38 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
in an airport: “My hoodie’s up. I’m
disappearing. And now here comes
this guy, super hungry eyes, and so I
talk to him. He’s, like, ‘I named my
company Meru.’ He was your classic
business dude, a bankruptcy guy. And
then I was pissed.”
We went in the back door of his
house: garden, garage, toys and tools,
dogs. Lowe-Anker met us in the
kitchen. She asked about our plan to
spend the next night in the moun-
tains above Hyalite Canyon. “Who’s
going?” she asked me, in her mordant
high-country drawl.
“Just Conrad, Tim, and me.”
“The poor sad men,” she said, with
a mocking sigh. Lowe-Anker is some-
times reluctant to indulge the climb-
ers in their sorrow. Later, she elabo-
rated: “We have so many friends here,
including young women whose hus-
bands have died. Certainly, there are
some women who are the ones who
die, in this arena, but it’s mostly men.
And there’s a lot of brokenhearted
women and families left behind.” She
cited a remark she’d heard decades ago
that comes up all the time, in refer-
ence to mountaineering: “It’s not that
different from young men going off to
war. Women like me, it’s not new. How
many women are there in war-torn
areas who have lost their husbands and
a raft of sons and family members?”
Anker said, “A fundamental differ-
ence, and why people are critical of
this, is that we do this by our own vo-
lition, whereas if you’re a firefighter, a
soldier, or a police person, you’re a hero,
you did that on behalf of other peo-
ple in society, or because you had to.”
Mountain climbing is a modern
curiosity, a bourgeois indulgence. It
consists mostly of relatively well-to-do
white people manufacturing danger
for themselves. Having been spared
war, starvation, mass violence, and op-
pression, its practitioners travel great
distances and endure great sacrifices
to test their bodies and minds, en-
counter beauty, and experience the
precariousness of existence and the
terror and whatever revelations, fleet-
ing or otherwise, may come of it.
Though the whole enterprise may
seem crazy or stupid or pointless, to
many people it represents a necessary
extreme of human endeavor, that
combination of excellence and aber-
rance which propels a sliver of the
population to set about going to themoon or writing symphonies, or drop-
ping out entirely, as latter-day her-
mits and monks.
Each climbing season, there is a
new tale to baffle the flatlanders. Last
year, a climber named Daniele Nardi
left behind a wife and their six-month-
old son to make a fourth attempt on
one of the most dangerous routes in
the world, the Mummery Rib, on
Nanga Parbat, in Pakistan. His part-
ner, Tom Ballard, had lost his mother
on K2. What a story the two men
made: the obsessive and the undaunted
son. Nardi and Ballard died, of course.
Max Lowe, who is thirty-one, is
finishing a film about his family. “They
aren’t so sure about the whole thing,”
he told me recently. “They’re, like,
‘Why do you need to do this? Why
do you need to stir up all this grief ?’
Maybe I should’ve just gone to ther-
apy.” Some people compare climbing
to heroin: addictive, selfish, deadly.
And yet, while society tends to con-
demn people who abandon their fam-
ilies for opiates and die of an over-
dose, we often treat fallen climbers,
including Max’s father, as heroes. “It’s
a lot to ask someone to give up some-
thing they love for you,” Max said.Anker, right, with Alex Lowe, two years before Lowe died in the Himalayas, in an avalanche that Anker survived.