32 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE ALTITUDE SICKNESS
Mountain climbers are intimately familiar with grief and guilt. A therapist thinks he can help.BY NICK PAUMGARTEN
I
n mountain towns, an early-au-
tumn snowstorm is a nuisance and
a lure. It runs some people out of
the high country but draws others in.
During the first week of October, 2017,
a foot or more of snow fell in the peaks
south of Bozeman, Montana. Before
dawn on the fifth, a group set off from
a parking lot in Hyalite Canyon, a pop-
ular outdoor playground, just outside
town. The man at the head of the group
was spooked by the new snow. To min-
imize exposure to avalanches, he made
sure that everyone ascended with cau-
tion, keeping to the ridgelines and bare
patches, away from the loaded gullies.
This was Conrad Anker, the famous
American alpinist. It is often said that
there are old climbers and there are
bold climbers, but there are no old bold
climbers. So far, Anker, at fifty-four,
was an exception.
There was nothing intrepid, really,
about this particular outing. It was ba-
sically a hike up a minor mountain for-
merly known as Peak 10031 (for its un-
remarkable altitude of 10,031 feet),
which had been rechristened in 2005
in honor of the late climber and Boze-
man idol Alex Lowe. The group was
headed to Alex Lowe Peak to spread
Alex Lowe’s ashes. Anker recognized
that it would be cosmically stupid to
kick off an avalanche on the way.
Lowe died in 1999, at the age of forty,
during an ascent of Shishapangma, in
the Himalayas. At the time, he was con-
sidered by many to be the world’s preëmi-
nent alpinist, and, even in a pursuit where
untimely death is almost routine, his
came as a shock. He was game for any-
thing yet prudent, in his way—more der-
vish than daredevil. Still, snow is water,
and it aims downhill. On Shishapangma,
a massive avalanche entombed two climb-
ers, Lowe and the cameraman David
Bridges, under tons of frozen debris. A
third, Anker, who’d fled in another di-
rection, got flattened and engulfed by
the blast, but after the air cleared he found
himself stumbling through an altered
landscape, alive and alone.
Lowe’s wife, Jennifer, back in Boze-
man, got the call from base camp twelve
hours later. Through the static of the
satellite connection, Anker confirmed
that her husband was gone. She’d had
premonitions and dreams about this
trip and—uncharacteristically, because
she’d been a climber, too, and a sup-
porter of her husband’s exploits—had
begged Lowe not to go. But he’d felt
obliged, both to his climbing partners
and to the North Face and NBC Sports,
which were underwriting the expedi-
tion. “It’s my job,” he’d told her. “It’s a
work trip.” She and Lowe had three
sons, aged ten, seven, and three.
Lowe’s peers had admired him not
only for his exploits on rock and ice
but for his attentiveness as a husband
and father, though it says something
about the mountaineer mind-set that
a man who spent several months of the
year away from home was considered
a dutiful dad. “We were all in awe of
him because he was able to climb and
be a father,” Anker told me. Anker and
Lowe were best friends, kindred spir-
its, and regular partners. Anker took it
on himself to look after Jenni and the
boys, spending more and more time in
Bozeman with them, doing what he
could to help them muddle through,
and also to find a purpose for him-
self—a reason to live. Less than two
years after Alex’s death, Anker and Jenni
were married. Anker adopted the boys,
and Lowe-Anker, as Jenni now called
herself, had another world-class climber
for a mate, with all the glory, anxiety,
and exasperation that entails.
In 2016, while in Nepal, Anker got
one of those calls where, as he puts it,
you know what the news will be be-
fore you even put the phone to your
ear. It was from his friend and colleague
David Göttler, who was climbing onShishapangma. He’d come across some
old North Face gear, and after some
digging had uncovered what appeared
to be the bodies of David Bridges and
Alex Lowe. Their corpses had melted
out of the glacier sooner than anyone
had expected—climate change. A cou-
ple of months later, Anker, Lowe-Anker,
and the three boys travelled to the Hi-
malayas to recover the bodies.
For the boys, the trip was proof that
their father was indeed dead, that there
was no chance of a miraculous return,
something that Max, the eldest, had
fantasized about as a child. Anker, for
his part, had had a recurring dream in
which Lowe showed up to reclaim his
brood. “It was all super heavy-duty for
me,” Anker told me. “Here’s his wed-
ding band, here’s his camera, here’s my
water bottle in his daypack.” Lowe was
found on his back, arms crossed over
his chest. “He had his hand with his
wedding ring curled against his heart,”
Lowe-Anker said. It was hard work to
dig out the bodies, wrap them up, and
haul them down to base camp, includ-
ing a rappel off a cliff. They’d lugged
in a cord of wood and some accelerant.
There is no real template for an en-
counter, in the high alpine, with the
frozen corpses of a father, husband, and
friend. “We looked at them for a day,”
Anker said. “And then we wrapped
them and cremated them.”
These were the ashes that the fam-
ily brought up to Alex Lowe Peak, a
year later. At the top, they scattered the
remains and said their farewells—clo-
sure, of a kind, eighteen years to the
day after Lowe disappeared under the
snow. It was dark when they got back
to the car.E
arlier that week, Anker had run
into a young climber named Hay-
den Kennedy at a Bozeman climbing
gym. Kennedy, twenty-seven, had a
few years earlier won a Piolet d’Or,