On the slopes of Tibet's Shishapangma - the world's fourteenth-tallest peak, a glacial mountain that rises some 26,000 feet above the sea - a pair of European climbers stumbled upon the remains of a disaster that struck 16 years earlier. Locked under a layer of blue ice for more than a decade, but exposed in an early melt brought about by hotter than average weather, were another pair of climbers.
Hikers David Goettler and Ueli Steck have, in all likelihood, found the resting place of David Bridges and Alex Lowe. The latter pair vanished in a massive avalanche that left the mountaineering community reeling - as USA Today reported at the time of the catastrophe in October 1999, Bridges and Lowe were "two of the best."
Goettler and Steck, who found the bodies last Wednesday, reported seeing the remains of what are believed to be Bridges and Lowe in yellow mountaineering boots and North Face backpacks. To Conrad Anker - a climber who survived the onrushing snow that claimed Lowe, his closest friend - such a description leaves little room for question. After a phone call with Goettler, Anker "concluded that the two were undoubtedly David Bridges and Alex Lowe," according to the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded Jennifer Lowe-Anker, who was married to Lowe at the time of the avalanche.
"After sixteen-and-a-half years, this brings closure and relief for me and Jenni and for our family," Anker, who later married Anker-Lowe, said in a press release on the foundation's website.
Both Bridges, 29, and Lowe, 40, were master climbers: Bridges, a champion paraglider in addition to a mountaineer, was acting as the expedition's cameraman and videographer at the time of the avalanche and had led a successful expedition to the top of K2 at the age of 23.
(Inset image: Alex Lowe, left, and Conrad Anker)
And Lowe, who scaled cliffs with a graceful, effortless style, was the sort of ice climber that climbers spoke of in the way tennis fans might describe Roger Federer. (Though Lowe's contemporaries also nicknamed him "the Mutant.") A May 1999 profile in Outside magazine captures a picture of the climber as a man in peak physical condition: performing 400 pull-ups at a go, and capable of gliding over sheer rock faces with ease -- much to the consternation of a fellow climber holding out for a tense moment to photograph.
Lowe, for his part, shrugged off any would-be superlative. "There are certainly talented climbers, and there are persistent, sort of anal climbers, you know?" Lowe once told the website MountainZone. "And those are the ones that sort of go on and do lots of climbs, and harder climbs. Those are the people who just can't shake it off. That's what I am."
What cannot be disputed is that Lowe displayed an almost inhuman resilience in the face of injury. In the foreword of Jennifer Anker-Lowe's memoir Forget Me Not, for instance, author Jon Krakauer recounts an episode in which an ice ax split open the climber's head. Though nearly having scalped himself after the ice sheet he was climbing gave way, Lowe insisted to his companions (who had temporarily fixed his head wounds with athletic tape) that they stop first for lattes on the way to the emergency room. As Lowe told Krakauer, "we knew it was going to be a long evening in the ER."
To accomplished climbers, Shishapangma is a so-called easy mountain - in the sense that there are no sheer vertical walls to scale. In fact, Lowe, Bridges and Anker felt comfortable enough to plan a ski trip down from the tip -- and they would have been the first U.S. mountaineers to ski from such great heights.
Shishapangma does, however, have a history of avalanches. For every 100 successful summits there have been about 8 deaths. On that day in October 1999, Anker recalls seeing a pale cloud of snow hurtle down the mountain, sweeping away any signs of his companions.
"I kind of never realized how quickly it would be that he'd melt out," Lowe-Anker told Outside magazine. "I thought it might not be in my lifetime."
But the discovery comes at a time when the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, likely due to climate change. When a photographer attempted to re-create Edmund Hillary's images of the north face of Mount Everest a century later, what he in fact documented was shrunken ice and a river retreating more than a half-mile. The glaciers on the Tibetan plateau - the "roof of the world" - are diminishing by an estimated 7 percent a year.
At the end of her memoir, Lowe-Anker recounts how Reinhold Messner, the Italian adventurer who famously summited Everest without oxygen tanks, told her that "Alex will melt out of the glacier one day." Messner had lost his brother on a mountain trek in Pakistan, and his remains had been found in a glacier, too, three-and-a-half decades later. Anker-Lowe wrote she would not look forward to that day.
But, as she told Outside magazine, "there is a sense that we can put him to rest, and he's not just disappeared now."