THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 43
tains, because they create this wonder-
ful connection between people.... But,
when you run up against what just
happened, you have to question whether
it’s really worth it.”
As the families, the team, and the
climbing community all tried to pro-
cess the loss, the North Face, with
Tate as a kind of chaplain, sought to
honor the dead and to provide succor
and support to the living. For an over-
night memorial at a campground in
the redwoods near Santa Cruz, it flew
in some of the climbers’ family mem-
bers and several of the company’s ex-
ecutives, including Arens, and every-
one gathered around a bonfire for a
boozy, improvised wake. Anker per-
suaded an opera singer who was stay-
ing at a nearby winery to come sing
something, to get people’s attention.
Then he said, “And now Gandalf will
say a few words.” Anker threw a staff
to Tate, who stamped the ground with
it twice.
“You don’t want me to stamp it a
third time,” Tate said. And then he
began to talk. As he recalled later, “I
went into a riff on the nature of invis-
ible reality.” When he was done, he sat
down next to Jimmy Chin. “Deep,”
Chin said.
Tate also ministered to the fami-
lies. He presided over Jess Roskelley’s
service in Spokane. “Jess had no will,”
his sister Jordan told me. “He had noth-
ing written down. We had to guess. A
pastor wasn’t appropriate. So that’s
where Tim came in. He just has this
way about him. It feels like he’s look-
ing into your soul. He really under-
stands the world these boys were in.”
The company wrestled with how
best to do right by the climbers, with-
out tilting into morbidity. Death and
life style are at odds in the market-
place. As Madaleine Sorkin told me,
“There’s a stop point where the com-
panies don’t want to be talking about
those climbers anymore.” Some com-
panies, such as Clif Bar, decided to
pull back from the business of spon-
soring climbers, in large part because
of the moral hazard of financing risk.
Fine, but that also deprives climbers
of a source of income and support.
After Santa Cruz and Spokane, the
Roskelleys went to Austria to meet the
families of the other climbers and at-
tend their memorials. (The North Face
handled the costs and the logistics
of their travel, as well as the repatria-
tion of the bodies.) The company sent
Tate along, too, and he went for long
walks in the foothills of the Alps with
Auer’s mother. In September, Anker
and John Roskelley flew to Poland for
the Piolet d’Or ceremony. ( John Ros-
kelley presented the results of his in-
vestigation into the accident on Howse
Peak.) Anker accepted the award on
Lama’s behalf, alongside his parents.
They stood onstage, all of them in
tears, as an audience of some two thou-
sand people applauded Lama for sev-
eral minutes.B
y the time Anker was in Poland,
he had been experiencing some
misgivings about his leadership role in
the climbing community and at the
North Face. His mother had died. His
heart was unwell. His best days as a
climber were behind him, and yet he
was prone to restlessness at home. He’d
been battling bouts of depression and
self-recrimination.
“Conrad is coming to a head in his
life,” Max Lowe told me. “He’s lived
a long life in this world where a lot
don’t. Most of his friends are dead. I
think he also feels responsible as an
Old Guard guy who introduced a lot
of them to climbing. Aging and the
heart attack have kept him back from
the mountains. Which is harder in a
way than just dying in the mountains
and being deified. Dying in the moun-
tains is easier than having to live and
watch your peers and friends die and
having to face your own mortality and
give up living on that beautiful edge.”
“Alex died a hero,” Anker said.
“There was no old age. Just a short bit
of physical pain and then you’re get-
ting carbon-recycled again.” With me,
he was relatively circumspect about his
own struggles. Tate, he said, had helped
him identify “the difference between
my character and my persona—what
masquerade is, and how the root of
that is ‘mask’ and ‘masculine.’”
The day after Christmas, Anker
travelled to Antarctica for a month
of climbing on and around the Vin-
son Massif, the continent’s highest
point. For the first time since the early
two-thousands, he was working as aguide. His client was a hedge-fund
manager and an outdoor enthusiast,
with nine companions, who were
spending forty-five thousand dollars
a head. All but two of them made the
summit. Then Anker joined up with
his North Face teammates Chin, Mor-
rison, and Nelson, for a quick jaunt
up Vinson, followed by an attempt
on a nearby peak called Tyree, which
had a sublimely steep and technical
face for Chin, Morrison, and Nelson
to attempt on skis. The weather didn’t
coöperate; Antarctica, likely because
of climate change, has become more
humid. The face was loaded with deep
snow, the cold was brutal, and every-
one had kids back home. “It just wasn’t
worth it,” Anker said the other day.
“We turned around.” It wasn’t yet clear
what story their film of the trip would
tell, and how it might help the North
Face, but Anker had cherished his
eight days holed up in a tent with
Chin. “Each of us has his side—it’s
always the same. We have a routine,”
he said.
Sam Elias had shared a tent with
Anker on Everest in 2012. He remem-
bers Anker, seemingly spent, power-
ing up alone to the summit like a zom-
bie, driven by a force he couldn’t quite
fathom. “That expedition destroyed
my life for a number of years,” Elias
told me. “Feeling so close to death and
then not dying and stepping back into
the world.” Elias, who is thirty-seven,
is from Detroit, the son of a Syrian
immigrant and a Pole; he came late to
climbing and mountain culture. He’d
been working with Tate since Puerto
Rico, and did an intensive in Bozeman
in December. He said recently, over
the phone, “You go into the moun-
tains, and your friend dies and you
don’t, and that’s O.K.—it doesn’t have
to fuck up your life for years.” He went
on, “Maybe I’m deluded or haven’t lost
the right person, or enough people, but
I just have a different view. I’ve always
felt strange about death. I’ve never been
personally that troubled by it. I haven’t
gone through what Michael and Julie
Kennedy have, or the girlfriends of my
friends, or what Conrad has. Hayden
was a really close friend of mine. I was
living in Carbondale when he was in
high school. I watched him—” And
then Elias began to sob.