to be part of the inaugural class of the Harvard Media and Medicine certificate program for healthcare professionals interested in using storytelling to improve health. That experience helped him when, in the Spring of 2020, Terry’s role as Medical Director for Emergency Medical Services in Blaine County and Stanley Ambulance District ran headlong into the COVID pandemic. 

A natural leader with innate interpersonal skills, Terry was just who we needed right when we needed him. He had the ability to listen calmly to stories from the public, from healthcare professionals, and from other leaders on topics ranging from the shortage of personal protective equipment for hospital and EMS staff to the whole spectrum of opinions about individual and public masking and social distancing. This expertise earned him the nickname, “the Dr. Fauci of Blaine County.” Terry was uncanny in his capacity to keep his cool when trying to distill a limited but growing scientific understanding about this new airborne infectious disease into quickly but carefully considered public policy discussions which could occasionally excite others’ hyperbolic political fervor at times when reasoned, kind, and level-headed minds were needed.

In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, reeling from that first severe wave of the infection that shut down most hospital services for two weeks, Terry collaborated with other physicians, scientists, and other healthcare professionals to measure the percentage of people in the Wood River Valley who had been infected in the pandemic’s first two months. That effort led to a second and larger scientific collaboration in the form of the research project Blaine COVID STATS, a longitudinal study of COVID-19 infection in the Wood River Valley for which Terry was co-principal investigator. He brought together scientists from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and the National Institutes of Health. 

Prompting that COVID-19 study was Terry’s wondering how to get more viral detection tests into the local community in hopes of stopping “flying blind” and to begin seeing waves of COVID-19 infection coming ahead of time, so that our hospital and emergency medical system would not be overwhelmed again. Each of the scientists involved credited their work on that study for significant positive impacts in their professional and personal lives. For his efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, Terry earned the Idaho Hospital Association’s Excellence in Patient Care award and was honored by the South Central Public Health District.

Terry excelled at many skills…expert mountaineer in high altitude rock and ice, backcountry skier, wilderness mountain biker, avalanche instructor, author of a chapter in Paul Auerbach’s 7th edition of the esteemed textbook “Wilderness Medicine,” remarkable skill with ultrasound diagnostics in emergency medicine, excellent emergency room physician with expertise in listening to patients and thoroughly assessing their needs, extreme endurance athlete with ultra marathon runs in Colorado, Idaho, Italy, and France, basecamp manager for an expedition at Mount Everest in 1999 and 2005, expedition physician and summit climber on Mount Everest in 2006, Blaine County EMS medical director, ambulance training and calls with Ketchum Fire Department and Wood River Fire and Rescue, TEDx Sun Valley speaker, podcast producer, clinical researcher, educator of public and professional audiences, director of the University of Colorado’s Diploma in Climate Medicine Program, and provider of humanitarian care across the developing world.

On a lighter but important note, Terry seemed to always have a fresh loaf of sourdough in hand, he roasted his own coffee, and he loved to throw homemade pizza parties. He was a surprising "foodie," though few knew how he found time for those things between saving the world and exploring it.  

Dr. Terry O’Connor was a man of profound grace, compassion, composure, vision, humor, humility, aptitude, love of adventure, and above all a kind and thoughtful humanitarian. He embodied what many of us aspire to be and has been an inspiring friend to many people across the world in all walks of life. Terry was 48 years old on May 10, 2024, when it took not one, but two avalanches in instant succession to sweep him down a mountain, out of this world, and into our memories.  He was preceded in death by his father Kevin O’Connor and is survived by his mother Lilia O’Connor, his brother Chris O’Connor, Chris’s partner Karen Belcher, niece Ava O’Connor, his partner Emily Williams and his beloved dog Revy. He leaves behind a loving family and a close-knit community who will miss him deeply. In lieu of flowers, Terry’s family suggests donations be made to one of his favorite charitable organizations, a list of which can be found here.