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Although Howse Peak is little known be-
yond the climbing world, adventurers re-
gard it as one of Canada’s most inhospita-
ble and unassailable mountains. It looks
unapproachable from the Icefields Park-
way, like a quilt nature patched together
from diabolical elements.
It has a sheer, 1,300-metre-tall striated
grey wall, and unsteady rocks as sharp as
razor blades. In winter, there is deep snow
and a glacier to traverse. Hundreds of cor-
nices hang from ledges all over its upper
reaches. Shards of ice cling to cliffs. Along
its sides, skinny remnants of avalanches
look like fingers that clawed their way
down.
Roberts and Fauteux stopped. “The sun
had just come out and it looked beautiful,”
Roberts says.
As they watched, a cornice, a large,
dense mass of snow, broke off from a ridge
below the summit and triggered an ava-
lanche. Roberts snapped pictures with his
phone. “It looked like the whole mountain
was falling apart,” he says.
From where he stood three kilometres
away, he had no idea anyone was on
Howse Peak.
Jess Roskelley, Hansjorg Auer and David
Lama had begun their ascent before dawn.
Early in the afternoon, three of the world’s
most accomplished mountaineers became
only the second group of climbers to reach
the 3,295-metre summit in winter. Shortly
after that, they started to make their way
down.
The next day, the members of the North
Face’s elite Global Athlete Team were de-
clared missing. When Roberts heard, it felt
like a punch in the gut. “I had an inkling
that what I had watched was connected to
it,” he says. “It was very eerie.”
He told friends. They urged him to con-
tact authorities. He provided information
that helped document a disaster that
shocked climbers around the world.
“I somehow got lucky,” Roberts says.
“Those guys didn’t.”
Ë /"2 02/2$0-/Ì
n the week before they
climbed Howse Peak, Roskel-
ley, Auer and Lama tuned up
by completing a difficult ice-
climb on Mount Andromeda, a 3,450-
metre peak along the boundary of Banff
and Jasper national parks.
They went to a climbing-club meeting in
Canmore, where they heard Geoff Powter,
an author and clinical psychologist, talk
about risk.
Powter, who has climbed for 46 years,
said that he attended 15 funerals during his
first 10 years of mountaineering.
“I understand risk to be an intricate
part,” he says. “It is not the purpose of the
climb, but a measure that establishes how
challenging one is.”
Powter scaled Howse in 1995.
“It is full of mystery and from pure aes-
thetics, it is difficult not to look up and say,
‘Oh my God,’ ” Powter, 62, says. “When you
realize it has only been done by a relative
few, that elevates it into a different strato-
sphere. It is a completion of a lifetime.”
Howse Peak checks all the boxes for
thrill-seeking climbers. Difficult. Danger-
ous. Rarely conquered. Canada has prob-
ably a dozen dangerous peaks that attract
mountain climbers. But there is little ad-
venture left with them anymore, having
been scaled innumerable times. And by
comparison, Mount Everest, at more than
8,000 metres, has been scaled successfully
more than 4,000 times, including a few
successful attempts in the winter.
Howse Peak, however, is in rarefied air.
Records show that Howse Peak was
climbed in 1902 for the first time. After
that, there is no evidence of an attempt for
65 years. In all, probably only a few dozen
people have successfully reached the top.
Those who do nearly always climb in sum-
mer and take a more moderate approach
up the northeast buttress, the line that
separates the east and north faces.
A sporting climb won’t satisfy the best.
They need one that stirs the soul.
“The whole notion of rendering the im-
possible possible and the untenable tena-
ble is very alluring,” Sharon Wood says.
In 1986, the Canmore mountain guide
became the first North American woman
to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Four years later, she and a partner climbed
Howse Peak in summer. They ascended
the northeast buttress.
“You climb it with a hope and a prayer,”
Wood says, sitting on the deck of her home
and surveying a backyard as rich as an En-
glish garden. “All of your senses are flared.
You listen to the sound of the rock under
your feet and beneath your palms.
“It is a big, messy problem to solve.”
“I hear people say you can do it when
conditions are right, but I disagree. It is
never safe,” says Will Gadd, who with two
partners was the first to reach the summit
in the winter, in December, 2002. The
climb took two days over a route he named
Howse of Cards.
“It is a dangerous face. The environment
interacts in ways you can’t control.”
At 52, the Canmore resident is one of the
world’s greatest adventurers. He is a four-
time national sport-climbing champion
and twice set world records for paraglid-
ing, the second time flying for 423 kilo-
metres.
