The
Longest
Journey

Lena Rowat skied 1,600 grueling miles across the Coast Range to quiet her demons. But she didn’t begin to silence them until tragedy struck.

_{by cassidy randall}

“It is important to affirm, and prove, that we go to the mountains to live and not to die, that we are not fanatics but firm believers, and that the few accidents which occur are hard but not useless lessons.” —Italian alpinist Guido Rey

ONE

The tent quaked in the howling wind. The storm had raged for three days, trapping Lena and Ruby Rowat at a narrow notch in the mountain ridge. By now the ceaseless sound of flapping nylon had become maddening. When the storm was unleashed on March 25, 2001, the sisters had only just skied to this pass, called Manatee Col. They hastily assembled a tent; there’d been no time to build up enough snow to create a windblock. Snow now piled against the shelter’s walls, threatening to collapse and bury them. When the women went outside to shovel it away, they threw themselves through the door to keep their sleeping bags from being covered in snow, which could soak the down that kept their bodies warm. They couldn’t afford to be careless. The nearest town—the British Columbia ski mecca of Whistler—was at least a four-day journey south on skis, up snow-draped peaks and down unpopulated valleys.

Lena, 28, and Ruby, 30, lit a stove inside the tent to cook food and dry their gear—a calculated risk, given that the tent wasn’t flame-retardant. But the heat from the stove and their bodies melted the snow beneath the floor, and it began to dip like the hull of a canoe, pooling water and pitching the sisters toward each other as they slept. Above the rampaging wind, they could hear the muffled roar of avalanches around them.

Such dangers might explain why no one had done what Lena and Ruby were attempting on this expedition: traverse North America’s Coast Range, a giant’s backbone of mountains stretching nearly 1,000 miles from near their home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. Some veteran mountaineers and skiers thought that it was impossible to ski it in one go. The Coast Range was remote and glaciated, shot through with raging rivers, almost laughably difficult to access, and notorious for unholy elevation gain, from sea level to peaks as high as 13,000 feet.

Then there was the wild scale of it all: Many considered it the longest nonpolar ski journey ever attempted. Some called it the longest technical ski traverse in the world. It demanded months of arduous travel and route finding. Anyone who tried it would have to navigate crevasses, avalanches, and the storms that broke across the mountains like waves. Traveling the entire length was the equivalent of climbing and descending more than eighteen Mount Everests over a distance equivalent to nearly fifty marathons.

Yet Lena Rowat thought it could be done. Outwardly, Lena lived a life of epic adventure: skiing, mountaineering, through-hiking, cycling across the continent. She was known in Whistler’s ski community as a six-foot-tall powerhouse with insane endurance, game to try almost any mountain objective. She wore thrift-store clothes, preferring bright tights and flowery dresses over brand-name gear, and sometimes shed clothing altogether to ski naked. She dyed her short hair—once bright blue, now bleached white—and danced on tables at parties, without any need for alcohol or drugs to let loose.

But underneath the hard-charging, fun-loving exterior, she mostly felt lost and depressed. She had no structure in her life, no steady job, and was often overwhelmed by a bottomless feeling of isolation. The mountains were the only place where her brain calmed. Which was one reason she was excited to tackle the Coast Range traverse: It had the tantalizing potential to fill her inner emptiness.

She just needed her sister, equally capable in the mountains, to join as her partner. The two had had matching facial features, but Ruby was much shorter, with a gymnast’s compact body, and hair dyed a deep magenta. Lena liked the idea of achieving this first together. Other than their mother, she knew of very few women in the world of mountain sports, and sometimes struggled to find adventure partners—simply, she assumed, because she was female. Lena liked that she and Ruby could model the kinds of possibilities for women and girls that the two of them didn’t have growing up.

Except it seemed that it would be men who completed the Coast Range route first. Somehow, after so many years when a full traverse was thought impossible, a young Canadian alpinist had dreamed the same dream at the same time. His team of four men left four weeks ahead of the Rowat sisters.

The women had raced to begin their own journey, and three weeks later they were pinned down by the storm. Now, in the besieged interior of their meager shelter, Lena’s stomach began to roll with nausea. In the hours that followed, it worsened. She had to exit the tent repeatedly to relieve herself. The storm showed no signs of abating as Lena’s illness intensified. In that moment, dejected mentally and cut down physically, she considered abandoning the attempt altogether.

But she couldn’t go back now. Not after all the work that had gone into planning the expedition. Not when all that waited back home was crippling loneliness and the lurking sense that she’d failed.

Lena wasn’t the only one in adventure sports who’d battled demons. Such endeavors often draw the misfits, the slightly crazed, the traumatized. Acute levels of risk, like those found in mountaineering, ski touring, whitewater kayaking, and climbing, can offer a tantalizing opportunity to mask a void—or, for people like Lena, fill it. Walking the thin line between life and death demands the kind of focus that can cause the demons to fall away entirely, and help athletes feel part of something bigger than what plagues them. But many never take the next step and figure out what’s behind an interior wound, or do the deep work to heal it.

Lena would do both—but only after her Coast Range journey brought her face-to-face with death.

