09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 89
in 2018, Erdmann abruptly quit climbing.
Two years before, they’d spent nearly a
month on the iconic peaks in Patagonia with
a third friend, Scott Coldiron. Of particular
concern was the body of Chad Kellogg, a
well-liked and highly respected climber from
Seattle. In 2014, Kellogg and his partner Jens
Holsten had been descending a steep, difficult
route on Fitz Roy called the Supercanaleta
when their rope got stuck in a stone flake
above them. Pulling on the rope dislodged the
rock, which hurtled down and struck Kellogg
in the head, killing him instantly. There was
nothing Holsten could do but descend.
The precarious location of the body pre-
vented any attempt at recovery, until 2016,
when Jess, Erdmann, and Coldiron were de-
scending the Supercanaleta and came across
Kellogg. Erdmann was the first to reach the
body, which was cemented to the wall by
snow and ice. He attempted to chop the ice
away with his ax but kept striking the limbs,
impaling them. It was arduous, gruesome
work that quickly became too upsetting and
risky to continue.
When Jess and Erdmann went back the
next season, the ice had thawed and Kel-
logg’s body had dropped to the glacier. They
gathered the remains and buried Kellogg in
a stone grave.
“After that I just couldn’t take it any-
more,” Erdmann told me. “I started climb-
ing to help me deal with trauma, 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.”
I’d often heard this kind of language—the
vocabulary of addiction—not just in the
climbing world but among many who pur-
sue dangerous activities like BASE jumping,
wingsuiting, ski mountaineering, big-wave
surfing, and so on. I marveled at the power of
such pursuits to override our hardwired in-
stinct for self-preservation. How close one
needed to stand—or fly, or ski, or surf—to
their own mortality was, to me, a question of
infinite fascination with no correct answer.
In Walk the Line, a documentary about
Anker and Lama’s attempt on Lunag Ri,
Anker is seen lying in the snow, incapacitated
from his heart attack, awaiting evacuation.
“I always wondered when I would get the
message that it’s time to let go of this game,”
he says to the camera. “And I think I got it.”
Many never do. In the past few years,
we’ve seen a raft of fatalities among high-
profile climbers: Justin Griffin, Kyle Demp-
ster, Scott Adamson, Ueli Steck, Marc-
André Leclerc, Ryan Johnson, Daniele Nardi,
Tom Ballard, Hayden Kennedy, Inge Perkins,
Kellogg, and Fiegl, to name a few.
In 2018, the North Face hired Timothy
Tate, a grief counselor and therapist in Boze-man, Montana, and a friend of Anker’s, to
work with athletes affected by tragedy and
survivor’s guilt. The program was prompted
in part by the 2017 deaths of Kennedy and
Perkins. The couple had been ski-touring
in Montana’s Madison Range when Perkins
was killed in an avalanche. Distraught and
traumatized, Kennedy, who was still suffer-
ing from the deaths a year earlier of his close
friends Dempster and Griffin, went home,
wrote a 15-page suicide note, and took his
own life.
“It was devastating for everyone,” Anker
says. “Hayden had recently moved to town,
and I just kept thinking, if someone had been
able to get to him, if he hadn’t been alone,
things might have been different.
“There’s this sense in our community that
shit happens in the mountains and you buck
up, take it like a cowboy, and don’t talk about
it,” he continued. “But now we’re trying to
have a better, bigger understanding of it.”ONE AFTERNOON in late May, I went to
visit with Joyce and John at their home a few
miles north of Spokane Valley. They live in
a Tudor-style house on 20 acres overlook-
ing a riparian wetland, with beautiful views
of nearby Mount Spokane. It was a bright,
breezy spring day, the kind you wish you
could enjoy without an asterisk.
The family had recovered Jess’s phone, on
which they found a handful of photos fromthe climb. John, who many years earlier had
worked for the Spokane medical examiner
analyzing accident scenes, pulled a few im-
ages up on the computer in his study. He had
used the metadata on the phone to trace the
climbers’ route, which had begun on M-16
before they veered left and put in a new line
to the ridge. A summit image, the three of
them crowding into the frame and grinning,
was captured at 12:43 P.M. “I could tell from
the summit photo that Jess felt really good
about himself,” he continued. “I mean, he
was beaming. I knew right then that he had
measured up.”
The men were descending when the ava-
lanche hit. Another climber in the area, un-
aware that the three were up there, had been
scouting potential climbs on Howse from the
road. He reported seeing a cornice collapse
and crash down the face at around 2 P.M. It
didn’t seem like they’d done anything to
cause the accident. “They got wiped some-
how,” John said. “That’s my impression. But
we don’t know. It’s all speculation.”
I asked if Jess had been worried about
keeping up with the Austrians, given their fit-
ness, speed, and comfort soloing big routes.
“He talked to me about it, and I said, ‘Hey
look, Jess. Hang with them. Carry less, go
lighter, but don’t take any chances. If you
need a rope, or if you feel more comfortable
with a rope, put it on. Don’t let them push you
AA to a point where you don’t feel comfortable.’ ”
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The east face of
Howse Peak