Two days after the ceremony on Alex Lowe Peak, Kennedy and Perkins, while ascending Imp Peak, a remote backcountry-skiing spot in a range southwest of Hyalite Canyon, were caught in an avalanche. That early-season snow. Kennedy, partly buried, dug himself out, but there was no sign of Perkins. He searched the debris field for hours, probing and digging, although he must have known that a buried victim almost never survives for longer than twenty minutes. Eventually, he gave up, skied out, and drove back to Bozeman. One can only guess at the panic, anguish, and self-recrimination that coursed through him in the hours that followed—he called no one. In the apartment that night, he wrote a fifteen-page letter and then took a fatal dose of painkillers and alcohol.
Kennedy had never seemed depressed or violent or rash. “He had as untraumatic a childhood as a kid could have,” Michael Kennedy told me recently. “What did we not see? We are baffled.” Compared with the Ogre, Imp Peak was supposed to be a routine jaunt, a bit of fun. “In his note, he said, ‘It’s my fault we were there,’ ” his father went on. “I think what was troubling him in those final hours, though there was nothing explicit about this in his letter, was that he felt he hadn’t lived up to his own ideals.”
A week before Hayden Kennedy died, he had published a sorrowful essay, on a climbing Web site called Evening Sends, about the recent deaths in the mountains of some of his climbing partners, among them Kyle Dempster, who had accompanied him on the Ogre. Dempster and two others had disappeared the year before in a storm during an attempt on Ogre II. In recent years, the community of the world’s top climbers and skiers has seemed to suffer the death rate of a combat platoon. In the essay, Kennedy posed the question that has often dogged people who live through experiences that kill others: “Why do some of us survive and others don’t?”
ne afternoon last fall, Anker showed me a page in a journal with about three dozen names handwritten on it—friends and partners who’d died, all but a couple of them in mountain accidents, many summoning up tragedies I knew as well as some do Bible stories or baseball lore. The list began with Anker’s mentor, Mugs Stump, who fell into a crevasse while descending Denali, in 1992. Scott Adamson, Justin Griffin, Hans Saari, Doug Coombs, Ned Gillette, Mira Šmíd, Hari Berger, Todd Skinner, Walt Shipley, Ang Kaji Sherpa, Ueli Steck, Dean Potter. Martyrs without a cause, except perhaps that of their own fulfillment.
“I had reached out to Hayden before and had talked to him about what loss was,” Anker said. “You fall into this pit, right after. It’s totally dark. You think about taking your own life. I hadn’t really talked much about it before, because there was shame or weakness associated with it.”
Late one evening, a week after Kennedy’s suicide, Anker called Tim Tate, a psychotherapist in Bozeman. Anker and Tate often went for hikes, and talked about their lives. Tate had helped him and the Lowes work through some dark periods, often marked by the reverberations of what Anker had come to identify as his survivor’s guilt—the nagging feeling that he was living someone else’s life.
The conversation with Tate was brief, as Anker’s conversations often are. Anker wondered if Tate would be open to consulting with the North Face, the outdoor-gear company founded in the Bay Area in 1966, about the problems of loss, grief, and harm. Anker was the captain of the North Face athletes’ team, an assemblage of more than a hundred outdoor adventurers—rock climbers, mountaineers, extreme skiers, snowboarders, ultra-runners—who are sponsored by the brand.
The deaths of Kennedy and Perkins had a profound effect on many of the younger North Face athletes, even though the two of them hadn’t been affiliated with the company. In the spring of 2018, Anker brought Tate to Alameda, California, to meet with some North Face executives. “I’d like to introduce my mentor, Gandalf,” Anker said. This was a reference to Tate’s bearing, and his shamanistic attributes, which are deeply rooted, perhaps even innate, and yet not uncultivated. A Jungian by training, and a friend and acolyte of Jung’s purported successor, James Hillman, Tate has woven into his practice and self-presentation a variety of rituals and beliefs borrowed from Zen Buddhism and from the indigenous tribes of the northern plains. Tate laid out his approach to mental health and his version of what wellness might mean. “Rather than manage symptoms or problems, I prefer to give people a context for their experiences,” he told me recently. “Athletes have a particular calling we need to address. It isn’t a mythology of proving themselves. It’s a calling they cannot refuse. They have it on a loudspeaker in their brains. They can’t help but do what they do.”
Soon, Gandalf started appearing at North Face functions, as a kind of visiting sage, and some of the athletes, charmed by his presence, his way of speaking, and his connection to Anker, signed on to see him. Several of them went to Bozeman, on the North Face’s dime, to undergo what Tate called intensives, which consisted of two two-hour sessions over two days, the assignment of various tasks, and, if the stars aligned, some mentoring from Anker and Lowe-Anker.
“I grew up as a cowboy,” Mark Carter, a snowboarder for the North Face team, told me. “Therapy isn’t something we do.” Carter was brought up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming and has a side business selling beef. He also has a toothpick sponsorship. He said that the biggest loss in his life was the death of a cousin—same age, same name—a Navy seal who died in Iraq in 2007. “Tim gave me homework,” Carter said. “He had me write a letter to my cousin. I’ve spent two months working on it.”
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Hillary Allen, known to friends as the Hillygoat, is an ultra-runner sponsored by the North Face. She also has a master’s degree in neuroscience. In 2017, when she was twenty-eight and competing in a thirty-five-mile “skyrunning” race along a ridge in Norway, a rock gave way, and she fell a hundred and fifty feet. She broke fourteen bones in her back, rib cage, arms, and feet and tore a bunch of ligaments. “I was pretty shaken up,” she said. “I had nightmares forever. I was mentally trying to figure out a way to get back. I was dealing with the guilt of wanting to devote myself to something that nearly killed me. People suggested a sports psychologist or a regular counsellor, but that wasn’t really the right fit.” Instead, she travelled to Bozeman for an intensive with Tate. “He’s my cup of tea. I’m a mountain person. I’m not an ooey-gooey dress-everything-in-pink kind of woman.”
Tate, seventy-one, has had a therapy practice in Bozeman since the early eighties. After the suicide of a friend who lived near Bozeman, Ted Yates, who had fallen into a cycle of depression and addiction following a bad car accident, Tate discovered that he had a knack for working with grief and loss. Yates’s father had been a highly regarded television documentarian who was killed by gunfire while covering the Six-Day War; Yates’s stepfather was Mike Wallace, the “60 Minutes” correspondent. Tate presided at Yates’s funeral, at an Episcopal church in Georgetown. Afterward, in the back seat of a limousine, he found himself ministering to a distraught Wallace, who’d lost a son in a hiking accident in Greece, in 1962. Wallace told him, “I don’t know what you just did there, but I have deep respect for it.” Katharine Graham asked if Tate would preside at her funeral, too, he recalled. Tate now wears the Concord Navigator watch that Wallace had given to Yates.
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