She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.

Lena was born in the aftermath of a snowstorm. In 1972, Nona and Peter Rowat spent Christmas and New Year’s in a rustic cabin at the base of the Whistler ski resort, north of Vancouver. Nona was nine months pregnant with Lena, and had sworn to press pause on skiing; she was due any day. As a family doctor and a pioneer of preventive medicine who’d publicly supported midwifery decades before it was recognized as a medical profession, she knew how to take care of herself and her unborn baby. But a New Year’s Eve storm delivered so much fresh powder that Nona couldn’t resist. At the end of a day on the slopes, she went into labor. Lena was born just after midnight on January 2, 1973.

It was a fitting entry into a family that prioritized outdoor adventure. Ruby and Lena learned to ski by the time they were school-age. Soon they were carrying their own backpacks on multiday trips on Vancouver Island’s rugged West Coast Trail, through rain and mud and mosquitos. With such activities came risk. When Lena and Ruby were in middle school, Peter took the girls on a winter backcountry trip. He taught them to dig a snow cave and melt water with a stove, which Ruby said released so much carbon monoxide they nearly suffocated. A few years later, as the family returned with friends from a wilderness hut in the Tantalus Range, a torrential storm brought flooding that caused Lena and another girl to be swept off their feet as they crossed a swollen creek. Lena still has a clear memory of being submerged in the water, desperately clinging to a branch at the creek’s edge, her feet hooking her friend to keep her from being carried away.

As Lena and Ruby grew older, they appreciated that their parents instilled in them the passion and the skill set—not to mention the capacity to handle themselves when things went sideways—that were key ingredients for staying safe outdoors. But it also seemed to them that their parents too often prioritized their own desires over the needs of their children. (Nona and Peter once left two-year-old Ruby tied to a tree, watched over by a friend’s dog, while they executed a nearby multi-pitch climb.) Lena often felt like she only deserved love when she was getting after it in the mountains. At the same time, she felt unprepared for regular life, with its responsibilities and rules. Worse, she lacked the ability to relate to others. Lena struggled to connect with people beyond her family. She had few friends growing up.

Things briefly improved during college. She made friends and experienced her first romantic relationships, which were with other women. One lasted a year and a half. When it ended, Lena blamed herself. She noticed her baseline mood lowering, her emotions sinking beneath the surface.

After graduating, Lena moved back to Vancouver, into the house where she grew up. Her parents had moved to San Diego when Peter, a neuroscientist, took a job at the University of California campus there. They leased most of the house to tenants, and Lena paid a nominal rent to live in the basement. With her family gone—Ruby, a talented gymnast, was traveling the world as a trapeze artist—Lena had next to no social contact. She lacked a steady job too, following a short stint planting trees and a brief try at medical school. She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.

The only thing that gave Lena relief was skiing. She volunteered on the ski patrol at Whistler, biking or hitchhiking nearly 75 miles each way from Vancouver. She soon bored of the resort runs and began skiing outside the ropes. Avalanche education was new and hard to obtain, and Lena’s parents paid for her to take the only course she could find. She slept in her car in the parking lot during the weeklong instruction, taking naturally to the dirtbag lifestyle pioneered by climbers and ski bums.

In the winter of 1998, Lena and one of her only friends, Merrie-Beth Board, ski-toured in the backcountry outside Whistler as often as they could. After she’d descended several big lines, people said that Lena was good enough to go pro in the burgeoning sport of big-mountain skiing. But being in the backcountry gave her an elusive joy she was reluctant to saddle with obligation. Plus, she could hardly handle everyday tasks let alone chase sponsorships.

And God, she was still so lonely. On top of Lena’s stunted ability to connect with people, the seasonal nature of mountain towns made social attachments ephemeral for everyone, contributing to a feeling of isolation in a place with few mental health services to turn to. Not that mountain culture in that era was ready to prioritize mental health. The mostly male community overwhelmingly prized strength, speed, stoicism, and infallible expertise. A willingness to show vulnerability was—and too often still is—sacrificed as the cost of belonging.

And so Lena sacrificed. By the late 1990s, her depression was so deep that she found herself sometimes thinking about suicide.

Then, in the summer of 1999, Peter took his daughters to climb Mount Waddington, the highest peak in the Coast Range Mountains at 13,000 feet. One day on that expedition, Lena gazed at the glaciers spilling out in every direction. She thought how easy it was to travel on them through the mountains. She pulled out a map of the range. The glaciers seemed to stretch from her home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska, into the Saint Elias Mountains, up and over Mount Logan (Canada’s highest peak), and down to the Gulf of Alaska. You could strap on a pair of skis and just keep going.

From that moment on, Lena’s plan was to connect the entire stretch over several years, in two-month segments. That’s how Peter tackled long traverses too, traveling in March and April when conditions were optimal. Here, she thought, was a project that would take three or four spring seasons to complete. A sense of direction that would span years.

