Plenty of people rocked our world this year—like resilient shark-attack survivor Bethany Hamilton, Olympic supa-swimma Michael Phelps, valiant Iraq war photographer Chris Anderson, and (of course) Lance, with his butt-whompingest Tour win yet. Meet the top 25 picks in our roundup of adventure heroes who stand a cut above.

Laird Hamilton

Laird Hamilton

Misty May & Kerri Walsh

Solid-Gold Spikers

Despite the anything-can-happen aura surrounding this summer’s Olympic Games, certain outcomes seemed inevitable: There would be drama and tears in the gymnastics competition, archery would not make prime time, and the American women would win beach volleyball gold. Of course, it’s easy to achieve world dominance on the sand if you are the formidable twosome of Misty May—a five-foot-nine, 150-pound 27-year-old with coils for legs—and Kerri Walsh, 26, whose six-foot-two, 155-pound beanstalk body lets her cover every inch of the net and court. It’s not surprising that both women are blessed with Athena-given genes—May’s mother was a nationally ranked tennis player, while Walsh’s mom was voted MVP on her college volleyball team at Santa Clara University—and both were college superstars in their own right. At Long Beach State, L.A. native May led her team to a 36–0 record and the 1998 NCAA championship, while Walsh, a native of Santa Clara, California, racked up four All-American honors and two consecutive NCAA championships at Stanford. The two paired up in 2001 and were ranked number one in the world by the end of the 2002 season, becoming the first American team to win the world championships, in 2003. Three years of playing solid ball together certainly paid off: The duo (who beat Brazilians Shelda Bede and Adriana Behar in the gold-medal round) didn’t drop a single game in Athens. “We played consistently and aggressively from the very first game,” says May. “I didn’t have any doubt we would win gold.”

Rush Sturges, Marlow Long, & Brooks Baldwin

Mad Auteurs

Judging from the footage in Young Gun Productions’ 2004 DVD New Reign, extreme kayaking has found its heirs apparent. The flick, 30-plus minutes of pure kayak porn, stars the trio and a cadre of their underage, overtalented pals running 70-foot waterfalls, cartwheeling through ten-foot standing waves, and raising hell on some of the world’s fiercest waterways, from Uganda’s White Nile to Canada’s Slave River. Set to rap and hip-hop, it forgoes narration for frame after frame of lemming-style plunges and teenage rowdiness. (In one scene, paddler Merlin Hanauer cranks the rental van through high-speed donuts in a Norway parking lot.) Talent and guts notwithstanding, the Young Guns’ irreverence and Hiltonesque reputation for partying haven’t gone over well with the sport’s veterans. “Don’t get me wrong—they go huge,” says Clay Wright, 37, a member of the U.S. Freestyle Kayak Team since 1995. “But they need to learn that people aren’t just watching them when they’re on the water.” Which, as it turns out, is most of the time: Long, 20, Baldwin, 20, and 19-year-old Sturges, the 2003 junior world freestyle champion, made their first movie, The Next Generation, in 2002 as students at the Vermont-based kayaking academy ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Quest. For their next offering, Dynasty, due out in late 2005, they’ll head to the Congo’s big water. “With a 15- or 20-foot wave,” says Sturges, “anything’s possible.”

Keir Dillon

Snowboarder

Keir Dillon

Keir Dillon

Keir Dillon couldn’t concentrate. It was the February 2004 World Superpipe Championship in Park City, Utah, and the pipe’s 18-foot walls were booming with the sound system’s house music and the noise of the raucous crowd. So he put on his earmuff-size Sony headphones, tuned in to the mellow vocals of a singer from his church, dropped in, and won gold. That same focus earned Dillon third-place finishes in both the X Games in January and the U.S. Open in March—a trifecta of podium appearances at the sport’s most renowned contests. In the pipe, Dillon, 27, is known best for his personalized McTwist—a 540-degree spinning front flip—and soaring amplitude. Off the snow, the Carlsbad, California–based boarder—who is married and sticks to a rigorous year-round training regimen in hopes of making the 2006 Olympic squad—is leading a new revolution of career-focused riders by being up front about who he is and what it takes to win. “You can’t be pro these days and be a complete derelict,” he says. “It’s about being dialed.”

Lauren Lee

Model Climber

“I don’t have the patience for sticking around climbs very long,” says 24-year-old boulderer Lauren Lee, “so I just send them [climb without falling] as quickly as possible.” In her case, impatience is a virtue. After less than two years of crag time, the five-foot-five, 110-pounder from Cincinnati was snagging first-place finishes at the 2001 American Bouldering Series and the Subaru Gorge Games. In 2002, she finished second to France’s Myriam Matteau at the Bouldering World Cup in Rovereto, Italy, then went on to win the prestigious Phoenix Dyno competition in April 2003 and the Professional Climbing Association competition in Salt Lake City in January 2004. But just because Lee can rage on the rock doesn’t mean she’s a dirtbag climber: A model for gearmakers Five Ten, Prana, and BlueWater, Lee has been known to compete in a skirt. True to form, she’s throwing herself headlong into the next step: sport climbing. In July, Lee put up the fastest female ascent on Dumpster BBQ, a notoriously difficult 5.13c pitch outside Rifle, Colorado. And in September, she became the youngest American woman, and third overall, to send a 5.13d. “It’s one thing to be strong, but it’s another to know how to move on the rock,” says World Cup climber Chris Sharma, 23. “Lauren has both. She’s got huge potential.”

Stewart+Brown

Eco-Fashionistas

Stewart+Brown

Stewart+Brown

At long last, the human species has evolved to the point where we can grasp the concept that earth-friendly fashions need not stop at hemp. This is due in no small part to Stewart+Brown, the Ventura, California–based green-produced, downtown-inspired apparel company created in 2002 by the husband-and-wife team of designer Karen Stewart, 35, and brand guru Howard Brown, 37, alumni of Patagonia and Urban Outfitters, respectively. “You know the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax? ‘I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!'” says Brown, by way of explaining their mission. “We want to mix environmental consciousness with good, cool design.” Toward that end, Stewart+Brown gives 1 percent of its gross profit to environmental causes. All of their cotton products are 100 percent organic; the cashmere comes from a fledgling Mongolian cashmere co-op run by herders who process the woolly stuff themselves; their Surp+ tote bags are stitched from leftover ripstop nylon and the remnants of fly-fishing waders; and their fleece is Stewart’s own invention, a proprietary blend of organic cotton, polyester, and spandex. They’d intended to take their new line slowly, conceiving the company while raising their two-year-old daughter, Hazel. But when the zeitgeist calls, you have to answer, particularly when those calls are for cashmere and they’re coming from national franchises like Anthropologie, trendsetting boutiques like Butter, in Brooklyn, and celebs like Cameron Diaz and Liv Tyler (who ordered their infant line: cashmere baby blanket, hat, and neckie). While tastemakers swoon—”Oooh, the hats!” cries Organic Style‘s Danny Seo—Stewart and Brown are planning to expand, and scrambling to keep up with existing sales. “Did you hear that sigh?” says Brown. “I just spent six straight weeks packing boxes, and people are already placing reorders. Stores are selling out.”

