09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 87
JE
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R
OS
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EY
It was not impossible that a survivor, maybe
two, was stranded on Howse with no way
to communicate. But the mood was heavy.
Alli sobbed fitfully, the grim reality of loss
crashing down in waves. Joyce cleaned the
kitchen, her face drawn. John made calls to
correct errors in the numerous stories being
rushed out. Jordan left to sit in Jess’s truck,
recovered from the trailhead and now parked
near the condo.
Growing up, Jess had a conflicted relation-
ship with climbing. “Through high school I
was dragged into the mountains as my dad’s
fabricated climbing partner,” he wrote in
2014 on the blog of MSR stoves, a sponsor.
“It’s as if I was planned with precise timing
to be his young partner as he grew older and
needed a young guy to keep him energized.”
For a while, he opted for more conven-
tional sports: cross-country, wrestling.
He raced mountain bikes. There were years
when it appeared he might not climb at all.
But mountains were his destiny. He was
built to climb, with long, ropy arms, a narrow
waist, and broad shoulders that he decorated
with colorful tattoos. At the top of his chest,
in a necklace of ink, he inscribed one of his
favorite quotes, from Ernest Shackleton:
FORTITUDINE VINCIMUS (“By endurance
we conquer”). He drove big, lifted trucksand favored T-shirts and flat-brimmed ball
caps. “He was the American badass,” said
Scott Mellin, global manager for the North
Face’s mountain sports.
Jess had a domestic side, too. He doted
on his white bulldog, Mugs, and fawned
over Alli, filling his Instagram with images
of them frolicking in romantic locations—
Thailand, Iceland, Costa Rica. He had a
playful, irreverent sense of humor, with a
penchant for fart jokes. Once, halfway up an
ice climb, he radioed his wife, who was ski-
touring nearby.
“Are you there? Over.”
“What’s wrong?” she replied, alarmed.
A pause, then she heard a blast of flatu-
lence rumble over the speaker.
“Jess!” she shouted, and burst out laugh-
ing.
He had always been bright, but school had
been challenging. He developed a keen ethical
sensibility and a temper to go with it. Bullies
infuriated him. Joyce, a ninth-grade teacher,
made more than a few trips to retrieve her
son from the principal’s office for fighting.
In junior high, he was diagnosed with atten-
tion deficit disorder. He had trouble staying
focused. “If he was in a quiet classroom, he
would hear the teacher at the pencil sharp-
ener in the room next door,” Joyce told me.He was prescribed Adderall, which helped.
Even more therapeutic, though, was rock
and ice climbing. It channeled the energy
and anxiety into his hands, into his ice
tools, helping calm his mind.
In 2003, when Jess was 20, he and John
climbed Everest together. The expedition
was long and grueling, plagued by dodgy
weather. When they finally reached the
summit, they could see only clouds, and
the wind was blowing so hard they were
forced to their knees. The pair embraced
and wept.
Everest was a turning point. Jess didn’t
much care for traditional Himalayan ex-
peditions—on the MSR blog, he referred
to Everest as a safari, “a luxury experi-
ence for the well-to-do”—but he had
proven himself on a serious climb at ex-
treme altitude. Afterward he “decided
that alpine climbing was the purest form
of the sport.” He dropped out of the Uni-
versity of Montana during his sophomore
year and took a welding job on Alaska’s
North Slope. It was demanding work but
lucrative; most important, it allowed him
to climb for weeks at a time.
For the next decade, Jess tackled icy
peaks and walls in Alaska, Montana,
Canada, and South America—striving to
turn his passion into a profession. On a
climb, he always seemed to be at his best
when things were at their worst.
“I’ve seen Jess in tough situations where
shit’s going down and he’s got this iron un-
derneath,” says Coldiron, a former Army
sergeant in Iraq who now works for the Spo-
kane fire department. “It’s this quality you
don’t see often, this ability to go to another
level and do what needs to be done. I saw it
in combat in Iraq. I see it in really intense, big
fires when people’s lives are on the line.”
In the spring of 2017, Clint Helander, a
climber based in Anchorage, reached out
to Jess to try a first complete ascent of the
south ridge of Alaska’s Mount Huntington.
The ridge rises in a series of steep pinnacles,
like a row of giant shark’s teeth, each more
imposing than the last. The pair hadn’t
climbed together before but had crossed
paths in Patagonia and hit it off. “There are
a lot of guys who can climb hard ice and hard
snow,” Helander told me, “but Jess had the
kind of commitment you long for on this
kind of route.”
Success on Huntington helped secure
Jess a contract with the North Face. “He had
really gotten to a place where he was mak-
ing it,” Alli said. “He wasn’t going to have
to weld this year. He could train full-time,
which, I have to tell you, over the last couple
months the change in his attitude was just
significant. He was so psyched.”From left: Roskelley,
Auer, and Lama on the
summit of Howse Peak.
The image was recovered
from Roskelley’s phone.