TWO

Lena didn’t leave on the expedition immediately. Ruby needed to block out enough time away from performing to join her sister. In the meantime, Lena floated through jobs and undertook a last-minute cycling trip on a rickety second-hand bike, riding 2,500 miles from Florida to her parents’ San Diego home. Then, around Christmas in 2000, she heard that another local skier was planning a Coast Range traverse—and aiming to do it all in one go.

His name was Guy Edwards. He was the ex of a woman Lena had hiked nearly a thousand miles of the southern Pacific Crest Trail with in the summer of 1997. He was known as Fast Eddie, renowned in both the American and Canadian mountain communities for his climbing feats on ice, snow, rock walls, and boulders. He had an almost hyperactive energy and an effervescent personality. Like Lena, Guy preferred fluorescent secondhand clothing to technical apparel. He painted his toenails. He had a monkish dedication to traveling light and held several climbing speed records. But he wasn’t chasing fame with his records and first ascents. Like many in the B.C. coast’s outdoor community, he believed that a person’s accomplishments should fly under the radar.

When Lena heard what Guy was planning, she called his house and left a message on the answering machine: She wanted in on the trip, and maybe Ruby could come, too. Guy returned Lena’s call in early January. His team was aiming to reach Skagway in Alaska, he said, a 1,200-mile journey over seven months. It was short of Lena’s vision of going all the way to Mount Logan—an additional 420 miles—but she was still interested. He said he’d have to speak to his other teammates first.

Guy had been planning the traverse for months and had already assembled an all-star team of alpinists: Vance Culbert, John Millar, and Dan Clark. Guy and Vance connected years earlier through the Varsity Outdoor Club (VOC), a cadre of climbers and mountaineers at the University of British Columbia. He and Guy had done expeditions together, including climbing Waddington without any maps, testing their route-finding skills up the complicated mountain. Guy and Vance left from their back doors in Vancouver; kayaked nearly 50 miles up Bute Inlet; skied 55 miles to the peak through trail-less rainforest; and after climbing to within 65 feet of the summit, bushwhacked to a logging road, where they hitched a ride home. The trip exemplified the human-powered ethos that prevailed among the coast’s adventure community at the time; fueled by environmentalism, they eschewed helicopters, ski lifts, even their own vehicles when on expeditions.

Dan Clark grew up in Calgary and had learned to climb in the Rocky Mountains. He’d skied other long expeditions, including a first-ever traverse in the Columbia Mountains west of Banff. When he heard that a few guys were planning an epic journey across the Coast Range, he drove out to persuade Guy to let him join the team.

The men had spent nearly a year planning; Lena and Ruby would have just weeks.

The VOC also placed John Millar in Guy’s orbit. Only 22, John emanated a quiet maturity. He was the middle child of a largely absent father, both physically and emotionally; John’s mother, Eileen, had raised him. He was a sensitive kid who grew into a big youth, ultimately reaching six-foot-five, with explosive emotions. At the University of British Columbia, he discovered an outlet for his unwieldy inner life: Climbing, skiing, and mountaineering provided a focus for his energy and immense strength. He learned quickly and became just as strong an alpinist as Guy, although he broadcasted his accomplishments even less.

Lena endured another restless week before Guy called her back a second time. He apologized, but his team was only a month out from departure and already too far along in their planning—which included 24 food caches, nine of which would be dropped by helicopter or ski plane—to add additional members. He kept her number just in case.

In tears, Lena called Ruby in Montreal. Could they at least do the first of their spring traverses—more than 400 miles from Vancouver to Bella Coola—this year? It seemed improbable. The men had spent nearly a year planning; Lena and Ruby would have just weeks. And Lena’s capacity for the complicated logistics of a three-month expedition was close to nil. Had Ruby said no, the idea might have imploded right there.

But Ruby said yes. She spent hours each day on the phone counseling Lena through her depression and anxiety as Lena organized nearly two dozen buckets of food into daily rations and grouped them by traverse section. They also had to pinpoint locations for food drops and find pilots to handle them. Perhaps most important, Ruby needed to obtain a pair of telemark skis, made for touring. Though she had some experience in the backcountry, she had never tele-skied before. Yet she didn’t think twice about undertaking a massive expedition on unfamiliar equipment, in perilous terrain, with limited options for getting back to civilization if something went wrong. Neither did it seem to bother her that she’d just broken a rib performing. After all, this was a Rowat-family adventure.

On March 2, four weeks after the men left, Lena and Ruby stepped into their skis and began skinning—skiing uphill using long strips of synthetic material stuck to the bottom of their skis for traction. They were undaunted by the enormity of the journey before them. Lena’s brain didn’t roil. She didn’t sense the ever present welling of tears. Heading up into the heights with her sister, she was singing at the top of her lungs.

THREE

Three weeks later, inside the storm-racked tent on Manatee Col, the Rowat sisters dug out their satellite phone and desperately dialed their father, hoping for moral support, advice, and a weather forecast. Lena’s stomach had settled some, but the fact that they were trapped by the storm for days had deflated her confidence.

Through a crackling connection, Peter Rowat told his daughters that the storm wouldn’t clear for a while. But, he reminded them, conditions were often calmer below the ridgeline. And one more thing, he said. Guy Edwards had called the Rowats’ house from his own satellite phone.