Alexander Fyfe

Soccer Captain

While the Iraqi National Soccer Team was gearing up for its knockout performance at the 2004 Summer Olympics, U.S. Army captain Alexander Fyfe was helping the country’s next generation of athletes sharpen their dribbling skills. Fyfe, a civil-affairs officer with the Fort Lewis, Washington–based 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery Regiment, was stationed in Mosul, Iraq, last February when he noticed some local kids playing with a makeshift ball made of straw. The 26-year-old West Point grad—a standout midfielder as a teenager in Rocky Point, New York—e-mailed his high school coach, Al Ellis, and asked him to ship over a few balls. Ellis broadcast the request over the Internet, and soon Fyfe had received $25,000 worth of jerseys, balls, and other soccer equipment from the United States and Japan, which he helped distribute to children throughout northern Iraq. Though his is a goodwill mission, Fyfe still has to watch his back: In June, while on a delivery run to schools near the town of Qara Qosh, his convoy was ambushed by anti-American insurgents. The soldiers escaped harm, but the incident rattled Fyfe, who hopes to end his tour of duty by year’s end and return home to the Northwest for a winter of hiking and skiing. “This soccer project is one of hundreds of good news stories happening here every day,” he insists. “I’ll leave Iraq knowing that I played a small part in a very big production.” Whatever the outcome in Iraq, it’s hard to contest the rightness of kids playing sports outside.

Joe Don Morton

Smoke Jumper

The wildfire outside the Alaskan town of Arctic Village was small, maybe only five acres, when veteran firefighter Joe Don Morton hurled himself from the belly of a Casa 212 aircraft on June 22, 2004. Even 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the sparsely vegetated foothills of the Brooks Range, it took eight men and two CL-215 tanker planes three days to douse the blaze. Morton, 34, is a veteran Alaska Smokejumper, one of 68 elite firefighters who serve as the Last Frontier’s first line of defense against wildfires, parachuting into the backcountry as soon as flames are spotted. Smoke jumpers are a burly breed, but in Alaska—where 99 percent of the state is wild and roadless backcountry—the job redefines hardcore. “When I heard about guys throwing themselves into the middle of burning, untamed wilderness 500 miles from the nearest road,” says Morton, a former Navy search-and-rescue swimmer who got his start fighting fires in Arizona, “I knew it was my calling.” Good thing, because 2004 was Alaska’s worst fire season on record, with 680 separate blazes charring nearly 6.5 million acres across the state, including the headline-grabbing Boundary Fire, which scorched 537,000 acres of the White Mountains National Recreation Area and threatened suburban Fairbanks in June. “It looked like a war zone,” says Morton, who made nine jumps between May and late September, often hauling up to 110 pounds of gear (including a Kevlar jumpsuit, hard hat, ax, and chainsaw) to clear terrain just ahead of the flames. “The large fires kept our guys out there a long time,” says base manager Dalan Romero. “They were a challenge to everyone’s endurance.”

Lance Armstrong

The Boss

More Lance? Yeah, more Lance. Because a cyclist now ranks alongside transcendent, single-name icons like Pelé and Jordan. Because, as a 32-year-old cancer survivor, he accomplished something after cancer—six Tour de France victories—that no one else has managed in an entire career. Because here’s how he described this summer’s 2,110-mile battle for his record-setting yellow jersey: “It’s as if I was with my five friends and we were 13 years old and we all had new bikes and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to race from here to there.'” Because rather than quit now, he is out there training, getting ready to unleash another season of hurt on the competition. Because he stamped LIVESTRONG on a yellow rubber band, sold it for a buck, and has generated upwards of $13 million for his cancer foundation. Because his rock-star girlfriend lives in L.A., and his career is based in Europe, but he insists on training in Texas so he can be closer to his kids. Because his cameo was the best part of Dodgeball. Because no matter how much is written about him, the next time he races, you’ll watch.

Bethany Hamilton

Surfer

Bethany Hamilton

Bethany Hamilton

“Then it happened,” writes 14-year-old Bethany Hamilton in her new book, Soul Surfer. “A wave rolled through, I caught it, put my hand on the deck to push up, and I was standing. I guess I started getting the technique wired after that.” Let us be the first to say that this is a massive understatement. Last January, ten weeks after losing her left arm in a grisly shark attack that made international headlines, Hamilton rode a six-foot wave on her six-foot-two-inch surfboard and placed fifth in her age group in a National Scholastic Surfing Association meet in Hawaii. In August she won the women’s open division of an NSSA Hawaii conference contest, outsurfing the reigning champ, 12-year-old Carissa Moore. How is this possible? Hamilton credits her family (her parents, Cheri and Tom, and two brothers, Noah and Timmy, all surf), supporters in her hometown of Princeville, Kauai, her strong faith, and her unwavering mission to turn pro. In addition to physical therapy, her daily workouts include beach sprints, crunches, stretches, and balance work. She also surfs three times a day on Kauai’s best breaks, fine-tuning her technique with help from surf-training legend Ben Aipa, 63, who has coached Kelly Slater and Sonny Garcia. Though she wears a prosthetic on land, she rides the waves without one: paddling with her right arm, kicking hard, planting her body in the middle of the board, standing up, and then dropping in. “For most of us, surfing with two arms is hard enough,” says Sunshine Makarow, publisher of Surf Life for Women. “But Bethany’s still out there surfing competitively, and she can rip!”

Justin Carven

Guru of Grease

No doubt you’ve been hearing the buzz about biodiesel. A chemically processed mixture of vegetable oil, methanol, and lye, usually blended with other diesel fuels, it sells for about the same price as unleaded gas, with fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and up to 40 percent better mileage. But 27-year-old Justin Carven, of Florence, Massachusetts, has come up with a smarter, cheaper way to drive greener. Carven’s Greasecar Vegetable Fuel System modifies any diesel engine to run on pure recycled cooking oil—cleaner and more fuel-efficient than biodiesel and free at Chinese restaurants and fast-food joints nationwide. Carven developed the Greasecar concept while studying mechanical design at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. His first real road test—a 2000 postgraduation trip from Cape Cod to California and back in a grease-powered VW Westfalia—drew so much attention that he soon began marketing easy-to-install Greasecar kits to the public. Carven and his staff of three (who produce all the components by hand in East Hampton, Massachusetts) report that 2004 sales are up 500 percent over last year, with 60 Greasecar kits, at $795 a pop, being ordered each month by a customer base that’s grown beyond the original dreadlocks-and-patchouli crowd. “I tried using biodiesel, but it was hard to find, and I figured why not go 100 percent?” says Mark Howard, an information-technology consultant in New Hampshire who installed a Greasecar system on his 1997 VW Passat last spring. “I estimate that I save $80 to $100 a month on gas.” Carven admits that vegetable oil is not the perfect replacement for gasoline—for one thing, lugging around vats of grease and filtering out the McNugget batter and other impurities can be a chore. But he thinks it’s a worthy alternative until another green fuel is developed. “It’s renewable, produced domestically, and not going to run out like fossil fuels,” he argues. “This stuff literally grows on trees.”

Danny Way

Big-Air Huckster

Danny Way

Danny Way

In the four-wheeled world of skateboarding, the name Danny Way has always been synonymous with big. That’s because, from the start of his pro skateboarding career, at age 14, Way has never stopped flying. The 30-year-old vert (a.k.a. halfpipe) skateboarder and father of two from Encinitas, California, made headlines in 1997 when he became the first skateboarder to jump from a helicopter onto a vert ramp—a move he aptly named the “bomb drop” and repeated two years later for MTV. In June 2003, Way set two back-to-back world records in a single jump at a mega–skate ramp in Temecula, California: First he landed a 75-foot-long backside 360 over a 40-foot gap, with the momentum carrying him into the vert pipe, where he soared to 23.5 feet of vertical. This August, he wowed audiences at the X Games in Los Angeles by breaking his own world record with a practice jump of 79 feet—and then going on to win the big-air ramp event. Needless to say, it can be messy work: In the past year, Way has received 25 stitches on his right elbow, ripped off all the skin on his stomach, and been knocked unconscious twice. But that’s nothing compared with his eight surgeries—six on his left knee alone—in the past ten years. Way is just as aggressive off the ramp. In 1995, he helped his brother, Damon, and friend Ken Block start DC Shoes, a San Diego–based skateboarding-apparel company, which they sold to Quiksilver in March 2004 for $100 million. Now he has the windfall to develop his latest idea—a portable 90-foot-high, 300-foot-long ramp that, he hopes, will kick off a big-air world tour. “Trying something new can be rough,” Way admits, “but once you make it happen, the possibilities are endless.”

