Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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Unlike the remains of climbers that are sometimes found high on Everest, the bodies of Lowe and Bridges are in a place where they can be recovered. (The body of guide Scott Fischer, a casualty of the 1996 storm on Everest that spawned Into Thin Air, remains on the mountain in line with the wishes of his family.)

At first I said no to being in the film,” Lia says with a smile. “Then we talked. At every Torn screening, viewers had this deep human connection because of how close Max was to the story.” Is this school a natural progression of your careers, or is it more a response to your losses in the mountains? That’s ostensibly what “Torn,” the documentary he would go on to make, is about: a son trying to get to know the father he didn’t get enough time with. But the film, released theatrically by National Geographic this month and on Disney+ in early 2022, is also about the dad Max gained when he lost Alex. That’s Conrad Anker, who also happened to be Alex’s climbing partner and best friend. He was on Shishapangma with Alex, and was the one who called the Lowes to tell them about the avalanche. Conrad, Jenni, and the three boys, now grown, are now planning to travel to Tibet during the summer monsoon. They’ll recover the bodies (they haven’t yet been in touch with Bridges’s family) and most likely return to Nyalam, Tibet, the closest town, to hold a ceremony.

Alex Lowe: The Concept

He also once said, “There are two kinds of climbers: Those who climb because their heart sings when they’re in the mountains, and all the rest.”

The athletes would pursue these activities with or without us,” Arne Arens, the president of the North Face, told me. “We know the inherent risks. We try to limit them as much as we can. They choose the objectives. Our role is to make it as safe as possible.” Generally, the athletes develop their own projects and pitch them to the company, which in turn shapes them not only to market the brand but also to road test new technology and gear. “If it weren’t for the athletes, we wouldn’t be able to push the limits ourselves,” Arens said. For Conrad and Jenni, the event seemed to have added significance, given the recent events in Nepal. “Whether it’s fate or coincidence or timing, you never know,” says Conrad. “The Khumbu is still bereft of tourists, and people in Nepal are still suffering,” says Jenni. “The people there are still so hopeful that there’ll be a good season on Everest and that tourism will return. For us to be up there was a bright spot for them and for us. Conrad made an appearance at Base Camp, and that was meaningful to them and all the people that have worked with us on KCC. And then to have [Alex found on] the very last day. … I thought that was kind of serendipitous. It was like Alex appearing in a way to say, Hey, good work. I’m done. I’m done now.” From my perspective there was just this big white cloud, and then it settled and there was nothing there,” Anker recalled during a phone interview from Bozeman, where he and Jennie landed on April 29 after spending the spring in Nepal. “And it was just so massive and so big. There wasn’t that sense of closure.” OUTSIDE: Jenni, when we wrote about Conrad in 2001, you declined to speak with us. What’s different now? No,” she says flatly. “If you watch his other films, you can see he has this capacity to connect in a real way with people that a lot of directors don’t. That’s his superpower. Max can get into people’s heads and hearts. It takes an introspective person to do that.”

Was there one particular climbing achievement Alex was most proud of?

Lowe climbing Great Sail Peak, Baffin Island, Canada, in 1998. Photograph: Gordon Wiltsie/National Geographic/Getty Images In mountain towns, an early-autumn snowstorm is a nuisance and a lure. It runs some people out of the high country but draws others in. During the first week of October, 2017, a foot or more of snow fell in the peaks south of Bozeman, Montana. Before dawn on the fifth, a group set off from a parking lot in Hyalite Canyon, a popular outdoor playground, just outside town. The man at the head of the group was spooked by the new snow. To minimize exposure to avalanches, he made sure that everyone ascended with caution, keeping to the ridgelines and bare patches, away from the loaded gullies. This was Conrad Anker, the famous American alpinist. It is often said that there are old climbers and there are bold climbers, but there are no old bold climbers. So far, Anker, at fifty-four, was an exception. I love big men,” Tate told me. “I’m a big guy. I like being around big guys. Big personalities, big stature. That’s really why Conrad and I get along so well. I feel most comfortable with accomplished men who don’t have huge egos.” Ten days ago, my phone rang with a strange caller ID, and I answered to hear my mother’s voice on the line. It was early, maybe 6 a.m., and her call woke me, but Jennifer Lowe-Anker was still in Nepal, 11 hours ahead and on the other side of the world. It took me a moment to absorb what she told me in a choked voice, that the bodies of my father, the renowned climber Alex Lowe, and fellow climber David Bridges had been found 16 and a half years after they disappeared in the ghostly plume of a massive avalanche on Shisha Pangma, an 8,000-meter peak in Tibet.

As a child, Max was a precocious violinist who loved Harry Potter books and fishing. Growing up in Montana, he climbed and skied alongside his younger brothers, but those activities never became obsessions like they were for Alex or Anker. “After Alex died, we would take the boys climbing, but only if they requested it,” Jenni recalls. “Conrad was sensitive to how they might feel and didn’t want to force climbing on them.” 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.

For those familiar with mountain climbing, the story of Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker falls somewhere between legend and soap opera — and Lowe’s oldest son, Max Lowe, does a lot to look behind those facile judgments in his documentary “Torn,” digging deep into his dad’s archives and his family’s still-raw emotional issues. Jennifer Lowe- Anker graduated from Montana State University and completed her college in 1987. JENNIFER LOWE-ANKER HEIGHT, WEIGHT Torn” becomes, in the end, less a movie about mountain climbing and more about the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that trauma and grief placed in this family’s path, and what it took to get around them.