On the Edge of the Cliff with Dr. Rob Rice

“Edge of the cliff” is often used as a metaphor for a situation that has suddenly taken a dangerous turn. It suggests uncertainty of some sort, and can lead to success or failure depending on what happens next. For Dr. Rob Rice, a professor and chair of the mental health counseling program in the Wegmans School of Nursing, this metaphor came to life when he found himself on a cliff ledge with his dog, Walter, in 2019.

Rice details his experience and the lessons that came full circle in his 2024 book, Cliff Notes: Contemplating Life on the Edge.

In the last decade, Rice has become keenly interested in nature and the benefits it has on mental health. The goal of writing Cliff Notes was to use the story of Rice’s experience to talk about mindfulness, the benefits of nature in mental health, and consciousness. 

Cliff Notes takes place on Moxham Mountain in the Adirondacks in 2019 while Rice was on his family’s annual camping trip. Rice set out on a hike up the mountain trail with his wife, daughters, and their white labrador, Walter, who led the hike off-leash. Around three miles in, he recalls hearing his daughters scream up ahead at the crest of the hill. He threw off his backpack and ran up to where they were, only to discover a cliff at the opening of the trees.

Around 20 feet down, Walter had fallen over the edge of the cliff, miraculously landing on a small ledge. “I blacked out. Next thing I remember, I was on the side of the cliff with him and half of him was on my shoulder, half of him was on a ledge,” Rice said. “I had one foot in a crack in the cliff and my other foot on this little dead tree branch that was coming out of it. I was on the side of the cliff looking straight down a thousand feet.”

While the experience was harrowing, it provided Rice with an opportunity for reflection.

“I was in shock and nervous that making a noise would cause me and Walter to fall,” he said.

When he finally felt able to safely speak, he realized he would not be able to get himself and Walter back up the cliff on his own. They needed a helicopter rescue, which was estimated to take about an hour to arrive. “The story itself chronicles that next hour of me and Walter. In those moments I was so connected with him,” said Rice.

With the help of a few kind strangers who brought dogs of their own, almost a symbolic twist of fate, they tied their dogs’ leashes—along with Walter’s— to form a makeshift rope. Rice was able to climb up the cliff with Walter and the helicopter was called off.

This interruption was not enough to make Rice end his adventure early. While his family insisted on returning to camp, Rice wanted to finish what they had come for: to hike up the mountain. To him, this served as a metaphor for resilience— to climb back up and keep moving forward.

A few years later, after Walter passed away, Rice returned to Moxham Mountain with his ashes. This commemorative chapter of the book, which was added later in the writing process, explores the idea of what Walter might have been thinking in those moments on the cliff with Rice, who was having a wave of thoughts of his own. It was an act of love that brought Rice down to the cliff ledge with Walter—something more powerful than reason taking over. “If I was conscious to get down there, I might not have gone down there,” he said.

The final chapter shares the title’s name, where Rice draws on lessons and ideas that he has learned and taught his students. “There are all these powerful concepts that I’ve learned over my career and from my mentors who encouraged me to write [the book].”

Those mentors are part of Rice’s “Breakfast Club” to whom he credits for urging him to turn his experience into a written work. “I’ve got three brilliant psychiatrists and psychologists who I’ve learned from throughout my career, who have become close friends, and I meet with them as often as I can on Friday mornings for breakfast.”

The Friday after his incident on the mountain, Rice was eager to tell his the “Breakfast Club”

what had happened to him. “I hadn’t even thought about writing it until I spoke with them about it. I was resistant to that because it’s not the type of writing I do, it didn't feel like it was worthy of me writing and people reading,” he said. “They convinced me to do it as a way of what they call ‘sharpening my tools.’”

One of his mentors took on woodworking during retirement, and explained to Rice that no matter how much time he spends woodworking, he needs to devote 25 percent of it to sharpening his tools. “That’s one of the things they tried to convey to me with writing. You can’t just write, you need to be writing these types of things actively as a way of sharpening your tools. I tried to take that to heart, and that’s how this got started,” said Rice.

Beginning to write the first draft of Cliff Notes helped sharpen Rice’s tools to write his first book, Video Games in Psychotherapy. “Once I wrote that, I felt like, ‘I can do this, I can write a book,’ and I dug back into that project [Cliff Notes] looking at it through a different lens,” said Rice. “It definitely helped me process what happened, but more than that, I think the experience helped me think about other things that I needed to be thinking about in my life at that time.”

Mindfulness, connection, and observation are lessons that Rice regularly teaches his mental health counseling students, though his experience on the side of the cliff made these lessons come full circle. This allowed him to illustrate the experience as a metaphor for something much more meaningful.

“In the moment on the side of the cliff, there was a lot of gratitude being exchanged by me and Walter,” Rice said. “Since that experience, I’ve gotten involved in learning more about gratitude interventions in mental health.”

With the aid of a grant from Fisher, Rice is currently in the process of developing an app in collaboration with RIT called Appreciation Ally that helps users practice gratitude.

One doesn’t have to literally find themselves at the edge of a cliff like Rice in order to find meaning. “It’s about being able to appreciate discomfort, and recognize that almost everything can be fixed. I think we’re wired to be really uncomfortable sometimes, and if we don’t have that experience, then we’re less resilient in our regular lives. I think we seek extreme discomfort without knowing it and we don’t really realize its benefits until we’re thrust into it,” he said. “You can go really quickly from ‘this is the worst possible thing that can happen’ to ‘what a great story.’”

Cliff Notes and Rice’s other work can be found on his website.

This article was written by Brooke Eastman, a senior media and communication major. Eastman currently works in the Office of Marketing and Communications at Fisher for the spring 2025 semester.