Becky Bristow

Expedition Kayaker

Just eight weeks after the U.S. State Department warned Americans off traveling to Iran this May, 27-year-old expedition kayaker Becky Bristow drove overland from Turkey with a team of paddlers from Britain and Argentina for a series of self-supported multi-day descents down Iran’s Class IV and V Bakhtiari, Zez, and Sezar rivers. As it turns out, pushy water was only half of the challenge: Reconciling river-rat culture with Islamic law came with its own set of hardships. Despite 100-degree average temperatures, Bristow paddled in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt and donned a head scarf while portaging. At one point, three villagers accosted the team along the Zez River—holding Becky in her boat and making menacing hand gestures until the team’s British photographer, Alex Nicks, handed over his camera to appease them. “That was some outrageous stuff that I don’t think happens over there that often,” says Bristow. “The majority of the time we met beautiful people who were generous and friendly.” Bristow got her start on tamer waters in 1989, paddling the North Saskatchewan River near her home in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, in a 13-foot fiberglass kayak her father bought at a garage sale. Fourteen years later, she has notched first descents in Alaska, Ecuador, Russia, and B.C. (she scouted drainages from a helicopter during the three summers she fought forest fires), starred in TGR’s film Wehyakin and Scott Lindgren’s Aerated, and is in the process of launching her own production company, Wild Soul Creations. “She comes off as an unassuming, mild-mannered Canadian,” says fellow paddler Kristen Read, 29. “It turns out she’s also a total badass.”

Kit DesLauriers

Freeskier

Kit DesLauriers

Kit DesLauriers

When Kit DesLauriers, 35, arrived at the base of Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mount McKinley this May, the entire summit was capped in blue ice. But a little hardpack wasn’t going to stop her from becoming the first American woman to ski the continent’s tallest peak. For 26 days, she and her husband, Rob, assaulted the mountain, helping to rescue a stranded Korean party and enduring biting snowstorms. At the summit, DesLauriers strapped on her alpine planks and skied down windswept icefields, arriving, eight hours of skiing later, at base camp at 7,200 feet. As an extended warm-up to the McKinley expedition, the Jackson, Wyoming, local carved turns on 13,770-foot Grand Teton in June 2003 and, the following November, clinched the first female ski descent of New Zealand’s 9,960-foot Mount Aspiring. This spring, DesLauriers will attempt two more ski expeditions—one to the Himalayas or Greenland and one to an undisclosed peak in Chile. “Skiing is life,” says DesLauriers. “I love winter. I love the mountains. Sometimes it feels like the easiest thing in the world to be doing.”

Jimmy Chin

All-Mountain Man

Jimmy Chin

Jimmy Chin

How do you get to be a professional adventurer? It’s a frequently asked question, and 31-year-old Jimmy Chin has the bona fides to answer. Based in Jackson, Wyoming, he has made newsworthy ascents in the Karakoram, the Himalayas (including Everest), and the tallest sandstone towers in the world, in Mali. A couple of years ago, he joined mountaineer Conrad Anker, the late photographer Galen Rowell, and me on a 275-mile unsupported traverse of a never-explored corner of northwestern Tibet, where each guy had a 250-pound rickshaw strapped (as Jimmy put it) “to our asses.” Jimmy proved his strength, not only carting gear at 16,000 feet but capturing the decisive moments with both still and video cameras. But that’s the easy part of what you need to be a pro. The more difficult (and important) part is something you’re born with, and it makes you the type that other adventurers want on their team: You can’t stop smiling, no matter how tough it gets; you never complain, because your glass is always half full and there’s nothing to complain about; and your ego is post-Copernican—out there orbiting around with everyone else’s, not at the center of anything. And, oh, yeah, I forgot—I guess it doesn’t hurt if People magazine votes you one of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

Michael Phelps

Heavy-Medal Swimmer

In case you fell asleep during the gazillion hours that the Olympics were televised this August, here’s a news flash: Michael Phelps was the Man. Swimming 17 races in seven days, the 19-year-old Maryland native nabbed six gold medals and two bronzes, a record haul for any sport in a single, non-boycotted Olympics. Although Phelps’s physique guarantees domination in the pool—observe his lean six-foot-four, 195-pound frame, flipperlike size-14 feet, six-foot-seven-inch wingspan, and extra-long torso—it was his bring-it-on mentality that cemented him as the one to beat in Athens. “He went after competition, not glory,” says Olympic commentator Rowdy Gaines, who won three gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. “He wasn’t afraid to take on the world’s best.” Case in point: Instead of entering the 200-meter backstroke—an event where at least a silver medal was a lock—Phelps swam against his Australian rival Ian Thorpe in the 200-meter freestyle, losing to Thorpe but snagging the bronze and breaking his own American record. But the much-heralded sportsmanship moment came when Phelps gave up his butterfly leg in the 4-by-100-meter medley relay to then-medalless teammate Ian Crocker. The U.S. team proceeded to win gold. Phelps’s pro status makes him ineligible for collegiate competition, but he’s still logging 50 pool miles a week as he prepares to start his freshman year at the University of Michigan, under the watchful eye of his longtime coach, Bob Bowman. It’s never too soon to start training for Beijing.

Rush Randle

Wave Doctor

Rush Randle, the greatest wave-sports athlete you’ve never heard of, lives for the cutting edge. Ever heard of tow-in surfing? Randle, 31, along with fellow all-star Laird Hamilton, invented it on Maui’s north coast in the early nineties. Ditto for kiteboarding, which made its debut in 1994–95, also on Maui. But his latest and greatest concoction is the upstart sport of foilboarding. The hybrid invention—which mounts an aluminum or carbon hydrofoil blade onto a wakeboard—got Hollywood treatment in Step Into Liquid and Billabong Odyssey, with sequences of foilboarders riding long, graceful swells. The physics are like that of an airplane wing: As the blade slices cleanly through the water, it provides so much lift that the board glides clear above the surface of the wave. The result is longer, faster, smoother rides—which may someday be the key to catching 100-foot waves. “It feels like flying,” says Randle, who builds and sells foilboards on Maui, where he lives with his wife, Erin, and their seven-year-old son. “It’s like being a pelican, riding the swells.” So for now, the Oahu native has dialed back his competition in the wildly nichefied sports of flow surfing (done in artificial pools) and sling surfing (in which a jet ski flings the surfer at a wave, launching him into acrobatic aerials) to concentrate on the hydrofoil. When the right swell hits this winter, he’ll be out there going the distance: “I want to take the longest ride on a single swell ever,” declares Randle, whose personal best is two miles. “With the right swell, I think I can go 50.”

