Peaks and valleys

Mountain-climber re-examines his life on the edge

Erika Gonzalez, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 2, 2005 at midnight

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Veteran climber and Colorado native David Roberts has scaled some of North America's most intimidating peaks, often by tackling dangerous, unexplored routes. To this day, some of his pioneering ascents have yet to be repeated.

But Roberts now concedes that perhaps his most difficult journey was one of emotional, rather than physical, endurance. The trip took Roberts back decades, through weathered diaries and to the Flatiron where Roberts saw his first climbing partner tumble to his death.

The result of that three-year trek is an honest and unconventional memoir that hits book shelves Saturday. In On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined, Roberts delves into areas other authors have been unwilling to go - acknowledging both the glory of the sport and its sometimes painful consequences.

"I had been so dissatisfied with other climbers' memoirs and autobiographies. I felt they didn't really dig into the deep questions of motivation and responsibility and the morality of the whole business," says Roberts from his Cambridge, Mass., home. "And they were totally unskeptical. It was just taken as a given that this was a great thing to do, rather than considering this as an endeavor that has at least some ambiguous and maybe negative qualities about it."

Granted, Roberts wasn't always as questioning. Though he suffered many close calls and watched two friends perish (and served on an expedition that claimed the lives of two others), for years, Roberts simply believed that some climbers paid for their passion with their lives. In fact, in 1980, he penned the essay, "Moments of Doubt" for Outside Magazine, arguing that, despite the tragedies he had witnessed, climbing was well worth the risk.

But negative reaction to the essay from non-climbers, as well as his interviews with other high-profile climbers, such as Reinhold Messner (the first man to ascend Mount Everest without bottled oxygen), caused Roberts to challenge his initial conclusion. Many of these world-class athletes are known in climbing circles as "hard" for their ability to separate their emotions from the sport.

"I was profiling these other climbers and trying to make them probe the very areas I hadn't probed in my own heart, and I was just getting stonewalled all the time," explains Roberts. "The frustration of that made me think I should look at my own track record."

Roberts began to reflect on his climbing career and the motives behind his daunting expeditions. That process led back to a childhood spent frolicking outdoors.

Born in Climax and raised in Boulder, Roberts' first playgrounds were high, alpine meadows. He would stare at towering Mount Democrat in wonder, imagining what it felt like at the top of the mighty peak. But it was more than just curiosity that drove the author to choose climbing as his path.

Even as a young boy, Roberts displayed a fiercely competitive spirit that he claims was at least partially inherited from his father, an ambitious astronomer. For proof, consider the response he gave to a psychological questionnaire in school.

"I answered the query, 'What kind of friends do you like to have?' by indicating that I didn't care if I had any friends, as long as I had people to beat in games."

For Roberts, the mountains served as a place to demonstrate that competitive streak. The sport also helped Roberts escape the loneliness and boredom he felt at home. Primarily focused on his career, Roberts' father was often preoccupied or away, meeting with other scientists. His mother, meanwhile, viewed the world with trepidation, thinking that "home was the only safe place."

As a result, Roberts devoured climbing accounts as if they were comic books. And by 10th grade, he had ascended Boulder's Green Mountain 50 times.

During his senior year, Roberts' girlfriend became pregnant and his parents arranged for her to have an abortion. The shame of the situation weighed heavily on Roberts, and he retreated further into climbing.

Recalls Roberts in On the Ridge: "I made in a sense a lasting decision - to seek the meaning of my existence not in the wilderness of love and intimacy, but in the terra incognita of the precipice."

Though Roberts changed his girlfriend's name to protect her privacy, he is bracing himself for criticism for including her in the book. "I think a lot of climbers will say that the pregnancy had nothing to do with my climbing," he says.

The summer after his graduation from high school, Roberts experienced another incident that led him to seek solace in the mountains. On a beautiful sunny morning in 1961, Roberts headed off with a childhood chum to climb the first jagged Flatiron rising above Boulder's Chautauqua Park.

Hours later, the 18-year-old returned home shell-shocked, haunted by the image of his friend slipping away from the rock and plummeting through the air, his out-of-control body eventually crashing into the treetops at the base of the Flatiron.

