THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 39
“But if you can’t expect your parents
to give that up for you, what can you
expect in this life?”
A
nker had proposed a night of
camping—three sad men, one
small tent—at his go-to getaway in
Hyalite Canyon. The Perch, as he
called it, was a recurring location in
his dreams, but it was also, I soon
learned, a narrow ledge on a cliff, re-
quiring some exposed scrambling on
a rock face, which was well above my
pay grade, and, besides, the forecast
was calling for a blizzard and tem-
peratures in the teens. “It’s going to
get nasty,” Anker said, grinning.
“It’s gonna get real Western,” Tate
said. Instead, we’d go to a cabin be-
longing to a family friend: a Scotch
Club hang. On the second anniver-
sary of the deaths of Kennedy and
Perkins, with a truckload of provi-
sions, we four-wheeled it to the cabin,
which was in a clearing above a steep
slope, with a view toward the snow-
clad Hyalite peaks, including the
one named for Alex Lowe, and one
that, in a certain light, looked—to no-
body but me—like the painted face
of Gene Simmons.
We opened up the cabin, then drove
to the end of the canyon and began
hiking up a trail that wound through
a conifer forest toward a band of cliffs.
The men had a permit to harvest fire-
wood, so we carried a couple of axes,
and Anker had a chainsaw, which he
soon revved up and sicced on branches,
limbs, and trees, as we made our way
uphill. Slightly hunched and a little
duck-footed, in a hoodie and orange
earmuffs, he stomped around and
called out commands, amid a bedlam
of sawdust and exhaust. On his or-
ders, we carried the debris deeper into
the woods. Tate worked hard to main-
tain his balance as he heaved boughs
of spruce.
The trail led up to the most pop-
ular ice-climbing spot in the canyon,
called Genesis, and though I’d begun
to suspect that Anker had us throw-
ing stuff around just for kicks, he ex-
plained that we were tidying up the
trail in time for winter, to improve the
hike up and the ski down. “This is
how I climb mountains,” he said. I’d
always thought of ascending big peaks
as a slow and methodical undertak-
ing, but it occurred to me, watching
him John Henry his way through these
woods, that, if you were to adjust the
frame-per-second dial, what climbers
do is attack a mountain, as though to
demolish it.
He attacked the rest of the evening
this way: splitting wood, making a fire,
rigging a tripod over the fire for the
pot, cutting vegetables, cooking a stew,
drinking beer, playing air guitar, crush-
ing empty cans with the side of an axe.
“I had A.D.H.D. as a kid,” Anker said.
“Hyper-situational awareness.” His
energy was palpable. Semiretirement
didn’t suit him at all, but hanging
around a bonfire with a few dudes cer-
tainly did. The snow started to fall be-
fore midnight, and by morning there
was half a foot on the ground.A
year before, the North Face had
invited me to Puerto Rico to speak
on a panel for the company’s annual
athletes’ summit—not my bag, typi-
cally, but the roster of big-name moun-
taineers and skiers who’d be there
promised that it would be a laid-back
Chautauqua of mountain badassery
that an old harness-sniffer like me
couldn’t resist. Some fifty athletes on
the North Face team, plus a dozen or
so marketing executives and support
staff, took over a beach resort that had
been closed since Hurricane Maria, a
year before.
I arrived late the second night, after
dinner. Most of the athletes were sit-
ting around a bonfire on the beach. A
theatrical white-haired gent was lead-
ing a storytelling session: Tim Tate.
An extreme skier named Angel Col-
linson, from Utah, was telling a story
about the death of her boyfriend in a
skiing accident. Other tales followed.
Tate’s flamboyant Rolling Thunder de-
meanor, and the communal baring of
souls amid a circle of fervent firelit
faces, made me—stranger and city boy,
fresh off the plane—feel ill at ease; I
hadn’t had what they were having.
Everyone was up at dawn. Yoga,
jogging, surfing; a legation went in-
land to plant trees. The resort grounds
were a bustle of hyperactive, impossi-
bly hale young creatures on holiday.
Climbers—the men shirtless, the
women in bikini tops—rigged up ropesand slacklines and did pullups and
bouldering maneuvers off the villas’
eaves. Such lats, such tats. I kept my
shirt on, and cracked a Medalla Light.
The panel that afternoon, featur-
ing Tate, me, and a social-media guru,
was on “storytelling.” What did I know
about the kind of storytelling that they
were there to ponder—the framing of
their adventures, which they refer to
as projects, in such a way as to secure
funding, attract an audience, and bur-
nish a brand? It is the job of a profes-
sional adventure athlete to create
media: films, photos, articles, social
posts. You go out and perform amaz-
ing feats in amazing places while wear-
ing the amazing gear. The framing
and the depiction of these feats give
them scale, reach, and meaning—and
commercial viability.
“Climbing is not a quantifiable
sport,” Anker told me. “Usain Bolt was
the fastest runner—we could measure
that. Climbing is this sort of intro-
vert-type activity that we do. It’s
experiential. Two people alone on a
mountain. Or even just one. So how
do you share that story?” In the early
nineties, as a young marketing associ-
ate at the North Face, Anker had
helped conceive of a climbing team,
which was the first of its kind; as its
founding captain, he brought in Lowe,
among others. It was a loose affilia-
tion, and there was no league, or even
competition, at least of the measurable
kind, but he and the others sought to
cultivate a network of camaraderie and
support. Later, the team expanded
to include other extreme endeavors,
in part because it was a skier, Scot
Schmidt, whose exploits flying off cliffs
in a black-and-yellow North Face Steep
Tech suit juiced the retail sales that
made such a generous system of spon-
sorship possible.
It’s a strange business: the artifice
of a film shoot combined with the real-
as-real-can-be physical exertions and
technical challenges of surviving in the
mountains. Renan Ozturk told me,
“Filming makes it more dangerous. It
slows it down, and you’re not quite as
focussed. It taxes your body, compli-
cates the logistics. It’s also what you
have to do on these trips if you want
to get funded.”
At that moment, the big hit was