André Tolmé

Golfer in the Rough

For most duffers, losing 509 balls and shooting 290 over par in one round would be a sign to quit the sport. Not for André Tolmé. His epic traverse of the world’s longest, most unconventional links—the 2.3-million-yard, par-11,880 country of Mongolia—made him the global spokesman for a nascent sport: extreme golf. In July, the 35-year-old civil engineer from Northfield, New Hampshire, completed his epic 90-day, 1,300-mile golfing expedition across the Mongolian steppes, where he spent most days fighting off fierce Siberian winds as he whacked balls with a 3-iron. What kept Tolmé going were the nomadic Mongolians who welcomed him into their yurts at night and fed him high-calorie (if not haute-cuisine) slabs of mutton fat, fermented mare’s milk, and sheep-brain pâé smeared on sliced sheep’s liver. Tolmé’s efforts landed him a spot on Jay Leno’s guest list in August and the coveted title of Golfer of the Year (as proclaimed by venerable New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson)—beating out country-club champs Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. When asked what could possibly top teeing off across Mongolia, he would only say, enigmatically, “I’ve got a few ideas.”

Tim Bluhm

Vagabond Rocker

Tim Bluhm

Tim Bluhm

Tim Bluhm lives in a 1995 Chevy Sportvan, but don’t let that throw you: The lead singer of the San Francisco band the Mother Hips has still managed to release nine albums, play more than 2,000 concerts, and build a cultish fan base—all the while stringing together a life of wilderness rambles that are as much Jack London as Jack Johnson. He tramps up and down the Golden State, skiing Mount Shasta, free-soloing Tuolumne Meadows’ Cathedral Peak, surfing the cold Northern California coast, and telemark-skiing the Sierra. This summer, he broke a 14-year concert streak and worked as a climbing guide in Yosemite. With a sun-soaked sound that blends Merle Haggard with the Beach Boys, Bluhm pitched his tent on a plot of California’s imagination and has been singing into the roar of the bulldozers ever since, a self-proclaimed “time-sick son of a grizzly bear” along the lines of Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt, with a similarly loyal following. In February, lines formed around the block in San Francisco for the premiere of Stories We Could Tell, a feature-length documentary about the band. This month, Bluhm releases California Way, a two-day session that Fog City Records producer Dan Prothero calls a “love letter from and about a disappearing place.” Reached by cell phone on a highway in the Sierra, Bluhm admitted that if he’d hit the jackpot ten years ago, he “probably would have just spent it all. Now,” he said, “I’d buy a better van. Or at least get my brakes fixed.”

Dwight Aspinwall & Perry Dowst

Gear Savants

What do you get when two New Hampshire engineers train their Ivy League brains on the lowly camp stove? Say hello to the Jetboil, a snazzy, all-in-one portable kitchen that—in 11 months on the market—has revolutionized backcountry cooking. It began as a brainstorm back in the nineties, when software engineer Dwight Aspinwall, now 43, was trekking Tasmania’s rain- and wind-pummeled South Coast Track. Every day, he’d watch his Aussie friends root around in their packs for their stoves, their pots, and their matches to make afternoon tea. Gotta be a better way, he thought. In 2001, Aspinwall teamed up with his second cousin, engineer Perry Dowst, 44. Three years and a few accidental fires later, the $80 Jetboil Personal Cooking System was born—an integrated fuel burner/pot/mug combo with a Star Trek–looking “FluxRing” heat exchanger that gives it double the heat-transfer efficiency of most other backpacking stoves. All you really need to know, though, is that, with infomercial-worthy ease and a flick of a knob (no lighter required!), it boils a cup of water in 60 seconds and uses 50 percent less fuel than a standard camp stove to do it. Since arriving in outdoor stores last January, Jetboil has become the buzz of bivy ledges and surf breaks nationwide—with everyone from firefighters to alpinists preaching the gospel of a fast cup of joe on the go. “A monkey could put this thing together and start boiling water within a minute,” says mountain guide Steven Tickle, who packed Jetboils for his clients’ fast-and-light assault on Nepal’s 22,494-foot Ama Dablam this fall. “You can always rely on it.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Environmental Action Hero

When he took over as governor of California in November 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 57-year-old, Austria-born bodybuilder and action-film star, was poised to do what many thought was impossible: turn the GOP—or at least his Left Coast slice of it—green. ” ‘Jobs vs. the environment’ is a false choice,” he said on the campaign trail, and then he backed it up with an ambitious environmental action plan for California that included mandates to cut air pollution in half by 2010; start a Green Building Bank, offering incentives to eco-friendly construction projects; and ensure that 20 percent of California’s power comes from renewable sources by 2010 (and 33 percent by 2020). So how’s he doing so far? After focusing on budget deficits and government restructuring for the first ten months of his term, in September the Governator signed into law more than 20 pro-environment bills, creating the Sierra Nevada Conservancy to protect 25 million acres of central California and cracking down on cruise-ship pollution, while also backing a 25 percent reduction in exhaust emissions from cars and light trucks by 2016. Even skeptical groups like the Sierra Club are giving him a cautious thumbs-up. “He’s off to a fair start in signing legislation,” says Bill Allayaud, legislative director of Sierra Club California. “But his whole record is uneven.” Right, and what about the famous vow to modify one of his Hummers into a hydrogen-fuel-cell hybrid? California EPA director Terry Tamminen, the former head of Santa Monica BayKeeper whom Arnold appointed at the recommendation of cousin-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is standing by his boss. “He promised to convert one of his Hummers to hydrogen during the campaign,” says Tamminen, “and the governor is always a man of his word.”

Chris Anderson

Frontline Photographer

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson

American Chris Anderson didn’t set out to become a war photographer. “It chose me. I didn’t choose it,” he says of his recent status as the intrepid shooter on every photo editor’s short list. At the relatively young age of 34, he has all the trappings of a grizzled photojournalist: an assortment of dented and dust-clogged rangefinder cameras; barely lived-in apartments in Paris and New York; a prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal, awarded by the Overseas Press Club for exceptional courage and enterprise; and a passport bloated with stamps from conflict-torn hot spots in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. In truth, when Anderson signed on with U.S. News & World Report to spend three months covering the war in Afghanistan—and, 16 months later, with The New York Times Magazine to cover the war in Iraq—all he really desired was to see how people live their lives and to capture moments of human drama by “shooting stories at eye level,” as he calls his brand of experiential photography. “Chris is the embodiment of the creative spirit: restless, searching, always moving on,” says legendary photojournalist James Nachtwey, 56. “He wants to know how things look out of the corner of his eye, on the dead run.” Such was the case on April 7, 2003, two days before Baghdad fell, when Anderson was riding with an armored column through the center of the city, the only journalist to do so. He survived a direct RPG hit on his vehicle and, despite nearly losing an eye to shrapnel, joined a similar mission two days later. “People are usually shocked that I enjoy my job as much as I do,” he admits. “But with all the strife and chaos going on around me, as sick as it sounds, it’s an absolute adventure.”

Jim Prosser

Sustainable Vintner

Oregon winemaker Jim Prosser says his delectable 2002 vintage possesses “an ageable combination of power and grace.” The same can be said of the 41-year-old recreational mountaineer–cum–professional vintner, whose 1999 debut pinot noir turned international critics into salivating sissies. Prosser’s J.K. Carriere label continues to wow oenophiles at restaurants from NYC’s Oceana to Aspen’s Ajax Tavern, with pinots ranging from $18 to $65 that, Prosser says, are “more about seduction and less about ‘haul you back to the cave by the hair.'” He and his crew of 16 produce the wine in a converted hazelnut barn in the Willamette Valley, using centuries-old techniques and locally grown, pesticide-free grapes. “Great wines are made at the margins,” says the Peace Corps alum (he served as a small-business consultant in Lithuania from 1993 to 1995), who compares winemaking’s risks and rewards to those of climbing a peak or catching a trout. When he’s not off skiing Mount Bachelor or fishing the Deschutes, Prosser relishes the long hours caught up in the vines or on the crush deck. But things get less rosé when the bees come out to bite. Deathly allergic, he’s twice ended up in a near-coma working in the vineyards. “It reminds me I’ve made a conscious choice to do what I do,” declares Prosser. “Know thine enemy, I say.” Fittingly, his label pays tribute to his nemesis: A big wasp underlies the vintage.

