Fowler always blazed own trail

Humble climber was one of world's top mountaineers

James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 15, 2007 at midnight

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Nobody wanted to believe it. Couldn't be. No way.

Even when grains of information began to multiply and coalesce and then adhere and gain velocity - a rushing wall of inevitability - people roped themselves to a desperate hope and hung on. He couldn't be dead somewhere in the wilds of China. Not Charlie Fowler, the baddest dirtbag alive.

No, he was OK. Just delayed out there, somewhere near the Tibetan border. Just spending some extra time making another of his first ascents on a mountain no human foot had been on before. Just adding to his almost mythical reputation as a climber, a mountaineer whose résumé orbited the Earth.

Hey, what about that time in 1998 in Gurla Mandata, in the Himalayas? A bad fall had screwed up his leg, left him unable to walk. So what did he do? He crawled for three days. Made it out. Sure, the frostbite wiped out a bunch of toes on both feet, but no big deal.

"Toes are overrated," he said.

Six months later, he was climbing. Typical Charlie. Give him a problem - a sheer rock wall, a serpentine path along a snow-choked ridge, feet without toes - and he'd solve it. No, he and Christine were OK. They were just . . . late.

And then hope died.

On Dec. 27, under the impassive gaze of 20,354-foot Genyen Peak, searchers saw a gray boot and a blue gaiter jutting out of the snow. They dug the body from its snowy grave and carried it down. The next day it had a name: Charlie Fowler, age 52.

The body of Christine Boskoff, 39, his climbing companion and love, was nowhere to be found. The avalanche that had engulfed them must have flung her further and deeper. Another brutal winter had begun. The search for Boskoff would have to wait until spring.

The reports sprinkled through newspapers and on television said Fowler was from the small Colorado town of Norwood. They just as easily could have referenced Patagonia or Tibet. Or Yosemite or the Alps or Shepherdstown, W.V.

Anyplace where the Earth's convulsions heaved rocks upward in small or stupendous formations, creating wondrous challenges. Tricky crags, satiny ice walls, fissures in sheer granite, zigzag slopes into the clouds - it didn't matter what the terrain was. It only mattered that he could find a way up.

"On the rock, that was where Charlie was at home," says Pat Ament, a friend and former climbing partner. "On rock, he was this perfect spirit."

"Charlie always said it was easier for him to climb than not to climb," says his sister, Ginny Hicks. "It was that much of a passion, or maybe a compulsion. He needed to climb."

Hicks pauses. She was the youngest. Suddenly, at 51, the elementary school principal from Oregon is an only child, left to grieve her big brother, along with her 87-year-old mother, Christine Fowler, and her 25-year-old daughter, Lindsey Hicks.

Three women survive Fowler left to mourn their blood. But along with a family's grief is peace.

"Charlie wouldn't have changed anything, and I wouldn't have wanted him to change anything," she says, her voice soft but resolute. "You can't ask someone to stop doing what is part of their essence."

Today, that essence will be celebrated and eulogized in Telluride. Friends - and there are many - from all over the world will tell stories about Fowler, master of every climbing discipline; a man who, says Jimme Moller, was "probably in the top five mountaineers in the world."

They will say over and over, as Jeff Lowe does, how "Charlie was a climber's climber . . . one of the great exploratory mountaineers of this generation of Americans."

How, as Paul Sibley says, "Charlie wasn't out there tooting his horn and trying to be in the limelight, be a pretty boy on the cover of the climbing magazines. As a climber, he was pure."

They'll also recall how it all started in the sleepy hills of the South, where a quiet boy found magic.

Bold, audacious, fearless

He was born in Wilkesboro, N.C., but grew up in Virginia, the first child of an Episcopalian minister and a school librarian. The Rev. Manual Fowler was a lover of nature and imparted that love to his son on camping trips and hikes. Not that the boy needed much nudging.

On visits to his grandparents' home in Shepherdstown, whenever the family went on walks, Ginny noticed "he was always going off the trail and onto the rocks. He always wanted to blaze his own trail."

When he was 16, he went on a trip to Mount Rainer and did snow and ice climbing. That trip became the fulcrum on which his life turned.

He attended the University of Virginia and earned his degree in environmental science in three years. Soon after, in 1975, he moved to Boulder. Better climbing. Bigger mountains. Places to blaze a trail.

He arrived when Colorado's second wave of climbing was starting to crest; young dirtbags - a term of endearment among climbers - were looking to find daring new routes up familiar rock walls. Soon, word got out about this "wild and crazy guy" who could do amazing things. He was bold. Fearless. Audacious.

"Ohmigosh, he was phenomenal; one of the best ever," is how Gary Neptune, owner of Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder, saw it. "He could do it all."

