THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 37
blue beanbag chair.” (He’s now close
to his son.) Picture the apostate dis-
embarking from the motorcycle, in a
paisley shirt, a scarf, and tight pants
tucked into high boots, and rolling
into his human-sexuality class at
Golden West. “Faculty guys took ex-
ception to me and my character, and
my teaching style,” he said. “I was into
learning theory.” A woman named
Susan, who had been unhappily mar-
ried to a Mennonite from Intercourse,
Pennsylvania, began showing up to his
hum-sex class.
Tate and Susan hit the road in his
Datsun. They wound up, after some
months, in Miles City, Montana, the
home of Tate’s older sister, where he’d
spent his teen-age summers working
on haying teams and combine crews.
Susan worked as a waitress at a bar
called the Hole in the Wall, and Tate
got a job as a counsellor at the Pine
Hills School for Boys, a state institu-
tion for hard-core juvenile delinquents.
“The approach had been all Thora-
zine and nose-to-the-wall,” Tate said.
He was hired to try a more progres-
sive regimen. “These were tough, tough
kids. It was there that I lost any resi-
due of naïveté about how dark the
human psyche can go.” The couple
moved to Bozeman in 1982, and had
a daughter. Susan got a job at a hair
salon called A Head of Our Time,
and Tate taught history and started
his therapy practice.
In the early eighties, Tate fell in
with a part-Crow, part-Sioux, part-
white Montana man named Scott Fra-
zier, who had had a near-death expe-
rience while working at an oil refinery
in Billings, and who, not without some
tribal resistance, had become a Sun
Dance chief and opened the notori-
ously gruelling ceremony to outsid-
ers. Tate participated in ten of these,
each comprising three or four days of
intense physical exertion, without food
or water. At Frazier’s urging, he found
and retrieved four eagle carcasses in
the wild, for the plumage. He also put
himself through traditional high-coun-
try fasts—vision quests, of a kind.
“When you sit by yourself for three
days on a mountaintop with no food
or water, shit goes down,” he said. “All
of the boundaries disappear.
“Whatever I’m into, I go deep,” he
went on. “But it became clear that it
was becoming a little culty, and so I
excused myself.”
Tate also became involved in the
nascent men’s mythopoetic movement
led by the poet Robert Bly. An arti-
cle about Bly and the Grimms’ com-
ing-of-age fairy tale “Iron John” (which
would become the title of Bly’s 1990
best-seller) piqued Tate’s interest, and
he attended a Bly retreat on Lake Hu-
bert, in Minnesota. “There were morethan a hundred men there,” he said.
“It got pretty Western. At one point,
they had set up maybe six sweat lodges.
The guy who did it was way past his
skill set, and at that time I was three
years into my work with the Crow
medicine man, and I intervened. I got
it back on track.” At the men’s gath-
erings, you were expected to discover
your animal totem. Tate’s was a moose.
Bly’s was a bear. “I would do a moose
strut, and then Bly and I would wres-
tle,” he said.
“I love big men,” Tate told me. “I’m
a big guy. I like being around big
guys. Big personalities, big stature.
That’s really why Conrad and I get
along so well. I feel most comfortable
with accomplished men who don’t have
huge egos.”T
hat evening, we met up with Anker
and the writer David Quammen
for a drink. These three are among
the regulars in informal meetings of
Bozeman men who call themselves
the Scotch Club: occasional well-
oiled nights in backcountry cabins.
Stories, verities, the shedding of
masks. At this mini-session, as at other
gatherings in town, I kept hearing
references to regular people (that
is, those who are not world-famous
alpinists) who’d lost loved ones to
climbing and skiing accidents; in this
cohort, it seemed almost as common
as cancer. Anker and Lowe-Anker,as the mahatmas of the mountain
scene, seemed to have connections to
all of them.
Anker is sandy-haired, strong-
jawed, intense, and introverted; peo-
ple in Montana have urged him to
run for office, but he is certain that
he is too thin-skinned. He grew up
in central California, just outside Yo-
semite National Park, on land that
had been in his father’s family since
the gold rush. His mother, from out-
side Dresden, met his father, a ser-
viceman, in Germany, just after the
war. Anker got his start as a climber
on California granite, then gravitated
toward the icy amplitude of the Hi-
malayas, before becoming a pioneer
of a new kind of challenge: high-al-
titude big walls. He made the first as-
cent, with Jimmy Chin and Renan
Ozturk, in 2011, of Meru, a tower of
rock and ice in India that Mugs Stump
had attempted twice in the eighties.
It became the basis for a documen-
tary film. Anker has a knack for dra-
matic story lines. He first made a name
for himself outside climbing circles
in 1999, when he found the body
of the early British alpinist George
Mallory, not far from the summit
of Mt. Everest, where he’d perished
seventy-five years before. Anker,
whether by fate or by his own design,
was caught up in a cycle of disappear-
ance and reappearance, of death and
its aftermath.
Anker had inherited Alex Lowe’s
celebrity mantle in Bozeman. After
drinks that evening, he took a curi-
ous route on the walk home, opting
for back alleys instead of Main Street,
slouch-darting along an archipelago
of shadows. “Hungry eyes,” he said.
He explained that people around town
often looked at him in a way that in-
dicated they wanted his time or at-
tention. Fame was part of the deal—
he’d chosen it, as a high achiever and
the well-compensated face of a sport
and a big sporting-goods brand—
but he was uncomfortable under the
public’s imploring gaze. He found
greater ease at the planet’s harsh,
unpopulated extremes, in the com-
pany of another superhuman or two,
whose hungry eyes were invariably
trained upward. Happiness is a cold
bivy sack. Recently, Anker met a fan