Jim Fraps & Jeff & Paula Pensiero

Big-Pow Hoteliers

Annual snowfall of 42 feet, 36,000 acres of untracked bowls, and 18,000 vertical feet of deep turns a day: Welcome to the “church of the fall line” at Baldface Lodge, one of North America’s largest—and newest—snowcat skiing operations, whose worshipers have included late snowboarding king Craig Kelley, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, and Foo Fighters bass player Nate Mendel. Eight years ago, the founders of this 24-guest powder haven in the heart of British Columbia’s Kootenay Mountains, 37-year-old Jim Fraps and his college buddy Jeff Pensiero, 35, were working and boarding in Tahoe—surviving on ramen noodles and a dream: to cash in on B.C.’s backcountry. The two scraped together $50,000, then scouted an area near Nelson that raked in consistently huge snowfalls. By the time they were granted tenure from the B.C. government for the land, in 2000, their $50,000 was history. Then a friend introduced Pensiero to Mendel and Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl, both eager investors. In December 2002 the duo, along with Pensiero’s wife, Paula, opened the lodge, a timber-framed structure perched at 6,750 feet on a ridge linking five peaks. A steady diet of cabernet and plank-grilled salmon—along with guides like 1998 Olympic boarder Mark Fawcett—and a happy, happening vibe have charmed guests ever since. “Their enthusiasm is infectious,” says Mendel. “It spreads throughout the whole operation.”

Darren Berrecloth

Freeride Mountain Biker

Darren Berrecloth

Darren Berrecloth

Darren Berrecloth, 23, remembers the exact moment he decided to dedicate his life to mountain biking. It was the summer of 2002, he’d taken the day off from his job at a Vancouver, B.C., machine shop to compete in a dirt-jump contest in Whistler, and his boss was pissed. “This skinny, nerdy guy was yelling at me that I needed to snap out of this biking thing,” he remembers, “to wake up and smell the coffee.” Berrecloth was fired on the spot. That fall, he showed up in Virgin, Utah, for the Red Bull Rampage—freeriding’s premier huckfest—unregistered, unsponsored, and virtually unknown. He took third. Since then, “Bear Claw” has almost single-handedly radicalized freeride mountain biking by bringing BMX stunts like spins, hand grabs, and no-hands seat grabs to an already extreme sport. With signature moves like the Superman Seat Grab Indian Air (translation: flying through the air, feet off the pedals, bike out in front, one hand on the bars), he won both the 2003 Joyride Slopestyle Expression Session, in Whistler, and the 2004 Monster Park Slopestyle Invitational, in Marquette, Michigan. While Berrecloth’s outta-nowhere podium finishes have raised eyebrows, his film segments have redefined what’s possible with two knobby tires and eight inches of travel. In the 2003 video New World Disorder IV: Ride the Lightning, he pulled a 360 off a 25-foot cliff in Kamloops, B.C. “People were blown away,” says filmmaker Derek Westerlund. “It was a big jump for most riders to even go off, and Darren rode up and did a 360 off it.” In Westerlund’s latest film, Disorderly Conduct, Berrecloth clears a 50-foot jump over a canyon in France. One man’s lunacy is just the logical next step for Berrecloth: “I’m always pushing myself to learn new things,” he says. “That’s what makes me tick.”

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They wouldn't tell me Joe was dead—not at first. “Disappeared” is what they said. Lost without a trace on a knife edge of ice and snow at 27,000 feet. Last seen on the evening of May 17, 1982. I was 30 then. Joe Tasker, my boyfriend of two and a half years, was on a British expedition attempting Everest's then-unclimbed Northeast Ridge. Thirty-four years old, he was one of Britain's climbing stars, with a number of new Himalayan routes to his credit, including the north ridge of 28,169-foot Kanchenjunga, on the border of India and Nepal, and the west face of India's 22,520-foot Changabang. With him on the ridge that day was his frequent partner, 31-year-old Pete Boardman, who, in 1975, had become the youngest man, and one of the first Brits, to summit Everest.

Joe and Pete set off from advance base camp, at 21,000 feet, on the morning of May 15. Monitored via telescope by expedition leader Chris Bonington and base camp manager Adrian Gordon, they climbed higher for two days, without supplemental oxygen. As the light faded on May 17, they moved out of sight, behind a pinnacle on the ridge. They never reappeared.

The news blew my life to pieces. For months I staggered from day to day, unable to fully accept the fact of Joe's death, unwilling to believe he wasn't coming home. That September, Pete Boardman's widow, Hilary, and I set off on our own journey to Everest. We stayed in the same hotels they had; we crossed the high, dusty plains of Tibet in the back of a truck, as they had. We trekked for ten days across the passes of the Kharta and Karma valleys, on the eastern side of Everest, and up the rough 12-mile trail to the site of their advance base camp. We sat in flattened-out areas where their tents had stood, and we collected relics: an empty whiskey bottle, film cartridges, the tattered remains of a copy of Bruce Chatwin's , which I had given Joe to read on the trip. On our way back down, through the Rongbuk Valley, we left mementos among the stones of Joe and Pete's memorial cairn. We planted a garden around it, scrabbling in the dirt with our fingers, transplanting patches of moss, burying poppy seeds, trying to beautify the closest thing we had to a grave.

No one can teach you how to mourn. As with climbing a mountain, you can try to prepare, but it's impossible to know what will happen once you are on its steep slopes. Before my trip to Everest, I'd gone from my home in Manchester, England, to the Lake District to visit the Boningtons—Chris and his wife, Wendy. Chris and I walked with his dogs, and he listened with kind patience as I talked endlessly, repetitively, about Joe. Standing on the top of a hill, watching cloud shadows slide over the rolling green fells beneath us, Chris suddenly said to me, “I know you can't imagine it now, but one day you will fall in love again—and be happy.”
I remember feeling angry with him, as if he underestimated my pain. Eventually, however, he was proved right. In 1986, on a teaching exchange to British Columbia, I met Dag Goering, a Canadian veterinarian who, like Joe, loved adventure but, unlike Joe, was prepared to compromise so I could come along. We got married and began to explore the world by kayak.

A decade later, we were in Austria, paddling down the Danube. One windy afternoon, as the sky filled with roiling storm clouds, we pulled ashore in Vienna. While Dag studied a menu at the marble-topped table of a coffeehouse, I went outside to a phone booth to call my mother, in England. She answered not with her usual delight and relief but in a voice choked with tears. “They found a body on Everest,” she blurted out. Time slowed, images sharpened. I leaned against the glass door of the telephone booth, staring at fat, perfect raindrops bouncing off the shining flagstones of the square. “It was on the news,” my mother continued haltingly.Ìý“They say it has to be either Joe or Pete.”

I called my friend Ruth Seifert, a psychiatrist who has been married to London neurologist and expedition doctor Charlie Clarke for 32 years. She told me that a Kazakh climber had come across the body on the Northeast Ridge. He had taken photographs and, when he returned from the Himalayas, would send them to Chris Bonington. It would be several weeks before they arrived.