The men’s expedition had hit a snag, too; they’d run into a storm of their own a couple of weeks prior. It pinned them down for a few days as their food supply dwindled. Once the weather calmed, they raced to a logging camp for one of their food caches. Desperately low on provisions, the group were traveling in the dark when Dan skied off the lip of a drainage ditch and slammed hard into the ground below. He came up bleeding and unable to shoulder his pack, let alone ski. They arranged a float plane for him to see a doctor, hoping he’d soon rejoin the team. But Dan had fractured two cervical vertebrae in his neck. He was lucky he wasn’t paralyzed. His Coast Range traverse was over.

The men replaced Dan with a skier named Kari Medig, but he was only available for a portion of the trip, and the team needed a fourth to climb technical sections in pairs. Guy had called to ask if Lena wanted to join for the northern stretch. The invitation sparked her spirits. She asked her father to tell Guy that she would be there as soon as she could. She only needed to reach Bella Coola with Ruby—after three weeks, they were just shy of halfway there—then she could join for the 620-mile leg to Skagway. The sisters quickly took their father’s advice to abandon the ridge, packing up their snow-drenched gear in the gale. Five hundred feet below camp, the wind disappeared. The snow let up as they descended farther.

Days stretched into weeks. More unstable weather forced more idle time in the tent. In the rainforested valleys, they slogged through the thick, slushy snow skiers refer to as elephant snot and bushwhacked the sharp spears of a plant called devil’s club, with spines that can pierce skin even through sturdy clothing. Higher up, they contended with avalanche danger and crevasses. Ruby once stepped through snow into the empty air of a thinly covered chasm, her heart nearly stopping before she stepped carefully backward onto solid ground.

It wasn’t all misery, though. Under the spring sun, the sisters traveled topless and skinny-dipped in glacial pools. Lena occasionally skied in a bright print frock she called her party dress. Several inches taller than her sister, she moved with the long strides of a giraffe. Ruby was an accomplished athlete herself, yet she often found herself lagging behind. When Ruby led, doing the hard work of breaking trail through the snow, the women found that their pace matched if Lena took on just a few pounds from Ruby’s pack. Despite substantial experience in the mountains, Lena’s self-doubt had kept her from seeing just how capable she was. “I think she realized, for the first time, that she was stronger than her older sister,” Ruby told me. “That trip helped launch her confidence in some respects, that she had that competence out there.”

Yet both felt their relationship fraying. Lena wasn’t just moving faster because her legs were longer. She wanted to join Guy’s team, and could seem impatient to do so. For Ruby, the 400-mile journey from Vancouver to Bella Coola—an enormous feat in itself—was the goal. As was spending time with her sister. After the call to their father, Ruby sensed the dynamic with her sister shift. “This was something we said we’d do together,” she said, “and then suddenly Lena was just keen to get on with these other people.”

By the time they reached the tiny settlement of Bella Coola, the Rowats had covered more than 400 miles in 54 days—a day faster than the men. Ruby gave Lena her skis, since Lena had damaged her own. The sisters hugged goodbye on the side of the highway. Then Ruby caught a ride south with family friends to return to the life she’d built. Alone on the road, Lena stuck out her thumb to hitchhike north, toward a life she still needed to create.

Lena met the team in Terrace, British Columbia, where Guy, Vance, and John were staying to regroup and make repairs. Lena and John knelt on the floor of a house to examine a pair of busted skis. Lena had met him before, back in January; though he’d turned down her request to join the expedition, Guy invited her to come look at maps with his team. But in Lena’s anxious and depressed state, she retained none of her first impressions. She’d been apprehensive walking into the Terrace house as a new team member; she didn’t know the others well and had no idea if they’d get along. Now John turned to her, his chin wispy with the thin beard of an adolescent. “Let’s see if we can find a Leatherperson,” he said.

Lena stared up at him as he lifted his full height off the floor. The name of the tool he’d referred to, a sort of Swiss Army knife on steroids, was Leatherman. Who was this guy who’d thought to say Leatherperson instead? She could tell it wasn’t to impress her. It just seemed to be the way his brain worked.

With the mountains as his guide, John had grown from a troubled youth into a good and jovial man. At potlucks, he was always first to do the dishes—then mischievously hide them in obscure spots in the kitchen. In Yosemite during one climbing trip, he stepped in when a group of policemen roughed up a drunk climber on crutches. John asked them to stand down; they threw him in jail for the night. Vance called him a warrior monk. Guy called him a superhero with morals.

Despite feeling welcomed by John, worries about the expedition gnawed at Lena during those few days in Terrace. Would she be able to keep up? Ski well enough? Be a capable team member? What would they think of her if she couldn’t?

Finally, the team of four headed into the mountains. They hadn’t gone far when Lena skied over a dip in the slope, bumped into Vance’s back, and fell backward in her heavy pack. She looked like a stranded turtle. Everyone, including Lena herself, burst into laughter. She felt the tension ease, like a pressure valve releasing.

