Death on Easy Ground
The beginning moments of the avalanche on Shishapangma that injured Conrad Anker and killed Alex Lowe and Dave Bridges. Outside magazine posthumously declared Alex to be “The World’s Best Climber.” Alex once said, “The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun.” KRISTOFFER ERICKSON
Twenty Miles Outside of Bozeman, Montana: October 17, 1999
A BUNDLED SECURITY GUARD checks my ID against the guest list and waves me through the gate. I drive up and park in a hayfield converted to a parking lot. A broad house sits beyond a corner of the field. Next to it a sagging grey hay-barn holds vigil next to a low-lying pavilion building.
Many people are driving up and getting out of their cars. All are dressed in black pants and suit coats or long dresses underneath formal coats. I’m wearing my best jeans and a black T-shirt. I’m shivering. I feel conspicuous. I start toward the buildings when I see Barry walking up in black cowboy boots, faded jeans and a long black western-shirt with a turquoise and silver bolo.
“Hey Barry. Hi Catherine. Look at us, the jeans brigade.”
Barry chuckles softly, “Yeah. I guess so.”
We start walking together. Barry’s wife Catherine puts her arm around me in consolation.
I step back behind Barry and Catherine as we approach the open pavilion. Conrad Anker turns the corner, his eyes meeting mine. Conrad was caught in the same avalanche as Alex and Dave Bridges. Conrad ran to the right, Alex and Dave went straight. Conrad lived, Alex and Dave died. He and I first met in Cody, Wyoming, the time I climbed with Alex. We have not climbed together. His pupils are dark and withdrawn, his eyes glassy and rimmed with swollen pink mucus. His face is pale; red abrasions cover his gaunt cheeks. His stubbly scalp reveals several rows of puffy stitches.
With one glance we acknowledge that our membership in this society of risk-takers cuts both ways. It has sharpened my awareness, helped define my choices, and tempered my ambition. Today we are reminded of a million experiences with the finest friends who are now gone. Ropes no longer to be shared, meals not to be cooked, wine that will go uncorked.
I am happy to see Conrad. I want to embrace him. I want to plan things with him. I want to live some precious moments together before the possibility of that also is gone. He drops his eyes and ducks into the large room before I can put this thought into words.
Inside, I lose sight of Conrad as my eyes adjust to the dim light. Then I see him moving towards the front. He takes a seat next to some of the other expedition team members. They are wearing matching black North Face fleece jackets for the occasion. I turn and find a place against the back wall, and drop into sadness as the ceremony begins.
Jenni Lowe and her three sons approach the podium. The youngest is so tiny, maybe three years old. I wonder what he’ll remember of Alex, if anything. The oldest, Max, will clearly remember a great deal. He describes climbing the Grand Teton with his dad less than two months ago.
Alex’s father doesn’t make it through his speech. His wife Dorthea, follows him off the stage. Famous climbers, expedition mates, and friends are each given their turn. After everyone has spoken, the brothers, Andy and Ted Lowe, lead us through Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” We all join in for the chorus; with each line we get braver. We sing the chorus three times. By the third time we are belting it out, our emotion unleashed.
You belong among the wildflowers,
You belong in a boat out at sea,
You belong on a very tall tower,
You belong to all the world and me.
The music stops. There is not a dry eye in the house. As the musicians step down the only sound is the echo of grief against the battered maple wood floor. I start to panic, something is wrong. Instead of remaining aloof from it, disdaining the weakness that allows it, I feel their pain and suffering. I feel my pain.
Before today my rationalizations have shielded me. Acknowledging and feeling this grief, how will it be possible for me to climb what I need to climb?
Alex made no mistakes, I think, reciting the familiar rationales: Wrong place, wrong time. Random death. Death on easy ground. Game of chance. Sobbing echoes through the room, I can still feel the wrenching pain of loss. My reasoning is failing. I turn and lurch for the door.
My exit is halted by loud footsteps crossing the stage. I look up, and there is young Max. He stops and puts his fiddle to his chin. With another fiddle and a guitar back up, he serenades us, gently at first, then spiritedly with “Whiskey Before Breakfast” – a plucky, upbeat, bluegrass tune.
Alex and Jenni on their front porch with their three sons (left to right): Max, Isaac, and Sam. GORDON WILTSE
Alex making the first ascent of Expanding Horizons in Hyalite Canyon, January, 1998. The route is graded M-8 R. The R indicates a runout, which means that a fall may be dangerous assuming the protection holds, and very serious or fatal if the protection fails. KRISTOFFER ERICKSON
Alex’s oldest son has saved me; tragedy becomes revelation. There he is, there is Alex, in Max: the same concentrated gaze; the long, limber fingers; the head bursting with stiff hair.
As the plane takes off I curl up next to the window and sleep. Alex appears in my dream. So do Marija, Jože, Caroll, Julie, and Steve Mascioli. They are not in a mystical place, or a perfect place, just a room. It looks like my childhood tree house. They’re all sitting, relaxed. I don’t know where they are, but they seem accessible. I could speak to them if I wished, and them to me. Yet no words pass; a comfortable silence between friends.
Turbulence jolts me awake. I look out the window at the Teton Range, Alex’s second home. Alex is gone; the stone fortress of those mountains remains – unchanged. I remain as well, but I am forever changed by having known Alex. I was his admirer, his friend, his partner.
I am weary of the disdainful superiority of alpinists like me who have survived, and who, chests puffed, cast knowing glances as if to say, “We are better than they were; we survived.”
I’m tired of long black dresses and black jackets. My eyes are tired of crying.
Tragically, I will never again watch Alex unleash his grace and power on a frozen waterfall. Never listen to Mascioli around a campfire, describing an unclimbed wall in British Columbia, a splash of whisky in our coffee. Never watch as Jože and Marija strike off toward a Himalayan summit, as if out for a seaside stroll.
There is a certain schizophrenia to these feelings. I feel a need to break from society’s structure, to move in a grand, natural environment, to measure myself, to find identity, and to prove my worth. These feelings teeter in balance with the fear of being the next one to be buried in an avalanche, to be hit by a falling stone, to fall to the bottom of a cliff, to get wedged in a crevasse, to become fatally exhausted. To die.
I close my eyes and imagine my own death over and over. I imagine it was me in Marija’s, Jože’s, Mugs’, Julie’s, Caroll’s, Steve Mascioli’s, or Alex’s boots. That it was me exhausted, frozen in the snow, killed by rockfall, by a snow-mushroom, by an avalanche. I imagine the last breath being crushed from my body.
Luck is nothing of which to be proud. Each of these cold, tired deaths could have been – might still be – mine. Ultimately, survival in the big mountains depends upon a great measure of luck. Where is the pride in that?