Many would have deserted the sport after witnessing such a horrific tragedy. But not Roberts.

Though he abandoned a trip to Grand Teton (at the urging of a close friend), by fall of his freshman year in college, Roberts was climbing again. He joined the Harvard Mountaineering Club and began honing his skills with much more experienced climbers.

In retrospect, Roberts says he never questioned why his parents continued to allow his participation in a sport that had proven so dangerous.

"My father was really remote and it took the most extraordinary dramas to catch his attention. My mother was caring, but intimidated by me, and I was such an angry, willful adolescent that she backed off," Roberts says.

Roberts also says that at the time, seeking therapy to deal with his grief was not an option.

"I didn't know of any other kid who had ever been to a therapist," he confides. "After Lisa got pregnant, I was sent to a therapist, and I received it as if it was punishment."

Instead, Roberts became a "hard" man like the climbers he admired, setting the tragedy of losing his friend aside to keep pursuing the sport he loved. In fact, Roberts had so buried his emotions that he didn't cry again until four years after the incident. And for much of the two decades following the accident, he became almost singularly obsessed with climbing, setting his sights on only the most challenging ascents.

"I don't think I had a death wish, but there was a willingness to risk it all," he acknowledges.

Climbing remained the most important thing in Roberts' life even after he married and landed a job as a professor of literature at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. In addition to teaching creative writing, Roberts established an outdoor activities program for students modeled after Outward Bound, which lured such notable students as author Jon Krakauer.

It wasn't until Roberts reached his mid-30s that his priorities began to shift. He performed his last serious ascent (with Krakauer) in 1977 and quit teaching in 1979 to pursue writing full-time.

Roberts' opinion about climbing has changed gradually over the last 20 years. He credits his wife (who he says "softened the hard man"), therapy and the experience of non-climbers impacted by the sport for sparking a new perspective.

Five years ago, Roberts began to seek out the friends and relatives of his first climbing partner for the first time since his young friend's death. The family's housekeeper was still so upset about the accident that she refused to talk to him. His climbing partner's sister was also mad, particularly for "opening an old wound" with his essay, "Moments of Doubt."

"It was disturbing for me to realize that she had been angry with me for 39 years," says Roberts. "And I'm sure this book will stir it up all over again."

Mark Synnott, an accomplished climber and member of the North Face Climbing Team, isn't sure what feelings Roberts' book will stir up. But he isn't surprised the author's philosophy has changed.

"When I was 25, I was willing to stick my neck out farther than I am now. That's something you can see is common, and that's probably true with David," says Synnott. "When people are young they're really hungry. But as you get older your perspective changes - you think maybe I shouldn't have stuck my neck out as far as I have."

Unlike "Moments of Doubt," Roberts doesn't arrive at any pat conclusions in On the Ridge. In the end, he recognizes that climbing hasn't brought him the transcendence he had hoped, but has instead been tainted by the deaths he witnessed. He concludes that "the petty pace" of life he sought to escape is, ironically, what life is all about. "One must learn to live with what Freud called 'ordinary human unhappiness,' " he writes.

Roberts is comfortable with such gray areas. "I was worried that the book would be reduced to a counter conclusion that it's not worth the risk and that after 40 years of climbing it had all been a big waste," he says. "I don't want the message of the book to be reduced to a formula like that. It's absolutely about ambivalence. But what's wrong with that? It's honest."

The long trek into the past now complete, Roberts is ready for a new adventure. Though most of his writing career has been spent focusing on nonfiction, he now has a novel brewing. And proving that he's still a glutton for the most difficult missions, Roberts has already been warned that his latest endeavor won't be easy.

"I asked my agent about it, and he said do it if you must, but you could not find a worse time in publishing history to start writing novels - unless you're Stephen King," laughs Roberts.

Not easily intimidated, he still plans to propose the book - just one more mountain to climb.

If you go

• What: David Roberts will give a slide show and read from his new book, On the Ridge Between Life and Death.

• When and where: 7 p.m., Sept. 14, REI, 1416 Platte St., and 7 p.m., Sept. 15, University of Colorado Student Recreation Center, CU campus, Boulder

• Information: 303-756-3100 for Denver event; 303-583-9970 for Boulder event

gonzaleze@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5350

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