As with Roskelley, Auer and Lama, he is
an alpine climber. Alpinists seek the most
challenging or highest mountains and en-
gage them as lightly and quickly as they
can. They use almost no safety gear.
“It’s like the stock market,” Gadd says.
“Everybody thinks they know the secret to
success. There is one difference. You lose
your fortune in the stock market. You lose
your life alpine climbing.”
Powter met the North Face climbers atthe lecture, but talked mostly with Auer.
The Austrian famous for daring solo as-
cents asked him what he thought about his
group’s coming attempt at Howse Peak. “I
told him I knew they were elite climbers,
that they were well prepared and would
make the right choices,” Powter says.
In the immediate aftermath, he won-
dered if they had made a poor decision. He
decided they hadn’t. “You can do every-
thing right and things can still go wrong,”
Powter says. “It is not out of line in our
sport for someone to die.” 0
/2 /$42s far as everyone knew, Roskel-
ley, Auer and Lama set out to
duplicate a winter climb only
one other group had achieved.
The fact that they did something different,
something that would enthrall climbers,
was a secret that nearly died with them.
Photographs recovered from their
phones and cameras show them begin-
ning to ascend Howse Peak’s soaring east
face at 5:49 a.m. It was windy and snowing
lightly, and very cold, between -5 C and -15
C. As much as 50 centimetres of snow had
fallen in the preceding week.
They began by following a route called
M16 that Barry Blanchard and two partners
established in March of 1999. It brought
Blanchard’s party to within a hair of the
summit, but not to the top because its path
was blocked.
Blanchard, a Canmore guide, nearly
died on the way down when struck by a
mushroom-shaped cloud of snow. By luck,
the impact thrust him backward rather
than over a ledge and into a fatal fall. “It
broke my right leg, but saved my life,”
Blanchard says. “If I was standing one foot
to the right, I would have gotten scraped
off the wall.”
In 1999, Blanchard and his companions
spent five days on Howse Peak, including
three in snow caves during a winter storm.
The climb was so gruelling that Blanchard
lost 15 pounds. After he was injured, he
rappelled – with a fracture – 300 metres to
where a helicopter pilot could rescue him.
“Getting on the side of an alpine moun-
tain is dangerous by definition,” Blanchard
says. “It is a fine kind of madness.”
He named the route M16 because he and
his partners felt like they were under the
gun the entire time. Nobody tried M16again until that mid-April morning.
Roskelley, Auer and Lama started out on
the route, but abandoned it two hours in.
Perusing the face, they found a more effi-
cient path. After making a jog to the left,
they were able to clamber up a thin line
that nobody had ever dared try. It gave
them access to the upper reaches of a mas-
sive waterfall, which they free-climbed for
12 storeys.
From there, they were only about 300
metres from the summit with a deep ridge
of snow between. It took them 90 minutes
to wade through it. They climbed from bot-
tom to top in less than seven hours and
then stopped to pose for a picture.
If it weren’t for photographs, their ac-
complishment and deaths would have re-
mained a mystery. It took months of
sleuthing by John Roskelley, the climber’s
father, and Grant Statham, a visitor-safety
expert in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay Na-
tional Parks.
For the first time, Statham used time
stamps and location data from photos to
reconstruct a climb.
“As the pieces came together, it blew my
mind,” Statham says. “I knew I was sitting
on top of an international-climbing story.
The route they took was incredibly excit-
ing, and the short time it took them is
mind-bending.
“They lived up to their reputation.”
In a picture on the summit at 12:44 p.m.,
Roskelley beams beside Auer and Lama.
“You can see the joy in his eyes,” Stath-
am says. “The guy was living his dream.”Ë20 4<0 / 020Ìess Roskelley was 9 pounds 14
ounces at birth and only a day
or two old when his parents
strapped him into a car seat
and headed for a climbing adventure in the
Grand Tetons.
His dad, John, was the most prolific U.S.
mountaineer of his time. Sir Edmund Hill-
ary dined with the Roskelleys at their
home in Spokane, Wash., when Jess was
young.
As a teenager, he began to climb in the
Pacific Northwest and by 18 was working as
a mountain guide. In 2003, at the age of 20,
he became the youngest person to reach
the summit of Mount Everest. He accom-
plished the feat with his dad.
“I took him on a number of adventures I/$! 0 ̄Howse:Mysteriousmountainchecksalltheboxesforthrill-seekingclimbers
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