THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 35
“They can’t help but do what they do,” Tim Tate said of the adventure athletes.Concord Navigator watch that Wal-
lace had given to Yates.
“Grief opens the gate to vulnera-
bility, and for whatever reason that’s
where I can stand up and be present,”
Tate told me. “The motif of the elder,
the wise man, the shaman, or some
sort of wizard dude—it’s not anything
I promote. It’s just me as I am. It has
worked well with the athletes.”I
n late September, Anker and Tate
sent me a selfie video: two silver-
backs on a ridge during a golden-hour
hike. They were inviting me to Boze-
man. “Come into our house and see
where I work, and see my life with
Alex,” Anker said. I wondered if he’d
meant to say “my life with Jenni,”
or if this locution was a testament to
Lowe’s enduring presence, in that
house and family and psyche. “Itwill have been twenty years, on the
fifth of October,” Anker went on.
“And all that we’re going through is
a really important part of our con-
nection, so—”
Tate said, “And stop by my office
for a quick analysis. That never hurts.”
Tate greeted me at the airport—
with a hug and a “my man”—and we
drove into town and went for a walk.
My wife and I had lived in Bozeman
in the early nineties, just out of col-
lege. Alex Lowe was already a celeb-
rity. A friend who lived across the street
from the Lowes introduced me to him
one day. It was like shaking hands
with Michael Jordan. At the time, I
had vague notions, inspired by mag-
azine articles and films, of a moun-
tain life—of pushing the envelope a
bit on skis—but I quickly ascertained
that I had neither the talent nor thea side business selling beef. He also
has a toothpick sponsorship. He said
that the biggest loss in his life was the
death of a cousin—same age, same
name—a Navy SEAL who died in Iraq
in 2007. “Tim gave me homework,”
Carter said. “He had me write a letter
to my cousin. I’ve spent two months
working on it.”
Hillary Allen, known to friends as
the Hillygoat, is an ultra-runner spon-
sored by the North Face. She also has
a master’s degree in neuroscience. In
2017, when she was twenty-eight and
competing in a thirty-five-mile “sky-
running” race along a ridge in Nor-
way, a rock gave way, and she fell a
hundred and fifty feet. She broke four-
teen bones in her back, rib cage, arms,
and feet and tore a bunch of liga-
ments. “I was pretty shaken up,” she
said. “I had nightmares forever. I was
mentally trying to figure out a way to
get back. I was dealing with the guilt
of wanting to devote myself to some-
thing that nearly killed me. People
suggested a sports psychologist or a
regular counsellor, but that wasn’t re-
ally the right fit.” Instead, she trav-
elled to Bozeman for an intensive
with Tate. “He’s my cup of tea. I’m a
mountain person. I’m not an ooey-
gooey dress-everything-in-pink kind
of woman.”
Tate, seventy-one, has had a ther-
apy practice in Bozeman since the
early eighties. After the suicide of a
friend who lived near Bozeman, Ted
Yates, who had fallen into a cycle of
depression and addiction following a
bad car accident, Tate discovered that
he had a knack for working with grief
and loss. Yates’s father had been a
highly regarded television documen-
tarian who was killed by gunfire while
covering the Six-Day War; Yates’s
stepfather was Mike Wallace, the “60
Minutes” correspondent. Tate pre-
sided at Yates’s funeral, at an Episco-
pal church in Georgetown. Afterward,
in the back seat of a limousine, he
found himself ministering to a dis-
traught Wallace, who’d lost a son in
a hiking accident in Greece, in 1962.
Wallace told him, “I don’t know what
you just did there, but I have deep re-
spect for it.” Katharine Graham asked
if Tate would preside at her funeral,
PHOTOGRAPH BY BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN FOR THE NEW YORKERtoo, he recalled. Tate now wears the