34 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
the yearly mountaineering awards, for
a first ascent of the south face of an
infamous tower in Pakistan known as
the Ogre. Kennedy, from Colorado,
and his girlfriend, Inge Perkins, from
Bozeman, had recently moved in to-
gether in an apartment in town. Since
graduating from high school, Ken-
nedy had lived out of his van, as he
built his climbing résumé; Perkins,
twenty-three and a strong skier and
climber, too, was a senior at Montana
State University, majoring in math.
Anker lived down the street from the
Perkins family and had helped intro-
duce Inge to climbing. He had climbed
decades ago with Kennedy’s father,
Michael, an accomplished mountain-
eer, and had known Hayden since he
was a boy.
Two days after the ceremony on
Alex Lowe Peak, Kennedy and Per-
kins, while ascending Imp Peak, a re-
mote backcountry-skiing spot in a
range southwest of Hyalite Canyon,
were caught in an avalanche. That
early-season snow. Kennedy, partly
buried, dug himself out, but there was
no sign of Perkins. He searched the
debris field for hours, probing and
digging, although he must have known
that a buried victim almost never sur-
vives for longer than twenty minutes.
Eventually, he gave up, skied out, and
drove back to Bozeman. One can only
guess at the panic, anguish, and self-re-
crimination that coursed through him
in the hours that followed—he called
no one. In the apartment that night,
he wrote a fifteen-page letter and
then took a fatal dose of painkillers
and alcohol.
Kennedy had never seemed de-
pressed or violent or rash. “He had as
untraumatic a childhood as a kid could
have,” Michael Kennedy told me re-
cently. “What did we not see? We are
baffled.” Compared with the Ogre,
Imp Peak was supposed to be a rou-
tine jaunt, a bit of fun. “In his note,
he said, ‘It’s my fault we were there,’”
his father went on. “I think what was
troubling him in those final hours,
though there was nothing explicit
about this in his letter, was that he felt
he hadn’t lived up to his own ideals.”
A week before Hayden Kennedy
died, he had published a sorrowful
essay, on a climbing Web site called
Evening Sends, about the recent deaths
in the mountains of some of his climb-
ing partners, among them Kyle Demp-
ster, who had accompanied him on
the Ogre. Dempster and two others
had disappeared the year before in a
storm during an attempt on Ogre II.
In recent years, the community of the
world’s top climbers and skiers has
seemed to suffer the death rate of a
combat platoon. In the essay, Kennedy
posed the question that has often
dogged people who live through ex-
periences that kill others: “Why do
some of us survive and others don’t?”O
ne afternoon last fall, Anker
showed me a page in a journal
with about three dozen names hand-
written on it—friends and partners
who’d died, all but a couple of them
in mountain accidents, many sum-
moning up tragedies I knew as well
as some do Bible stories or baseball
lore. The list began with Anker’s men-
tor, Mugs Stump, who fell into a cre-
vasse while descending Denali, in 1992.
Scott Adamson, Justin Griffin, Hans
Saari, Doug Coombs, Ned Gillette,
Mira Šmíd, Hari Berger, Todd Skin-
ner, Walt Shipley, Ang Kaji Sherpa,
Ueli Steck, Dean Potter. Martyrs with-
out a cause, except perhaps that of
their own fulfillment.
“I had reached out to Hayden be-
fore and had talked to him about what
loss was,” Anker said. “You fall into
this pit, right after. It’s totally dark.
You think about taking your own life.
I hadn’t really talked much about it
before, because there was shame or
weakness associated with it.”
Late one evening, a week after Ken-
nedy’s suicide, Anker called Tim Tate,
a psychotherapist in Bozeman. Anker
and Tate often went for hikes, and
talked about their lives. Tate had helped
him and the Lowes work through some
dark periods, often marked by the re-
verberations of what Anker had come
to identify as his survivor’s guilt—the
nagging feeling that he was living
someone else’s life.
The conversation with Tate was
brief, as Anker’s conversations often
are. Anker wondered if Tate would be
open to consulting with the North
Face, the outdoor-gear company
founded in the Bay Area in 1966, aboutthe problems of loss, grief, and harm.
Anker was the captain of the North
Face athletes’ team, an assemblage
of more than a hundred outdoor ad-
venturers—rock climbers, mountain-
eers, extreme skiers, snowboarders,
ultra-runners—who are sponsored by
the brand.
The deaths of Kennedy and Per-
kins had a profound effect on many
of the younger North Face athletes,
even though the two of them hadn’t
been affiliated with the company. In
the spring of 2018, Anker brought
Tate to Alameda, California, to meet
with some North Face executives. “I’d
like to introduce my mentor, Gan-
dalf,” Anker said. This was a refer-
ence to Tate’s bearing, and his sha-
manistic attributes, which are deeply
rooted, perhaps even innate, and yet
not uncultivated. A Jungian by train-
ing, and a friend and acolyte of Jung’s
purported successor, James Hillman,
Tate has woven into his practice and
self-presentation a variety of rituals
and beliefs borrowed from Zen Bud-
dhism and from the indigenous tribes
of the northern plains. Tate laid out
his approach to mental health and his
version of what wellness might mean.
“Rather than manage symptoms or
problems, I prefer to give people a
context for their experiences,” he told
me recently. “Athletes have a partic-
ular calling we need to address. It isn’t
a mythology of proving themselves.
It’s a calling they cannot refuse. They
have it on a loudspeaker in their
brains. They can’t help but do what
they do.”
Soon, Gandalf started appearing at
North Face functions, as a kind of vis-
iting sage, and some of the athletes,
charmed by his presence, his way of
speaking, and his connection to Anker,
signed on to see him. Several of them
went to Bozeman, on the North Face’s
dime, to undergo what Tate called in-
tensives, which consisted of two two-
hour sessions over two days, the as-
signment of various tasks, and, if the
stars aligned, some mentoring from
Anker and Lowe-Anker.
“I grew up as a cowboy,” Mark Car-
ter, a snowboarder for the North Face
team, told me. “Therapy isn’t some-
thing we do.” Carter was brought up
on a cattle ranch in Wyoming and has