A photograph, I told Dag. If it were of Joe, how would he look after lying for a decade near the summit of Everest? Surely he would be perfectly preserved, forever youthful as I'd grown older? Gently, Dag warned me about the ravages of UV radiation, dry winds, extreme cold; the remains might not be pretty, he said—might not even be recognizable.

A month after I stood in that phone booth in Vienna, Chris received the pictures. From the clothing, Hilary and her mother-in-law identified the remains as Pete's. For Hilary, it was an affirmation of her belief that Pete hadn't fallen. If he'd died violently, she had always claimed, she would have sensed it. I was relieved, too. During the weeks of waiting, I'd begun to dread what the discovery of Joe's body might unearth in me. But I felt compelled to see what death on the mountain looked like.

The next time I saw Hilary, she handed me a large brown envelope containing a copy of the black-and-white photograph, then quietly withdrew. I thought I was prepared. But when I saw the picture, I cried out loud: desiccated skin drawn tight over bones, hair bleached white, the head uncovered, the hand gloveless in the snow. As shocking as the ravaged body, however, was the supreme bleakness of the place where it lay. That image of Pete Boardman's shell, leaning against a bank of snow on the Northeast Ridge, is fixed in my memory as one of profound loneliness and desolation. When I cried over it, I cried for Joe, too, for the fact that he had perished so far from warmth, and from life.

“This is a desperate place,” he'd written to me from base camp a few weeks before he died, describing the high winds, the cold, and the unforgiving landscape. And now I saw, truly, what he meant.

“If climbing were totally safe, it wouldn't have the same draw,” says Royal Robbins, 68, one of the pioneers of big-wall climbing in America. “You know it's dangerous in the first place, and the ironic thing is that when there's a mountain on which people died, getting up that mountain alive has a greater value.”

It's true: For many, risk is a necessary part of the game. Over the past decade, however, more climbers have begun to talk openly about the darker side of high-altitude mountaineering. “The defining thing about climbing is that it kills you,” says British mountaineer and author Joe Simpson, whose 1988 classic, , recounts his own close call with death in the Peruvian Andes. “Not many people publicly question the fatality rate, because it opens up a very nasty Pandora's box. Your rather fragile rationale for why you are climbing might not stand up to a close examination, and so you'd rather not talk about it. People feel uncomfortable and think, No, no, it's not like that. But you only have to look at the facts.”

According to figures collected by Kathmandu-based historian Elizabeth Hawley, the 79-year-old chronicler of decades of Himalayan expeditions, the death rate on climbing expeditions to Nepal between 1950 and 2001 was 1.9 percent. But, she points out, that includes all Nepalese mountains. Zero in on people doing new routes in the high Himalayas and the statistics change dramatically.

A 1988 survey by Charlie Clarke and Oxford pediatrician and author Andrew Pollard examining 83 British expeditions to peaks over 7,000 meters between 1968 and 1987 found that 23 of 535 climbers were killed. Excluding the deaths of Sherpas and porters, for which it was difficult to find accurate information, this added up to a fatality rate of 4.3 percent—at least one death for every fifth expedition. “If that were Formula One and more than one out of every 25 drivers were killed over this time span, it would be crazy,” says Clarke, now 59. “The level of risk would never be accepted.”

Joe used to say he was as likely to get killed in a car crash as on a mountain, and many climbers still echo that sentiment. But according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, approximately 42,000 people in the United States are killed every year in motor vehicle accidents. Out of a population of 281 million, that's approximately one death in 6,700. When I ask Steph Davis, a 30-year-old climber from Moab, Utah, who has tackled some of the biggest walls in the world, how many of her friends have died in climbing accidents, she counts eight. American alpinist Mark Twight, 41, says that 43 people he's known have died climbing. Over the past 15 years, Joe Simpson has lost, on average, a friend a year to the sport. How many people have lost that many friends to car wrecks?

According to Ruth Seifert, risk is, for many people, a totally abstract concept. “Mountaineers know terrible things happen to other people, but they think those people have been unlucky or made some mistakes. They say, 'Oh, I'm a careful person. I've survived lots of other expeditions. I'm going to be all right.'”

But what if something does happen? What if they don't survive? This is a question that has long been taboo in mountaineering. Most climbers are happy to discuss the reasons they climb—the thrill, the joy, the sense of purpose—but ask about the people waiting at home and their tone changes. The ebullient Slovenian alpinist Tomaz Humar, a 34-year-old father of two, suddenly grows silent. “This is the hard question,” he says.

Andy Kirkpatrick, a 32-year-old British alpinist who also has two young kids, becomes defensive: “If I were an armed first-response cop, would it be any different?”

Only Royal Robbins is unflinching in his reply. “We have to remember that if we're talking about true risk,” he says, “occasionally there has to be a price paid.”

“By whom?” I ask. “The people left behind?”

“Yes,” he says. “That's part of the largeness of the price.”

Until the 1980s, most eliteÌýclimbers were men. Since then, an increasing number of women have taken up the sport, but the arena of high-stakes mountaineering—the most difficult routes on the world's highest peaks—remains dominated by men. These days, their partners are often involved in the sport themselves and are aware of the dangers. It wasn't always so.

When I first entered the climbing tribe, few of the other wives and girlfriends of mountaineers I met were climbers. I sensed a wall of silence surrounding them, as far as “the life,” and the possibility of death, was concerned. They didn't complain about it or question it. The implicit understanding: Take it or leave it.

I'd met Joe in the fall of 1979, in the kitchen of a friend's house in Wales. I'd walked in while he was recounting how he and his friend Dick Renshaw had put up a new route on the 23,184-foot Indian peak Dunagiri and then, without food or fuel to melt water, endured an epic five-day descent. Joe was slim and wiry, with blue eyes and rather pinched features. He wore jeans and a fisherman's sweater. A web of fine lines ran across his forehead, and his hair was thinning. Had I passed him on the street, I doubt I would have given him a second look.

I already knew a little about the climbing world. My oldest brother, Mick, was a climber at the time, and I shared a house with a young mountaineer, Alex MacIntyre. I had watched their girlfriends suffer the stress of separation when they left on expeditions, and it wasn't the life I wanted. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Joe's mix of danger and charisma, and the glamour of his life was a welcome distraction from my job as a high school teacher. I found myself in the company of some of the world's elite climbers, people who were always on the move, making plans, zipping off to remote mountains to do audacious routes, and returning with wild stories. Nothing was static; nothing was certain.

As a newcomer, I looked up to veterans like Wendy Bonington, a woman with long and hard experience. In 1966, while Chris was on a volcano in Ecuador, their two-year-old son, Conrad, drowned in a stream. It was more than a week before Chris got the news, another week before he could get home. Even then, Wendy never asked him to stop climbing. The couple had two more sons, and year after year, while Chris went off to K2, Annapurna, and Everest, becoming one of England's most famous mountaineers, Wendy stayed home. “Love to me is the whole plant,” she says. “Once we put conditions on something, that is cutting off one branch of growth. There are very often things about another person that you cannot understand, but to me that does not change whether you love them or not.”

Not all of the wives were so supportive. “I don't see why mountaineers need to be protected,” says Ruth Seifert. “What—they're going to have absolutely everything? Plus the dear, faithful wife who's never to say anything horrid about them? Well, that's too much to ask, frankly.” For 20 years, whenever Charlie left on expeditions, Ruth became a single mother to their two daughters while practicing psychiatry full-time. “I've preferred to have a life where I've not been the little wifey, where I've had to be the man and the woman,” she says. “I know what I did at home was much harder than what he did in the mountains. It took me to my extreme. I thought, Good, I know who the strong one is.”