He blazed a new route up the Diamond on the east face of Long's Peak. Did a second ascent on the daunting Perilous Journey route in Eldorado Canyon. Became the second American to do a solo ascent of the north face of the Eiger in the Alps. Floored people with the first free solo (no ropes) of the daunting Direct North Buttress on Middle Cathedral in Yosemite - a staggering display of climbing verve, chutzpah and intelligence up 1,600 feet of sheer, exposed rock.

Intelligence was key. To the nonclimbing world, Fowler may have seemed like a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie. Not so.

To Moller, "Charlie . . . was old- school, classical. He'd gather information, train himself. He would only do the next step when he was ready. He never took unnecessary risks."

As thoughtful as he was bold, as methodical as he was fearless, Fowler was a sphinx when he came to self-promotion.

"Charlie was humble; he didn't brag about his climbs," says Ament. "He let his climbs speak for him."

Not that he was always eloquent.

"In the 1980s, Charlie was a little rough around the edges," is Ament's view, and "he would blurt things out that someone else would have phrased in a more tactful way."

Always climbing light

What Fowler was doing in Sichuan - what the China Travel Guide Web site calls "one of the most inaccessible provinces in the nation" - was what he loved. That love had brought him back again and again to that remote outpost in southwest China. If you ask his sister, Sichuan's lure was "it was uncharted territory, unknown territory, unclimbed territory."

Ever the "climber's climber," Fowler "didn't like the kind of snow slog that are Everest expeditions," says Lowe.

"Charlie," says Moller solemnly, "liked to go light."

In life, as well as on the mountain.

"He didn't need many creature comforts," says Hicks, alluding to the modest house in Norwood that Fowler shared with Boskoff, a house one friend likened to "a monk's cell."

Even food was an afterthought. Arlene Burns, another friend, says, "Some climbs, he wouldn't bring food. The joke was everybody's fed Charlie on one climb or another."

As he scaled the topography of Tibet, Vietnam, Cuba, Scotland, Utah, South America, Colorado, even as he became an internationally known guide and segued into career sidelights of photography, videos and writing, Fowler went light.

For a long time, he even managed to resist the siren call of the world's highest mountain. Finally, in 2002, he led an expedition up Everest for a company called Mountain Madness, Christine Boskoff's company.

Mountaineering had brought them together: the mythical alpinist and the female icon whose résumé boasted ascents on six of the world's 26,000-foot peaks, a woman Burns calls an "animated, radiant being."

It was the exquisite interior of China that lured Boskoff and Fowler in October, a place to climb mountains, some without a name, a place for first ascents. They didn't even file for permits. No surprise there.

As a friend once recalled, "A few years back, I asked Charlie how he managed to climb in Tibet, which is notorious for numerous restrictions and high peak fees. He replied, 'I just ride the local buses, and when it stops near the mountain, I get off. The bus will eventually leave, and there you are.' "

So there they were in Yading, chatting with a Chinese tourist on Nov. 7, telling her of plans to climb one last peak before returning to America. There they were in Litang on Nov. 9, signing a local guest book.

Another local, a driver, picked them up Nov. 11 and drove them to Lamaya, a lonely dot on the map. They visited the Genyen Monastery. Told the monks they planned to travel north and return in four days. Then they set out into a light snowfall. It was Nov. 12.

On Dec. 4, fear began to unfurl among their friends. It wasn't like Charlie to miss a flight. The phone calls started. Heard from Charlie or Christine?

Word spread across the country. Across continents. It spread to government offices in Washington and China. It spread to the media, to The New York Times, to CNN. A $4,000 reward was offered for information about the climbers. Search teams were assembled. Each day that passed chilled the hope that Fowler and Boskoff were stranded in some village, some nomad camp.

Meanwhile, the regional government had located the tourist, the driver, the monastery. Everything pointed in one direction - up.

On Dec. 27, a search team ascended Genyen Peak. At 17,400 feet, they encountered frozen waves of snow, the aftermath of an avalanche. They saw the gray boot and the blue gaiter screaming out of a sea of white. The end of the last trail Charlie Fowler would ever blaze.

A final windblown journey

On Jan. 2, at the Lengu Monastery in Sichuan Province, monks performed a traditional puja prayer ceremony as Fowler was cremated. His sister says the cremation was done to circumvent the thick red tape required to get a body out of China. But it also solves the problem of where to place the remains of a man who had intimate relationships with so many places on the planet.

Some of his ashes will be loosed near a favorite climbing spot in Telluride. Others will be sent with the search party seeking Boskoff's body. Some will go to Virginia. Others will be consigned to Shepherdstown, where his father is buried.

In the way of nature, the wind will embrace the ashes, swirl them higher and higher across the sky, over the land. Inevitably, some will find their way upon a rock. And then Charlie Fowler will finally be home.

Services

• What: Memorial service for Charlie Fowler and Christine Boskoff

• When: 6 p.m. today

• Where: The Sheridan Opera House, 110 N. Oak St., Telluride

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

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