The feeling wouldn’t last. A few days later, the men pulled out collapsible sleds—helpful for moving gear over flat terrain. Lena and Ruby had brought one, too, but opted not to use it. Now it took Lena a long time to assemble hers as the men skied off. Once underway, she had to stop repeatedly to adjust it. As she fell farther behind, anxiety rose in a sour tide.

“It was an abandonment trigger for me,” Lena recalled. “A lot of my childhood was, ‘You better keep up or else.’ ” When she was older, she noticed that being able to go far, fast, won her positive feedback. But if her teammates paid any mind to the trouble she had with her sled, no one said anything about it.

Over the next few weeks, Lena began to feel more comfortable. She skied in her party dress. She skinny-dipped in glacial ponds. Evenings, she sat with the others watching the sun set over the spires and ramparts of mountains few people had laid eyes on. And she proved herself a valuable member of the team. Once, while navigating a complex icefall—a steep section of jumbled ice—Guy was in the lead, tied onto a rope with Lena. He stepped onto a pile of snowy ice to jump across a narrow crevasse. When it collapsed, he disappeared into the void. Lena sat down immediately to use her body as an anchor until Guy could pull himself out.

Lena also experimented with ways to navigate the Coast Range’s numerous rivers, whose banks were choked with tangled alder and thickets of devil’s club. After bushwhacking a difficult stretch, she inflated her sleeping pad and placed her pack and climbing gear on top—including her sharp crampons and ice axe. Then she waded into the river to swim while pushing the makeshift raft ahead of her. The men had begged her not to do it; it would be catastrophic to lose everything in the river or be swept away herself. Lena was undeterred, and paddled past the men as they struggled onshore. “She did things her way,” Vance said. “Which often turned out for the better, even though there was a high degree of risk involved.”

On June 1, about a month after she’d joined the men in Terrace, Lena and John were walking together when he turned to Lena, pulled her in, and kissed her.

Lena felt a jolt of thrill—and surprise. Not because previously she’d been with women; if she was honest, she’d fallen in love with all three men on the expedition. She’d thought she and Guy might end up together—John was several years younger, and Vance was already in a relationship. But Lena had come to know John as a strong, quiet goofball. He was caring and selfless; without fail, he was the first to wake up on frigid mornings to make something hot for the rest of them. He was completely himself, and he made Lena feel appreciated for who she was. So when John kissed her, she relaxed into the moment.

It had been a bold move on John’s part. He was painfully shy around women. By the time he was 22, he hadn’t even kissed a girl. Inexperienced though he was, John was mature enough to want to avoid upending team dynamics with what could turn into a budding romance. He suggested they keep their mutual attraction secret, confined to nights when they were paired up in the tent rotation or during rare moments alone. Lena went along with it. Guy and Vance remained cheerfully oblivious. And though Lena and John’s relationship didn’t really exist outside of intermittent nights spent pressed against each other in the scant privacy afforded by nylon walls, the loneliness that had strangled Lena for years began to loosen its grip. Soon, John became the love of Lena’s young life.

Weeks later, in the long midsummer light of southeast Alaska, the small party of skiers blazed like beacons of color against the glistening pale of the Stikine Icecap. Their figures were dwarfed by its expanse and the stark silhouette of the great spire they skied toward. Like an ancient stone monolith, the Devils Thumb rises more than 9,000 feet from a glacial basin dubbed the Witches Cauldron. Its sawtoothed massif—a forbidding wall of rock and ice—had called to alpinists for decades and was one of the most challenging climbs on the continent. To this day, fewer than fifty people have made it to the summit.

The team had no intention of merely passing by the Devils Thumb; to climb it, even by an established route, was still a great prize in alpinism. The men had arranged for a food cache and some climbing gear to be dropped there, just enough for two climbers at a time to make the attempt. Vance went first with his girlfriend, Cecelia Mortenson. A competent mountaineer who’d just returned from a solo traverse in the Himalayas, Cecelia had met up with the team at a fishing lodge on the Stikine River. The pair were turned around before the summit ridge by an impassable pinnacle of rock. Next went Guy and John, the group’s strongest climbers, choosing a different route straight up the face; they, too, were stymied.

That left Lena. She wanted to climb with John, but he was exhausted from his attempt. Vance offered to go back up with her. It was only after they’d ascended the first steep snowfield that Vance realized Lena had never climbed a technical alpine peak before. “She was so confident in herself, she just believed she could do anything,” Vance said. Still, to realize that he was on the Devils Thumb with an inexperienced partner, far from any help should something go wrong, was unsettling.

They spent a long afternoon and night—a dusky twilight so far north—ascending, including a pitch of aid climbing, which Lena had never done before. Under Vance’s direction, Lena learned to step up and pull on pieces of a webbing ladder and loops that Vance fixed in the rock and ice. They crested the knife-edge summit ridge, empty air dropping away for thousands of feet on either side, as the sun lit the basin.