Of course, Ruth also emphasizes that she and Charlie “really like and love each other and always have. Mountaineers aren't disappointed people. They don't feel they are wasting their lives. They've gone out there and done something.” Charlie came into his element in the mountains, Ruth realized. He was a different person, more lively, more confident. Like most mountaineers, he felt alive in high, wild places. It was a feeling that home life couldn't provide. “Chris left Wendy with babies. Charlie left me with babies and a full-time job,” she says. “They thought, What's the big deal? I'm a brave mountaineer. I'm doing something incredibly dangerous here, and all you have to do is look after the house and family. Let's get this into proportion.”

And when he did come home, Ruth says, “Charlie was a nuisance. He just wrecked the whole well-oiled machine. They come back and expect that the whole universe of their home is going to revolve around them—God, I hated him when he came back. He was so full of himself. And then, after every expedition, he became depressed. And so I wasn't adequate—none of the wives could ever supply the real love and the enormous romance that they have with the mountains.”

For many climbers, the hard part starts when they get home. According to Joe Simpson, the fears they face in the mountains are primal ones, of falling, or suffocating in an avalanche. Against these he sets “uncontrolled fears,” about money, children, career, success, love—the daily concerns that can never be fully resolved and that never go away.

When I mentioned these theories to Chris Bonington, he smiled knowingly. “The big questions are simple questions, aren't they?” he said. “It's the little questions that are hard. Sorting out your income tax, trying to make the fridge work, getting the car fixed, dealing with your children being expelled from school or wanting to borrow money from you so they can do something you don't really approve of—those sorts of things are much more difficult questions than trying to climb a mountain or facing life and death. Life and death are simple.”

So why stay marriedÌýto a mountaineer? Ask Ruth this and she'll laugh. She was too busy to leave him. Others like the time apart, including Erin Simonson, 45, whose husband, Eric, 48, co-owns International Mountain Guides, in Ashford, Washington, and led the 1999 Everest expedition that discovered George Mallory's body. “Eric going on these long expeditions is a positive thing for our relationship,” says Erin, who helps manage IMG. “It's this process of constant renewal. Just about the time we're getting on each other's nerves, he goes out the door for a couple of months and it gives me time to reflect on the things I really like about him.”

“Life is just easier if you put him on the back burner and do your own thing 100 percent until he gets home,” Lauren Synnott, 32, told me when we spoke in early 2002. She has been married to 33-year-old North Face-sponsored alpinist Mark Synnott for five years. For several months each year, while Mark is off climbing, Lauren is at home in Jackson, New Hampshire, with their two sons—Will, age four, and Matt, one. The possibility of becoming a widow crystallized for her in 1999 when Alex Lowe was killed on Shishapangma, a month after he and Mark were in Pakistan together climbing Great Trango Tower. “It really brought it home to me,” she told me. “I just have to block the worry out. It does affect our marriage, because I put up an emotional wall when he leaves, and when he comes back it's hard to instantly tear it down. It never comes all the way down. The wall helps me prepare myself for if I ever did have to deal without him.”

Four years into their relationship, Lauren left Mark and got engaged to her high school sweetheart. A regular guy with a regular job, he came home to her every night and weekend. Lauren is a self-confessed homebody with no desire to travel; it should have been a perfect match. “The life was so boring,” she told me. “I kept comparing him to Mark.” She eventually dumped her fiance, returned to Mark, and married him. “Everyone loves an adventurous spirit,” she said, “especially if you're not that way yourself. I live vicariously through him.”

A year before Joe died, he and several expedition mates gave a lecture, in London's prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall, on their first ascent of 25,325-foot Mount Kongur, in China. Standing at the back of the auditorium, I watched Joe cast his spell. As he spoke, pictures were projected on a huge screen behind him. Precipitous snow slopes. Knife-edge ridges. Summits soaring into the sky. Joe stood before us, brimming with hubris, spinning stories of daring and death. By then I knew his faults, the weaknesses behind the image. But like everyone else in the audience, I was enthralled. I envied him the certainty of his calling. He was the hero I could never be, the hero I thought I needed—without any real inkling of what that would cost.

Nothing can prepare you, of course, for the phone call or the person at the door telling you there's been a storm, an avalanche, a falling rock, and that your husband, wife, father, or daughter isn't coming home. You can't allow your mind to expect that sort of anguish.

When Erin and Eric Simonson met, on a climb up Kilimanjaro in 1997, she asked him if he would climb Everest again if he had a family. If children were involved, he told her, he would think twice. “What his answer told me,” says Erin, “was that he felt he wouldn't have the same sense of responsibility to a wife that he would have to children.” In 2000, the couple had a daughter, Audrey; Eric went to Everest the next spring. “I used to feel like I came home from trips with my little bag of experience fuller than when I had left,” he told me that fall. “That whatever I brought back with me overcompensated for something I might have missed. But you can't rewind the tape on a kid—you're either there or you're not.” Eric continues to climb, but he has made a conscious effort to reduce the time he spends at high altitude. Still, says Erin, “he's willing to take that risk, even as a father.”

In 1995, 33-year-old British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, the first woman to climb Everest alone without oxygen, and the mother of two small children, wrote from K2 base camp, “It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two.”

Like many climbers, she didn't stop. As she neared the summit of K2, on August 13, it was late in the day and threatening clouds were forming to the north, but she kept on. At 6:30 p.m., she stood on top of the world's second-highest mountain. The sky was clear, the air still. But thousands of feet below her, the clouds were generating storm-force winds. On her descent, Hargreaves, along with two of her climbing partners and three Spanish alpinists, was plucked off the mountain by the wind and slammed down so brutally that her jacket, her harness, and one of her boots were ripped off. After the storm, another climber found these items, along with a trail of blood leading down the mountain to where her body lay, unreachable. How do families—children especially—make sense of something like that?

It doesn't matter to 45-year-old Andréa Cilento that her father, American mountaineer John Harlin II, never finished his dream climb, a direct route on the north face of the Eiger. Or that the route he took now bears his name: the John Harlin Direct. What matters to her is that he's been gone since she was eight.

The Harlins moved to Leysin, Switzerland, in 1963, when Andréa was five and her brother, John, was seven. Harlin and his wife, Marilyn, had jobs at two American schools there, and in the Alps he could pursue his passion for mountaineering. By the time Andréa was eight, he had given up his regular job to establish the International School of Mountaineering and to focus on his plans for the Eiger.
Harlin made his attempt in the winter of 1966. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Eiger expedition was big news. On March 22, a British reporter, Peter Gillman, was on a hotel balcony at the bottom of the mountain, scanning the north face through a telescope. He was searching for Harlin and his climbing partner, Dougal Haston. Suddenly he saw a figure in red, falling. A human figure. “It was stretched out,” he wrote in his book Eiger Direct, “and was turning over slowly, gently, with awful finality.”

A fixed rope Harlin was jumaring up had broken, and he fell 4,000 feet down the face. Haston later admitted to Marilyn Harlin that he'd noticed the rope was frayed but thought it would hold. She couldn't bring herself to look at the body.

