Editor’s note: This column has been updated to correct the location of Gabe Lee’s fatal fall in 1961.
David Roberts, foremost Alpinist, adventurer and author, died Aug. 20 of complications related to throat cancer. He was 78 years old.
Roberts started climbing in Boulder, where he earned straight A’s at Boulder High School. His father, Walter Orr Roberts, founded NCAR; his mother, Janet, was elected to the Boulder City Council.
Early on, Roberts witnessed the dark side of climbing. As chronicled in his exceptional memoir, “On the Ridge Between Life and Death,” he watched his friend, Gabe Lee, fall to his death from the First Flatiron in 1961.
Roberts stoically soloed to the summit, then carefully downclimbed the back side. Once down, he found Lee. “I could not bring myself to touch Gabe’s body,” he wrote. “I slumped to the ground, caught my head in my hands, and gave myself up to the sobbing that the last 30 minutes of terror had kept at bay.”
Four years later, on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, Roberts and his friend, Matt Hale, were ice climbing when two friends on an adjacent route tumbled down the mountain. Roberts and Hale raced to their aid, but after a prolonged revival effort, their friends perished.
These tragedies deeply impacted Roberts and his perspective on risk. And while it took a number of years for this post-traumatic stress to manifest fully, it gilded his writing with loss, vulnerability and a painfully honest search for meaning.
His exquisite — sometimes haunting — prose grabbed me immediately. I was on an airplane from Seattle to Anchorage in April 1998, reading Roberts in the midst of a personal and emotional crisis. Fleeing turmoil at home, I ran toward the ultimate distraction — an alluring, dangerous place that would demand every fragment of my attention and commitment: the Alaska Range.
There, I planned to climb Mt. Huntington, a steep and elegant peak considered among the most attractive mountains on earth.
On that flight I read Roberts’s first book, “The Mountain of My Fear,” about his own ascent of Mt. Huntington in 1965. He and three Harvard buddies pioneered a bold, 4,500-foot rib of ice, granite and snow — a tour de force that wrought from these four young men everything they had, including one of their lives. Ed Bernd had somehow unclipped from an anchor and, in total silence, teetered backward into the abyss.
This third fatal accident shook Roberts to the core, teasing out whatever suppressed demons were at work within his heart and head. Eventually, his floodgates opened.
“Fueled by a purgative need … Roberts holed up in his childhood bedroom during the 1966 spring break from his University of Denver postgraduate creative-writing program and in nine days wrote nine chapters that became “The Mountain of My Fear,” wrote Nell Porter Brown in Harvard Magazine.
Roberts’ psychic exorcism defied the classic heroics of adventure literature, of men conquering mountains, and began a new, more truthful narrative of youthful ambition stripped naked by the savage consequences and utter indifference of the mountains.
The ferocious pace at which he penned the book highlighted the ease with which he would always write. In a 2016 piece on outsideonline.com, Brad Rassler explains, “Even in illness, he has never known writer’s block and can’t understand those who find writing difficult work. He takes an almost perverse joy in recounting how Jon Krakauer, his most celebrated friend and former college student, agonizes over drafts.”
As Roberts passed his mid-30s, climbing faded to the background, though it remained in his life until recently. Annually, he would organize a rock climbing trip with a small cadre of friends, including Hale. “He’s a strong personality,” Hale told me. “That’s part of his attraction and it’s really at the heart of his success.”
Roberts authored dozens of audacious first ascents, most in Alaska, as well as 32 books and hundreds of articles. His work invites readers to experience the palpable, unbounded joy of youthful triumph and the gut-wrenching emptiness of profound loss, often on the same page. He challenges not only how readers understand risk, but how adventurers themselves interpret their journey.
Reading Roberts is like sipping — nay, gulping — a sublime cocktail of beauty, catastrophe, longing, despair and aspiration as he lays bare the humanity behind the daring, if not foolish, arena of alpinism and risk-taking in a way no writer ever has before.
Contact Chris Weidner at cweidner8@gmail.com. Follow him on Instagram @christopherweidner and Twitter @cweidner8.
