42 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
from Nike. “At Nike, nobody dies,” one
athlete said.
Still, some of the athletes said pri-
vately that they loved the idea of ther-
apeutic conversation, but that Tate
might not be their ideal psych. I talked
to a couple of them who wondered if
he was full of crap. (As for Lowe-Anker,
Anker said, “She likes Tim, but she
doesn’t go in for all the woo-woo, which
is what she calls it when people talk
about chakras and yoga and all that.”)
But athletes kept asking to see him,
and the North Face kept paying for
them to do so. In 2020, it has allocated
as much as ten per cent of its market-
ing budget for wellness. Anker said,
“There’s never an excuse for not doing
the right thing.”
A climber from Boulder, Madaleine
Sorkin, had recently launched, with
the American Alpine Club, an initia-
tive called the Climbing Grief Fund,
to support members of the climbing
community dealing with the losses of
friends and partners. “This is a heavy
profession,” she told me. “What is the
responsibility of companies when their
athletes don’t return from a trip?” As
with the North Face’s wellness pro-
gram, she isn’t sure what shape the fund
will take; it targets the climbing com-
munity generally, and not just the pros.
On the Grief Fund’s Web site, she
has posted interviews with two dozen
climbers, in which they talk about loss.
Sorkin’s wife, Henna Taylor, a film-
maker, is turning the footage into a
documentary. Sorkin was a friend of
Hayden Kennedy, and also of Brad
Gobright, a highly regarded free solo-
ist, in the Honnold mold, who died in
November in a rappelling accident in
Mexico—a samurai lets down his guard.L
ast April, the North Face team
suffered a grievous loss. Three of
alpinism’s brightest stars, two of whom
I’d met in Puerto Rico, disappeared
on Howse Peak, in the Canadian
Rockies. Their bodies were eventually
found at the base of a pitch called Life
by the Drop. Postmortems suggested
that, during their descent from the
summit, an avalanche had swept them
off the face. Jess Roskelley, Hansjörg
Auer, David Lama: thirty-six, thirty-
five, twenty-eight. The climbers hadbeen testing a line of high-perfor-
mance gear called the Advanced
Mountain Kit. Five months later, two
of them were posthumously awarded
Piolets d’Or for outstanding first as-
cents the year before—Auer for a solo
climb of Lupghar Sar, in Pakistan, and
Lama for a solo climb of Lunag Ri,
in the Himalayas.
As it happens, Lama and Anker had
twice attempted to summit Lunag Ri
together. The first time, in 2015, ex-
treme cold turned them back not far
from the top. A year later, they returned,
but, six pitches up, Anker told Lama
that he was feeling pain in his chest.
Lama persuaded Anker to retreat and,
over Anker’s objections, to use a sat-
ellite phone to call in a helicopter res-
cue. Nine hours later, in a Kathmandu
hospital, Anker learned that he’d had
a heart attack. You could say, and Anker
does, that Lama saved his life. Lama,
who’d stayed behind at the base of the
mountain, decided to go back up. He
got just past the point they’d reached
the previous year but again had to turn
back. Two years later, Lama returned
to Lunag Ri alone—climbers are often
bewitched by unfinished projects—and
finally got it done. “I would have loved
to share this moment with Conrad,”
Lama wrote, in his account of the climb
for the American Alpine Journal. He
died on Howse Peak just days before
the article went to press.
Anker, whose heart problems had
forced him to give up his high-altitude-
climbing career, got the news while on
a lecture tour in the U.K. He’d been
following the climbers’ progress. He
told me, “From the moment Joyce Ros-
kelley’s name came up on my phone
to when I put it up to my ear, I thought,
I know exactly what this is.” Anker
had brought Jess Roskelley and Lama
onto the team. (They were born into
the guild, in a way. Lama’s mother, an
Austrian climber, had met his father,
a Nepali guide, on an expedition. Ros-
kelley’s father was the decorated moun-
taineer John Roskelley; they’d sum-
mited Everest together in 2003, when
Jess was twenty.) A week later, Anker
appeared as a guest on a podcast called
“Terra Incognita.” His feelings were
still raw. “I’ve seen far too much of
this,” he said softly, in his flinty, diffi-
dent way. “We celebrate the moun-David Lama, shot by Jess Roskelley, just before the accident that killed them.