Andréa built up a fantasy around her father's absence. He hadn't died; he'd faked his death. It was perfectly plausible. He'd run away to start a new life. Eventually he would come back. He would let Andréa know where he was. It would be their secret, and she could go and visit him. Back in America, she held on to that fantasy until she was a junior in high school. When she started dating, she went for “skinny city boys.” Eventually she married a nonclimber. Now they have a family, and in their house in Olympia, Washington, among the framed photographs of their children, are shots of her father and of his near double, her brother, John. He, too, is a climber. And the father of a seven-year-old girl. Andréa shakes her head at the thought.

“When climbers die,” she says, “I hear lots of people saying, 'Oh, well, it's OK—they died doing what they love best.' I don't think that at all. You should make sacrifices when you have children, because they need you. People say, 'If climbers didn't do what they love to do, they would die inside.' Well, excuse me, but there are other people involved in life, and you're not an island, especially when you have a family. I can only go by how I felt growing up in that situation. I felt abandoned. I felt like I was less important to my father than that mountain. I still feel that way.”

Was she less important? Certainly Harlin loved his children, but he resented the demands of fatherhood. In a 1960 letter to his wife, when Andréa was two and John was four, he wrote, “With [the kids] I have a trapped feeling, and I lose interest in myself, you, even life….Away, I become a romantic…just a different person. This person is more me, and it's the way I want to be.”

“He had us too early,” says John Harlin III, now 47 years old. “I wasn't planned. My father was 19 when he conceived me. He had great, driving ambitions. I was twice my father's age when I had a child. But I was still frustrated by not having climbed what I felt I should have by then.”

When John was six, his father took him on his first multipitch climb, in the Calanques, on the southern coast of France. Harlin's competitiveness was legendary, and as hard as he was on himself, he made impossible demands on his son. When he died, John was ten. “Everyone else was crying,” he says. “But I thought, How could he do that? How could he fall off? I wanted to know the details right away. I wanted to hear that he hadn't made a mistake.”

Conclusive proof of deathÌýis a basic human need. On May 25, 1996, 37-year-old Bruce Herrod, a British photographer on the first South African Everest expedition, reached the summit of Everest and was patched through via Base Camp to his girlfriend, Sue Thompson, in London. He was never heard from again, and his fate remained a mystery for a year. Then, in 1997, Sue received an e-mail from an expedition on Everest telling her that a team led by Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev—who himself would die on Annapurna that December, leaving behind his own grieving partner, American Linda Wylie—had found a body attached to the fixed ropes at the bottom of the Hillary Step. There was little doubt that it was Herrod; he'd been the last person to summit the mountain in 1996, and Boukreev's team was the first to go so high since then.

“My first reaction was, 'Oh, so you can come home now,' ” says Sue. “Until you think, No, he's still just as dead as ever.”

She contacted several expeditions at Everest Base Camp, asking them to look for personal effects on Herrod's body. Most important was his camera—she knew that he would have been recording his journey for as long as he was able. “You're aware it's the most horrible request to make: 'Can you look through his pack, and if his camera's there, can you bring it back?' But that became my obsession,” she says.

An expedition led by American filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears agreed to the task. When they reached Bruce's body, it was still clipped into the fixed ropes. He was hanging upside down, his arms dangling, his mouth open, and his skin black. “Like Captain Ahab,” Breashears wrote in his memoir, High Exposure, “lashed to his white whale.” Another American climber on the team, Pete Athans, secured Herrod's pack to the fixed lines, then cut the body free and watched it fall out of sight.

The roll of film inside the camera was marked, in Herrod's writing, “Eve of 24/5/96 South Col.” There were only two exposed frames. They were identical: There was the memento-strewn marker on the summit of Everest, and Herrod, leaning over it, smiling jubilantly at the camera, the earth curving behind him.Ìý

The image brought Sue some comfort, but the questions of how Bruce had died and whether he had suffered still haunted her. In the spring of 1999, she went to Everest and met Athans, who had just come down through the Khumbu Icefall. “To meet the guy who carried out the burial,” she recalls, “who sent Bruce spinning thousands of feet into space, is the ultimate proof that his body has gone and he no longer exists. I knew that when I shook his hand, the hand that had cut the rope, this would be confronting the final truth as far as I was ever going to see it.”

Sue suspects Athans was being kind when he assured her that, despite having hung near the summit for a year, Herrod was recognizable. He told her that he thought Herrod had suffered a very bad head wound, and that it was likely that he'd got his leg caught in old ropes and flipped back, knocking himself out. Athans also assured her that, unlike the remains of George Mallory, which had been discovered that spring, Herrod's body would not greet future climbers—the fall from the Hillary Step was long and hard. “I got this image of a body in pieces, and it's almost like that was the dissolution I needed,” Sue says. “I realized it's easier to deal with when you don't think of the body as a dead entity anymore. It's somehow dissipated.”

Imagining a body broken into a thousand pieces, watching a coffin being lowered into the earth, planting flowers around a cairn: These are ways of finding acceptance that someone is truly gone. But the questions that surround death in the mountains always linger. Herrod chose to go to the summit of Everest alone, late in the day, when his climbing partners were on their way down. Joe and Pete were fully aware that their strength was sapped by weeks on Everest, and that, should anything go wrong, their tiny team was too depleted to mount a rescue attempt. Nonetheless, the two men set out from advance base camp that May morning. What happened remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that they didn't say to each other—in good enough time—”This is crazy. We're way beyond our limits. Let's turn back. Let's return to the people who love us.”

I used to claim I feltÌýno anger over Joe's death. Other climbing widows admitted to bouts of rage—one kicked a bouquet of condolence flowers around the house, another slapped the person who came to break the news of her husband's death on K2. I used to say, “At least he died doing what he loved best”—as if that somehow made it all right, both for him and for me.

Ruth always insisted that, at some level, though I certainly knew what I was getting into when I chose Joe, I had to be angry. “Joe and Pete—all the climbers—pursued a passion that was above their responsibility for their family, and which took precedence,” she said. “It's like a mistress, really. The anger has to come out somewhere.”

A few weeks after Joe died, a trunk of his belongings arrived from Everest. Inside it I found love letters from another woman. It felt like the ultimate betrayal—and I realized that, if the mountain hadn't claimed him, I might have lost him anyway. That was unbearable. I burned those letters, and buried the memory of them for two years. When I finally spoke of them to a friend, I experienced a huge upwelling of anger—for what Joe had put me through, for what he'd expected of me, for what he'd left me with. And then I felt tremendous relief; at last I could move on.

But even when you think you have reached acceptance, when you are sure it's all sorted out, your subconscious tells you otherwise. All these years later, occasionally I'm disturbed by dreams that Joe has come back from Everest, sorry for all the upset he caused and wanting to be together. Grief, for me, has not been in stages or in tasks completed. Rather, it has been like a spiral: At first the spiral was so tight I could see nothing beyond it. Now it is made up of huge arcs, only faintly perceived on the horizon. Some of the old pain will always be there, but mostly I think of Joe fondly, and with gratitude.

Ask mountaineers why they climb and invariably they say that it allows them to live in the moment. Ask those bereaved by climbing accidents if anything positive has emerged from the tragedy and, in one way or another, they usually echo the climber's sentiment. If they love someone, they tell them. If they have a gift to give, they give it. They take nothing for granted.

I understand that sentiment. Joe's death stripped away my desire to live for the future. My life became the past and the present. I lived from moment to painful moment, a vivid and extreme existence where nothing mattered and anything was possible. That intensity, I now realize, was Joe's legacy. It compelled me to follow his example, taking from life what I wanted and needed, knowing that the end can come suddenly, without warning.

Joe's death jolted me alive.

Ìý

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