But just before the summit, they were stopped by a pillar of smooth rock. The only way around it was to traverse the wildly steep, snow-covered north face, and the day was too warm for the snow to support their weight. They were forced to turn around. Vance built a snow anchor for them to rappel off a steep pitch. He explained that if the snow anchor appeared to hold his weight, she should pull out the backup anchor, called a picket, so as not to leave any gear on the mountain. As he rappelled down the pitch, Lena saw the snow anchor give only the slightest bit. She pulled the picket, tied onto the rope, and leaned her whole body back into space.

The snow anchor failed immediately. Vance watched, horrified, as Lena sailed over his head, somersaulting down the nearly vertical rock of the south face. The rope screamed through his hands, the friction burning his gloves as he grasped at it desperately. As Lena catapulted downward, her life didn’t flash before her eyes. Instead, a mantra played in her head: Try to stop, try to find handholds, don’t give up.

Miraculously, the rope tied itself into a knot and arrested her fall after more than 100 feet. Lena came to rest on an angled snow patch. She sat up in the sudden stillness, shocked to be alive and amazed that Vance still had one end of the rope. She climbed back up to him as he belayed her. When she reached him, he was in tears. “I was a total wreck,” Vance said. “I almost killed Lena.” She appeared to him as calm as a windless day. (The feeling of free-falling would haunt her in flashbacks, every time she rappelled, well into the future.)

When the pair made it back to camp, they passed along the climbing gear to Guy and John, who were eager for a second attempt, without disclosing Lena’s near-death experience. They only told the others what had happened when the men returned the following morning after another unsuccessful try. For Guy and John, the failure to summit the Devils Thumb was the only disappointment of the entire journey. As they skied away, the image of that tower of ice and stone stamped itself on their brains.

On July 16, the Coast Range team stepped into the Alaskan mining town of Skagway. The streets bustled with cruise-ship tourists, so the team couldn’t have stood out more: They were dirty and disheveled, with skis strapped to their backs in the middle of summer. In the preceding five and a half months, they’d traveled more than 1,200 miles. They navigated avalanching slopes, icefalls, crevasses, and storms, using paper maps, compasses, and the still-developing technology of GPS. They climbed 14 major peaks, including two first ascents. And they completed what many consider the longest technical ski traverse in the world.

But when they got to Skagway, there were no reporters, no welcoming party. Fanfare would have been anathema to them anyway. None of them were after glory. This wasn’t the culmination of some competition. It was a love affair, an homage from a few bold skiers to the mountains they considered home. Later, when word got out that the Coast Range had been traversed, the same people who’d said it was impossible “bowed their heads, calling it the greatest ski ever completed, anywhere,” wrote Geoff Powter, then editor of the Canadian Alpine Journal. “They said these young skiers were the next great generation, that they’d set the stage for a whole new era of exploration.”

Now that it was over, most of them were keen to move on. Guy and John were ready to get back to rock climbing. Vance was headed to graduate school. But Lena felt that the expedition had given her direction, taught her to function through the chaos in her brain. She’d connected with people meaningfully for the first time in her life. And it had delivered John. Lena didn’t want it to end. She could have kept going forever.

FOUR

After Skagway, Lena had a new objective: completing the pieces of the traverse she’d missed. But without companions for the endeavor, she felt herself begin to drift again. John tossed her a lifeline. He invited her to come to Vancouver and learn to rock-climb with him and Guy. The three of them lived in a rental house dubbed the Mansion, which overflowed with a rotating cast of climbers connected to the VOC. Only four names were on the lease, yet at one point 17 people got their mail there. John had once claimed the kitchen closet as his room.

The bustling house meant that Lena and John were rarely alone. Even when they climbed together, it was often with Guy or other housemates. In the few months they cohabitated there, she and John made only one trip that was just the two of them. It was to Mount Sedgwick, a hard-to-access peak in the Squamish wilderness that generally called for what one local mountaineer had called “two days of extreme-level sufferfest” to summit. When they’d reached the peak, Lena sat in John’s lap, the whole of the B.C. coast laid out below them, and they enjoyed a quiet moment together. Despite having spent little time alone together, John was certain enough of his relationship with Lena to introduce her to his mother, Eileen, at her house on Quadra Island, north of Vancouver. In Eileen’s kitchen, Lena and John danced to the ukulele notes of his favorite song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

By the fall of 2001, Lena was restless and making plans to undertake what she considered the complete Coast Range traverse: from Haines, Alaska, to Mount Logan, the roof of Canada at 19,551 feet, and back down to the Gulf of Alaska. She asked John to join her, but he was more interested in climbing than skiing, and about to join an expedition dubbed the Endless Summer—a group of climbers sailing all over the world and summiting peaks from Alaska to Antarctica. He left for New Zealand in mid-September. The decision and the distance would have ended many relationships, and Lena still battled her belief that people didn’t really love her if they didn’t want to go on adventures with her. As she mulled over their relationship, Lena decided to join the expedition, too, in late January. But by then John was getting ready to leave it—which left her to suspect that he didn’t want her there.

The pair overlapped for just two nights in Ushuaia, Argentina, where John proudly gifted Lena a sweater he’d knit. Lena loved it—both the sweater and the gesture, which helped ease her angst about their prospects as a couple. On their first night together again, they slept on a mattress in a storage locker by the dock; the second they spent in a high valley, holding the tent down against a fierce wind.

