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Drinking his third latte of the morning on his way to ski from Alta, Conrad Anker seemed, for a moment, satisfied. I had moved him away from his gracious chores at the Outdoor Retailer, and as we drove through suburban Salt Lake City and the Frozen Wasatch Mountains, he seemed dizzy at the thought of taking in the air. Dark clouds hovered above the peaks, the snow-covered road curved under broken rock ribs, and Anker, who lived nearby for a decade and a half, tore up a cinnamon bun and bubbled with longing. As he walked across the dash he showed an eagle’s nest, then a mixed route of ice and boulders he had already hiked in one day, then a snowfall he was using to ski at the end of the day. spring: “Great GS-style turns,” he fondly recalls, “no ends and tails. “
“Torn” is a heartbreaking look at Alex Lowe’s long shadow
In a new documentary, rock climbing legend’s son Max Lowe explores the high-profile death of his father, Conrad Anker joining the Lowe family and the family drama that followed.
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A handsome 38-year-old mountaineer, with boyish blonde hair, tight blue eyes and a lantern jaw, Anker looks more like a nervous surfer than an accomplished mountaineer. With no hiker thighs or swollen muscles in the gym, his physique is surprisingly light and his head perpetually tilts forward, as if reaching for the future. At times ironic self-promoter who is serious about saving the world, Anker also has the playful Peter Pan way outdoors. Which makes sense, given that he spent his entire adult life in a very special America – an adventure sports subculture in which status stems less from money than from talent for skiing, kayaking and rock climbing, a subculture in which a well-meaning environmentalist and anti-consumerist views constitute an informal state ideology. Success starts with finding a job flexible enough to let you play whenever the powder is deep, the ice is in it, or the rock is dry. More success means making a living at some approximation of your game, like working as a ski patroller. True arrival is making a living doing the thing itself: travel, adventure, freedom.
Anker was paid to play for almost a decade as a salaried member and globetrotter of The North Face climbing team, and it’s been a great ride. But lately he’s negotiated the transition from being the preferred partner of some of the world’s greatest expedition leaders to being a leader himself. At the same time, he’s had a painful calculation with the costs of playing one of the world’s most dangerous games – costs that include his own contacts with mortality, the untimely deaths of his three closest friends in the high mountains and the strange fallout these deaths had in his life.
Lowering the car stereo, Anker gestured towards a granite strip called Hellgate Cliff. He told me that with his first serious climbing mentor, the legendary Mugs Stump, he established a notoriously committed climbing, Fossils from Hell, in the 1980s. (The stump disappeared into a crevasse in 1992 then. he was guiding clients on Mount McKinley in Alaska.) As we approached Alta, Anker recalled how he and another college climbing buddy, underground hero Seth Shaw, had occasionally climbed on ice, a climb and a few ski runs in one day, even asked for used lift tickets from skiers leaving Alta early. (Shaw was killed in May 2000 by the ice fall, also in Alaska.)
“Wow!” he exclaimed as we rounded a snowy curve and a frozen waterfall came into view. “Look at all the people on this ice climb! Wear your helmets today, guys! Anker told me with obvious delight that he and Shaw held the record for round-trip speed on this climb until Alex – Alex Lowe, Anker’s best friend and a man once considered the best. climber of the world – breaks it. In the fall of 1999, an avalanche hit Anker, Lowe, and a friend named Dave Bridges on the flanks of Tibet’s 26,291-foot Shishapangma. Anker ran one way and survived, but Bridges, 29, and Lowe, 40, took another path and are gone. Lowe left behind a widow, Jennifer, and three young sons.
Even Anker’s most famous achievement is clouded by ambiguities. In 1999 he joined the Mallory & Irvine research expedition to Mount Everest. In May, just above 27,000 feet, he found the remains of 75-year-old British climber George Mallory. The discovery shed new light on one of the great unsolved mysteries in exploring the world, which happened to Mallory and her partner, Sandy Irvine, during the third attempt to summit Everest. But for Anker, who made important early climbs from Antarctica to Baffin Island, and who has no particular concern for history, it was more of a whim of fate than the kind of peak climbing feat he is most proud of. Nonetheless, he was honored in newspapers and magazines around the world; he co-wrote (with David Roberts) a book on the Mallory Expedition; and since then he has been on an almost constant lecture tour.
By far, the biggest change in Anker’s life came shortly after the October 1999 memorial service for Alex Lowe in Bozeman, MT. In what must have been a confusing and exhausting semester, Anker had returned straight from Everest to spend five months co-writing Mallory’s book, flew to Shishapangma with Lowe, survived a deadly avalanche and had returned just in time for a book tour. Everywhere he went, according to Topher Gaylord, longtime director of The North Face Climbing Team, “people were so supportive of Conrad. But he had to go back to his hotel room alone every night, and it didn’t bring Alex back, it didn’t change a thing. I think this is where Jenny and the kids became the best way to deal with the loss of Alex.
In a series of events that Anker understandably preferred not to discuss with a reporter, he eventually broke off his engagement with an environmental lawyer named Becky Hall and got involved in a romantic relationship with Jennifer Lowe. In December he applied and they are planning to tie the knot when this magazine hits newsstands. Anker now lives with Jennifer and her sons in the Lowe house in Bozeman, finding himself, in other words, the future husband of his best friend’s widow and the stepfather of three boys who lost their father while he was climbing next to Anker himself.
At Little Cottonwood Canyon that day, Anker didn’t dwell on himself and the losses of his new family, and that was only partly because he knew I already knew all the details. . He also resolutely insists on an invigorating vision of his profession. In his slideshow of Mallory – the story of another young husband and father who died rock climbing – Anker does not mention the half-dozen mutilated corpses he encountered on Everest that he describes in his book. He never shows the gruesome photographs of himself overlooking Mallory’s gruesome body. (He criticized this magazine for putting one of those shots on its cover.) He sometimes even says to the public, in all sincerity, things like, “If I can motivate any of you to come home. him and planning only one climb tonight, I will. have done my job.
Anker is, of course, a paid spokesperson for The North Face and a man who has never experienced much beyond extreme mountaineering. But we also feel that he feels a great compulsion, even an obligation, to affirm aloud that the profession he chose was worth it and that Alex Lowe did not die stupidly – only the main quest of his life is still what it always seemed: good for body, soul and spirit, and inspired by great purpose.