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Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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You’ve done as good a job as I could have ever imagined,” says Max. “And we all really love you for it.” But as it would turn out, the camera allowed Max the freedom to ask the questions he’d buried for so long. In return, his relatives met him with a newfound level of candor. Anker opened up about the pressure he felt to fill Alex’s shoes and live up to the “good guy” ideal the public assigned him after he adopted the boys. Lowe-Anker read aloud from intimate love letters written to her by both of her husbands. In one of the notes, sent just a month after Alex’s death in 1999, Anker wrote: As someone who isn’t particularly comfortable with heights, it was important for me that MERU be more than just about mountain climbing. It’s a truly personal story, one about pursuing one’s passions, though in this case those passions are unusually extreme. David Lama, shot by Jess Roskelley, just before the accident that killed them. Photograph by Jess Roskelley / Courtesy Alli Roskelley

Earlier that week, Anker had run into a young climber named Hayden Kennedy at a Bozeman climbing gym. Kennedy, twenty-seven, had a few years earlier won a Piolet d’Or, the yearly mountaineering awards, for a first ascent of the south face of an infamous tower in Pakistan known as the Ogre. Kennedy, from Colorado, and his girlfriend, Inge Perkins, from Bozeman, had recently moved in together in an apartment in town. Since graduating from high school, Kennedy had lived out of his van, as he built his climbing résumé; Perkins, twenty-three and a strong skier and climber, too, was a senior at Montana State University, majoring in math. Anker lived down the street from the Perkins family and had helped introduce Inge to climbing. He had climbed decades ago with Kennedy’s father, Michael, an accomplished mountaineer, and had known Hayden since he was a boy. americanalpineclub.org, pdf version of AAJ 2000, p. 441 (the motto of In memoriam: Alex Lowe 1958-1999, pp. 441-443, by Gordon Wiltsie). We have this shadow of Alex that hangs over all of us,” says Max. Unlike his mother and brothers, who hyphenated their last name to include Anker once he became their adopted father, Max chose to solely keep Alex’s last name. There was the Great Trango Trip. That was the beginning of bringing media into the mountains, and it was a time when big-wall aid climbing was at the forefront of climbing.Jennifer Lowe-Anker published a memoir, Forget Me Not in 2008, that recounts her life shared with Lowe, his death and the life she continued with Anker. Forget Me Not won the National Outdoor Book award for literature in 2008. [10] Legacy [ edit ] Max Lowe, who is thirty-one, is finishing a film about his family. “They aren’t so sure about the whole thing,” he told me recently. “They’re, like, ‘Why do you need to do this? Why do you need to stir up all this grief?’ Maybe I should’ve just gone to therapy.” Some people compare climbing to heroin: addictive, selfish, deadly. And yet, while society tends to condemn people who abandon their families for opiates and die of an overdose, we often treat fallen climbers, including Max’s father, as heroes. “It’s a lot to ask someone to give up something they love for you,” Max said. “But if you can’t expect your parents to give that up for you, what can you expect in this life?” In fall 2021, Max debuted his biggest and most personal project to date: Torn, a feature-length documentary about his family’s legendary past and his place in it. As the story goes, Max’s father, Alex Lowe, was one of the most decorated climbers of his era, with notable first ascents from the Himalayas to Antarctica. On October 5, 1999, Alex, then 40, died, along with cameraman David Bridges, in an avalanche on the south face of 26,335-foot Shishapangma in Tibet. Their bodies were not recovered at the time of the accident. On October 5, 1999, Alex Lowe and David Bridges were swept away by an avalanche on Shisha Pangma during an attempt to ski a first descent of the mountain. Lowe, 40, was arguably the finest mountaineer of his era. Bridges, 29, was also an extraordinary athlete, mountain lover, and photographer.

Lowe, from Bozeman, Montana, had made difficult climbs all over the world, including Nepal’s Kwangde and Kusum Kanguru, and twice reached the summit of Mount Everest. In Peru, he climbed the south-west buttress of Taulliraju. Forget Me Not will stay with your forever. It is a beautifully written story of great love, great daring, great loss, and great recovery. Most of all, it is a story of great courage." - Tom Brokaw Alex and David vanished, were captured and frozen in time. Sixteen years of life has been lived and now they are found. We are thankful,” Jenni Lowe-Anker said. In the last paragraph of her memoir, Forget Me Not, Lowe-Anker had predicted a day would come when her former husband’s body would be found. “Alex will melt out of the glacier one day … and I do not look forward to it.” The story of Max’s past is exactly that—the past. He’s moving on, to find connections elsewhere in the world. As Alex put it: he’s got a clean slate, the whole world in front of him. You know, he always spoke about soloing Kusum Kanguru, which is a 6,000-meter peak in Nepal. He hiked up and over it after guiding Everest. It was the most amazing thing.Anker knows that many people question why he does what he does. Why keep risking your life? Why encourage others, given the inherent danger? Get off the mountain, old man. He struggles, too, with how to explain his motivation to those who don’t climb, who haven’t seen the vistas he has seen, who don’t know what it’s like to survive what shouldn’t be survivable. I grew up with parents who both made a living doing what they loved, and I knew that was something I wanted to do, too,” Max says. “I never knew it was going to be film or photography until it was.” In 2003, the ACLF and Anker also helped to found the Khumbu Climbing Center ( 3), a school that aims to increase the safety margin of both Nepali climbers and high-altitude workers by “encouraging responsible climbing practices in a supportive and community-based program.” The KCC educates indigenous climbers and workers via a variety of courses taught each winter season. The subjects range from English language to mountain safety, rescue, and wilderness first aid. To date, over 1,000 Nepali men and women have passed through the school. Although initially many courses were taught by Western climbers, now the vast majority of the staff and instructors at the KCC are indigenous. More Quotes from Alex Lowe But I also wanted to show that following your passions is not always a beautiful thing. It can be fraught with internal conflict, doubt and intractable compromise. I often ask myself: Where do you draw the line between following your heart and your responsibility to others?

It doesn’t get less sad from there. If you feel happy or want to be in a good mood, don’t watch “Torn.”

The proper thing to do will be to take care of his body according to local practices,” says Anker. “They’re still frozen into the ice.” Anker, meanwhile, was extremely reluctant to participate in the film, Jenni and Max told me. “I don’t want to do this,” Anker said. Gosh … It was always those moments, right at the beginning of the day, when you’re anticipating a day out in the mountains with Alex. For me, that was always the most special time. The possibility of the day ahead was a big deal. Getting up, and just get a ton of energy going, like, “Yeah, let’s go drink coffee!”

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