Lena returned to Canada in March and left for her Logan traverse in late April 2002. The logistics of this expedition were easier. The long stints of glacier travel were more straightforward, and there were teammates to help. She’d enlisted Kari Medig, who’d skied a portion of the Coast Range traverse before Lena; Merrie-Beth Board, with whom Lena explored the Whistler backcountry; and Jacqui Hudson, a VOC member who was dating Guy. Also, her brain felt calmer. She’d begun to develop a community around her. And she still had John. Although he wouldn’t be joining, he drove Lena and the others down to Bellingham to catch the ferry to Alaska.

Most people who climb Mount Logan set up a base camp on its flank and ascend via the King’s Trench, considered the easiest route up the mountain. But Lena’s team planned to ski nearly 280 miles from sea level in Haines and ascend the more difficult East Ridge. Once underway, the Logan traverse was not nearly as exciting to Lena as the others had been, although the team did nearly run out of food at one point, and Jacqui fell 25 feet into a crevasse while dragging a sled. There was little of the sense of newness around every bend that the southern part of the range had held; instead, it was a slog across the mind-boggling enormity of flat glaciers. And where Lena had enjoyed a dreamy group dynamic with the Coast Range team, this quartet—all strong personalities—rubbed each other raw at times. Merrie-Beth was training to be a ski guide and tended toward group decision-making, Jacqui said, “Whereas Lena will just ask for what she wants or tell you what she’s going to do. So she and Merrie-Beth butted heads a lot.”

Still, the team completed the Logan traverse in 55 days and 420 miles. There was only one piece of unfinished business on the Coast Range.

In April 2003, Lena, John, and Guy returned to the only peak they’d failed to summit during their traverse: the Devils Thumb in Alaska. They wanted to complete the Northwest Face, a massive 6,500-foot, nearly vertical wall that avalanched ice and snow. The climbing community considered it both the last great unachieved challenge on the continent, and, in the words of local Petersburg climber Dieter Klose, “a perfect place to commit suicide.”

Lena, still more of a skier than an alpinist, had no plans to try the Northwest Face. Instead, she enlisted her father for an attempt on an established route up the south face, while Guy, John, and a climber named Kai Hirvonen tackled the more perilous route. Once the expedition was over, Guy planned to head to Nepal. In John’s journals, he wondered whether he should be done pushing dangerous limits in the mountains. He’d been thinking about medical school.

After a few days of boating and skiing to the mountain, the group spent one more night together in its shadow. Lena pulled out her harmonica and played John’s favorite song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” as they all sat in the long light of a northern sunset. They skied out the following morning under gleaming skies. After John, Guy, and Kai broke off on their own, Lena tied a surprise goodie bag to a rock for the men to find on their way back. She didn’t worry much as they skied away. That was one of the things her parents had ingrained in her—the Rowats were experts at underplaying physical risk.

Six days later, as she slept after the climb with her father, the whine of a chainsaw invaded Lena’s dream. When she woke, she realized that the sound was a helicopter landing so close that it blasted the tent walls with snow. Her heart sank with a sick certainty. Kai emerged from the helicopter with search and rescue personnel and said, “We’re looking for John and Guy.”

Thank God, she thought. They’re not dead yet, then.

After peeling off from Lena and Peter, Guy, John, and Kai had set up base camp at the foot of their route and spent three days assessing conditions on the Northwest Face. On the evening of the third day—climbing at night was safest, because warm snow and ice can be unstable—they approached the wall under clear skies, carrying several days’ worth of food and fuel. At the base of the wall lay an enormous pile of avalanche debris. It made Kai so uneasy that he decided to turn around. “There was something in my body screaming at me not to go,” he said. “I’d never sensed that in my entire life.” He was embarrassed and ashamed to let John and Guy down. They’d spent so much time saving for the trip, planning it, and getting to the remote location. “We took planes, we took boats, we skied,” he said. But he felt that it was too dangerous.

John urged him to reconsider. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “You should come.”

But Guy said gently, “I get it. No worries.”

Kai skied back to base camp, where he watched the tiny lights of John’s and Guy’s headlamps ascend the rampart into the night. He stayed up for an hour, following their progress, before he turned in. As the days passed, he kept a close eye on the mountain but couldn’t make out any figures or headlamps. Finally, after three days, he skied out alone—covering in a hurried 12 hours what had taken three days on the way in—and summoned a rescue. Then he came to find Lena.

The helicopter airlifted Lena and Peter out to Petersburg, where Lena began making calls. People flew up and gathered in the small town: both of John’s parents; John’s sister, Jerusha; his brother, Hamish, who’d been on a ski trip in southern Argentina when he’d gotten word that John was missing; and Jacqui, even though she and Guy had broken up by then. The group took turns looking for the climbers from the helicopter.

When Jacqui first glimpsed the Northwest Face’s restless ice and hanging glaciers, she thought only one thing: They’re dead. There was no way anyone could survive such a pitiless place. The scale of it played tricks on Eileen. Flying over the peak, she told the pilot she would just step out of the helicopter onto the snow and ice to look for John herself; the pilot told her they were 100 feet in the air. Jerusha watched her father get out of the helicopter to scream at the mountain, and at John for losing himself to it.

