88 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 09/10.19
ON SUNDAY, the weather cleared and the
search and rescue team returned to Howse.
There would be no Easter miracle. With the
help of an avalanche dog, rescue workers
located the three bodies in the debris field.
It would have been news in the climbing
community if any one of these guys had been
killed, but to lose all three in a single accident
sent shock waves around the world. Writing
in The New York Times, Francis Sanzaro, the
editor of Rock and Ice, said it was like “wak-
ing up and learning that Tom Brady, Le’Veon
Bell and Antonio Brown had all been killed
on the gridiron.”
The next morning, I skied into the base
of Howse with a friend from Spokane to have
a closer look at the mountain. The wall was
a magnificent nightmare of black rock and
blue ice, soaring straight up into oblivion.
It started to snow, so we retreated while we
could still see our tracks. Near the trailhead,
we encountered a young woman in sneakers
postholing awkwardly toward Howse. She
had driven several hours from Calgary, she
said. We asked if she knew the climbers.
“No. I just read about it, but for some
reason it hit me really hard, and I felt like I
needed to come here,” she said. “I guess it’s
a spiritual journey.”
If Jess Roskelley was the American bad-
ass, then Hansjörg Auer and David Lama
were the European superstars. They stood
out in an Austrian culture that is obsessed
with mountaineering. The Österreichischer
Alpenverein—the Austrian Alpine Club—
boasts more than half a million members,
5 percent of the country’s population. Top
climbers are recognized on the street and
routinely have their restaurant meals paid
for by anonymous fans.
Auer may be most widely known for a
2018 viral video, shot on his helmet cam,
which shows him bailing off a mixed route
in Austria, rappelling from a tiny nubbin of
rock. But he’d been considered one of the
most skillful, audacious climbers in the world
since 2007, when he burst into prominence
by free-soloing a route in the Italian Dolo-
mites called Via Attraverso Il Pesce. Named
for a fish-shaped feature three-quarters up
a rock face, the route is a 2,700-foot 5.12c,
with a crux that involves handling a power-
ful, awkward undercling—with no ropes or
protection—above a thousand feet of air.
Until Alex Honnold’s 2017 ropeless as-
cent of El Capitan’s Freerider—which, at
3,000 feet and rated 5.13a, is slightly lon-
ger and more difficult than Il Pesce, Auer’s
climb stood as the benchmark free solo. He
didn’t bring a camera or a film crew and had
climbed the route only once, three years ear-
lier. The climb may well have vanished into
obscurity had it not been witnessed by two
Germans on a nearby route.
Growing up, Auer was an awkward kid,
skinny and shy, with jug ears, a tremendous
chin, and a gap in his front teeth. “I was al-
ways one of the last ones picked for the foot-
ball team,” he said in No Turning Back, a film
about his climbing life. “I would go hiking
alone in the mountains. I felt comfortable
there.” In 2017, he published an autobiogra-
phy, Südwand, that detailed his feelings as
an outsider and his struggles with anorexia.
He’d started a career as a math teacher
but eventually abandoned that path to climb
full-time. By his thirties, he was bringing
his formidable climbing skills to big alpine
routes. In October 2015, he was climbing
Nilgiri South in Nepal with Alex Blümel and
his close friend Gerry Fiegl when Fiegl, suf-fering from altitude sickness, slipped dur-
ing the descent. Auer and Blümel watched
in horror as their friend tumbled backward
and fell 2,000 feet to his death. A couple of
years later, Auer and Blümel completed a first
ascent of the north face of 22,982-foot Gim-
migela East, in Nepal. At the summit, they
spent half an hour in silence. Later, Auer
asked what Blümel had been thinking about.
“Gerry,” he said.
Lama’s path was equally impressive if
higher profile. He was the son of a Sherpa
mountain-guide father and an Austrian
mother who had him climbing early. When
Lama was five, he went to a climbing camp
run by Everest veteran Peter Habeler, who
declared him a prodigy. At 18, he was the
overall Climbing World Cup champion. It
didn’t hurt that he had Teen Beat good looks,
with caramel-colored skin, brown eyes, and
a lustrous dome of dark hair. At 21, he quit
competition to pursue alpine climbing ex-
clusively.
Bringing his peerless strength and techni-
cal abilities to the big mountains held great
promise, but it got off to a messy start. In
2010, Lama attempted to free-climb—that
is, using gear only for protection—the iconicCompressor Route on Cerro Torre in Pata-
gonia. (It was named this because the first to
climb it, Cesare Maestri, left a large air com-
pressor that he’d used to drill bolts dangling
from anchors on the rock. It remains there
today.) A film crew from Red Bull accompa-
nied him on the climb, stitching additional
bolts up the face and turning the iconic spire
into a glorified climbing wall. When Lama
failed, and the crew left bolts and ropes be-
hind on the peak, the critics pounced. “Go
home, gym rat,” one climber quipped online.
Lama took the criticism seriously and
committed to doing the climb in pure alpine
style. It took another two years, but at last
he “freed” the Compressor route, garnering
Lama and his partner, Peter Ortner, a special
mention at the Piolets d’Or awards. “David
was an incredible alpin-
ist, but he also was a really
good human,” says Had-
ley Hammer. “He was
gentle, had me laughing
all day, and could make
me feel like I was capable
of anything.”
In 2018, Lama pulled
off his pièce de résis-
tance: a solo ascent of
Lunag Ri, on the border
of Tibet and Nepal. He’d
attempted the route twice
before, in 2015 and 2016,
with Conrad Anker. The
second year, at 20,000
feet, Anker suffered a heart attack. With
Lama’s help, he was able to descend to base
camp, where he was evacuated by helicopter.
Afterward, Anker said he would no longer
climb at altitude. “David saved my life,” he
told me. In 2018, Lama returned to Lunag
Ri, completing the first ascent on his own in
three days.A FEW WEEKS after the accident on
Howse, I met with Benjamin Erdmann, 32,
a longtime climbing partner of Jess’s and
one of his closest friends. Erdmann is a
warm, vivacious entrepreneur who lives in
Leavenworth, Washington, where he raises
bees and runs a kombucha company. When
he was 18, his father attempted suicide,
and Erdmann got into climbing to help
work through his trauma. For several years,
along with Jess, he was one of the leading
American alpinists, with sponsorships from
Adidas and Camp USA.
Like Jess, Erdmann also worked on the
North Slope as a welding inspector. They
started a welding company, and their com-
patible schedules and lifestyles allowed them
to travel together, bagging hard routes in
Alaska, Canada, and South America. Then,“I STARTED CLIMBING TO HELP ME
DEAL WITH TRAUMA,” SAID JESS’S
FRIEND BENJAMIN ERDMANN, “BUT
NOW IT WAS CAUSING IT. I WAS LIKE
A HEROIN ADDICT WHO TURNED TO
METHADONE TO GET CLEAN,
THEN THE METHADONE BECAME
THE PROBLEM.”