After two days with no sign of John or Guy, the local search operation ceased its efforts. Eileen used her own money, borrowed from John’s grandparents, to hire a helicopter and keep looking. After another five days, that search was called off, too. It was presumed that John and Guy had been swept away by an avalanche and buried at the base of the massive wall.

Still, some in the climbing community secretly hoped that they’d show up on some logging road trying to hitch a ride home after summiting the unclimbable face, having given everyone the slip. For years afterward, the sound of helicopters in the mountains dropped Lena into the hope that it was John and Guy, alive, coming to reunite with her.

FIVE

On a late September day in 2024, more than two decades after that expedition to the Devils Thumb, I joined Lena to hike an unforgivingly steep route to an alpine lake above her home in Squamish, north of Vancouver. She was 51 and still possessed much of the youthful drive that had propelled her across the impossible spine of North America. Her long legs ate up the slope effortlessly. As she led me upward, she told me stories about her past.

After John and Guy died, Eileen’s house on Quadra Island became Lena’s haven. She spent weeks there, the two of them grieving alongside each other. For a long time, Lena would awake with the sudden memory that John and Guy were gone. It was like a punch to the heart. It took all day for Lena to finally, somehow, feel OK. But as she went to sleep she’d collapse into grief again, then repeat the whole process the next morning.

When she wasn’t on Quadra, Lena was at the Mansion. If the climbing house had once been full, now it burst at the seams with people coming together to remember John and Guy over potlucks and at parties, sitting on the floor and painting each other’s toenails in homage to their lost comrades. This was a community acquainted with loss; John had seven or eight friends die in the mountains by the time he went to the Devils Thumb for the last time. But this one seemed to hit especially hard.

As Lena suffered her way through grief, the outdoor community’s support buoyed her. As it tightened around her, she felt part of it in a way she never had before. The loss also brought her closer to Hamish and Jerusha, whom she’d barely met before those horrific days in Alaska. John’s siblings and his mother became her adoptive family; Eileen told me that she lost a son but gained a daughter.

Finally, here was the thing that Lena had been missing for so much of her life: deep connections. From beyond the grave, John and Guy had given her this. “Having that community helped calm my mind,” she told me, “and allowed me to then home in on midwifery”—the vocation her mother had championed. “I remember thinking when they died that it was so good I had something I could work toward.” For the first time in her life, Lena had purpose outside the mountains.

She goes into the mountains now to connect with herself, with her husband and son, and with her friends. She sometimes feels that John and Guy are with her.

Not that she pulled back entirely from outdoor adventure after John and Guy died. Between 2006 and 2009, Lena assembled two expeditions to finish the sections of the Coast Range traverse she’d skipped when she hitchhiked from Bella Coola to Terrace, which included the most technical stretch of the route. When those sections were complete, Lena Rowat had gone farther in those mountains than anyone else.

In 2014, eleven years after John’s death, Lena married a man with a matching appetite for adventure and a calm temperament that provided balance for hers. They now have a nine-year-old adopted son. She’s worked as a midwife since 2008.

Would that all things in life were tied up in such neat bows. When John and Guy died, Lena shut out her parents and Ruby, a move that devastated her sister—Lena’s closest companion during her youth and her teammate on the leg of the Coast Range traverse that had launched the best years of her young adulthood.

Nor did Lena’s demons fade away easily. She suffered with them for years, until at the age of 50, she committed herself to therapy to confront her tangled attention span and the depression that plagued her after John died. She’s honest about losing her train of thought when responding to a question. She still has a hard time completing chores and what she calls “administrative tasks” at home, and spends time outside before she has to pick her son up at school. She talks a lot about internal family systems, about what makes for a healthy one. She knows that she hurt Ruby, but also that she needed other people at the point in her life. They’re both trying to heal their relationship.

As we topped out at a lake gleaming like a jewel, surrounded by the stark beauty of the south end of the Coast Range, Lena told me that she no longer felt she had to prove her lovability through her prowess at extreme adventures. She goes into the mountains now to connect with herself, with her husband and son, and with her friends. She sometimes feels that John and Guy are with her. She still has the sweater John knit for her; she wears it around the house when she wants to be cozy. She keeps a photo collage of both of them on the wall in the living room. She says there was once a part of her that wished she’d been the one who died doing something she loved, with someone she loved—so she wouldn’t have to go through the travails of the rest of life. But she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

Lena knows that it’s a long path she’s on, exploring these internal reaches. In some ways, it’s a path that began all those years ago when she stepped into her skis to walk the whole of these mountains; it took that long to get where she is now. But pilgrimages rarely end with a single moment of transcendence. More often, transformation comes when the journey leads back home, to the minutiae of everyday life.

That fall afternoon, Lena shucked off her flowery skirt, edged out onto a hanging flake of rock, and jumped naked into the green water thirty feet below. When she emerged, she was laughing, the glorious sound of it rolling to the sky.

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