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Howse Peak is twin-tipped spire rising from the Continental Divide between British Columbia and Alberta’s Banff National Park. The area is remote, no cell service or snack bars, although Howse is plainly visible from lonely Icefields Parkway, which bisects Banff just a few miles from the mountain. Only the most serious climbers would consider ascending its east face, a sheer 3,000-foot wall of sedimentary rock marbled with an intricate network of snow and ice. Its most fearsome route, M-16—echoing the name of the machine gun, because of the frozen detritus that routinely showers down it—has only been completed once, 20 years ago, by a three-man team . One of the men, Steve House, that the climb entailed “one of the hardest pitches of my life.”

On Monday, April 15, 2019, three of the best alpinists in the world—David Lama, 28, from Innsbruck, Austria; Hansjörg Auer, 35, from Umhausen, Austria; and Jess Roskelley, 36, from Spokane, Washington—skied to Howse and set up a tent in a snow-filled basin, with plans to attempt M-16, or a variation of it, early the next morning. The trio had been in the area for almost a month, staging out of a condo in Canmore. All three were members of , a storied group of mountain athletes created in 1992 that includes luminaries like Conrad Anker, Peter Athans, Emily Harrington, Alex Honnold, and Jimmy Chin, among others.

Alpinism is climbing’s most demanding discipline, involving the most objective hazards on the most challenging routes of steep, often fragile snow, ice, and rock. It hardly resembles what most people recognize as mountaineering these days, which is to say the sad circus on Mount Everest or the trade routes on Mount Rainier and Mount Hood. To alpinists, style is everything. Proper progression involves climbing light and fast, with minimal gear and maximum self-­sufficiency. First ascents are cherished, though repeating lines of significant difficulty also earns respect. The margin of error is alarmingly thin, and the sport has a long roster of casualties. Roskelley had recently told his younger sister, Jordan, a yoga instructor who works with the Gonzaga men’s basketball team: “If those guys make a mistake, they lose a game. If I make a mistake, I die.”

This trip was the first time that Lama, Auer, and Roskelley had all climbed together. They became friends through the North Face, hanging out at trade shows and company gatherings, chatting enthusiastically about potential trips. The men were set up for a month in Canada—a comfortable base from which they could launch alpine sorties, shake down new gear, and dream up big projects. The three had been discussing an attempt on the southeast ridge of Annapurna III, one of the great unclaimed prizes left in the Himalayas. Lama and Auer had already attempted it twice, in 2016 and 2017, with another Austrian, Alex Blümel. On their first trip, a few thousand feet from the summit. On the second, before they reached base camp, when they got the news of a friend’s death and lost the desire to continue. For a third attempt, Auer and Lama thought that their new teammate Roskelley might be a better fit. The Canada trip was a chance to sort out any problems.

By mid-April, the trio had completed some solid climbs around Canmore, including a dramatic frozen waterfall called Nemesis and the Canadian Rockies classic Andromeda Strain. M-16 was bigger and bolder than those two routes but well within the climbers’ proven ability. They had all completed longer, more difficult, and objectively more dangerous climbs. On Monday evening, Parks Canada indicated spring conditions for Howse, a typical if somewhat vague rating for that time of year: “The avalanche danger is variable and can range from Low to High. Traveling early in the day is recommended, as conditions can change rapidly.”

Around 2 A.M. on Wednesday, April 17, Roskelley’s wife, Allison, texted his mother, Joyce. Jess had not yet checked in by InReach messenger, as he usually did. Joyce tried to reassure her, but Alli spent a sleepless night waiting for news. The next morning, when Jess still hadn’t checked in, Joyce spoke with Jess’s dad, John, a renowned climber himself. John thought there were a number of possible explanations, not all of them dire. He contacted Parks Canada, which promptly dispatched a search and rescue team from Lake Louise, about 30 miles away.

A team member drove to Banff National Park, where he found Jess’s truck at the trailhead to Howse. Then search and rescue dispatched a helicopter to circle past Howse’s east face, where they saw a large swath of avalanche debris at the base of the wall. A few pieces of climbing gear were visible in the runout. Most troubling was the sight of a leg protruding from the snow. There were no other signs of the climbers or further indication of what had gone wrong. The weather was deteriorating quickly, so the team took photos from the air, then swung around and returned to Lake Louise, where they called John and Alli.

I arrived in Canmore on Friday afternoon, flying to Calgary from my home in New Mexico. I had lived in Spokane for a number of years in the nineties, learned to climb there, and visited regularly, since my dad still lived in the area. I’d joined , a local outdoors club, of which John Roskelley was arguably the most esteemed member. In the seventies, he was on the first American team to summit K2 and made daring ascents on other major peaks. In 2014, he , the sport’s highest honor. He wasn’t climbing much while I was around, having pivoted to public service as a county commissioner. We interacted a few times, because I worked for a weekly newspaper, and I always appreciated his common sense and straight talk in the blustery world of city politics.

The Roskelleys are close. They all live in Spokane and get together often for meals, vacations, and holidays. For several years after college, Jess and Jordan, who had been a pole vaulter at the University of Oregon, were roommates and confidants.

I found the family at the condo that Auer, Lama, and Roskelley had rented. A duffel of the climbers’ gear sat on the kitchen floor, and there was some tense discussion about what to do with it. Jordan stood in front of the refrigerator, holding the door open, revealing little more than beer and cookie dough. “What were these guys eating?” she sighed.

The unsettled weather stuck around until Sunday, which was Easter, dropping a foot of snow in the high country and keeping the search and rescue operation on hold. Media attention was in full fervor; Parks Canada had received more than 800 inquires about the incident. Others had arrived in Canmore, including Scott Coldiron, one of Jess’s climbing partners, and Lama’s girlfriend, Hadley Hammer, who skis for the North Face. 

There were murmurs of an Easter miracle. It was not impossible that a survivor, maybe two, was stranded on Howse with no way to communicate. But the mood was heavy. Alli sobbed fitfully, the grim reality of loss crashing down in waves. Joyce cleaned the kitchen, her face drawn. John made calls to correct errors in the numerous stories being rushed out. Jordan left to sit in Jess’s truck, recovered from the trailhead and now parked near the condo.

Growing up, Jess had a conflicted relationship with climbing. “Through high school I was dragged into the mountains as my dad’s fabricated climbing partner,” . “It’s as if I was planned with precise timing to be his young partner as he grew older and needed a young guy to keep him energized.”

For a while, he opted for more conventional sports: cross-country, wrestling. He raced mountain bikes. There were years when it appeared he might not climb at all.

But mountains were his destiny. He was built to climb, with long, ropy arms, a narrow waist, and broad shoulders that he decorated with colorful tattoos. At the top of his chest, in a necklace of ink, he inscribed one of his favorite quotes, from Ernest Shackleton: Fortitudine Vincimus (“By endurance we conquer”). He drove big, lifted trucks and favored T-shirts and flat-brimmed ball caps. “He was the American badass,” said Scott Mellin, global general manager for the North Face’s mountain sports.

Jess had a domestic side, too. He doted on his white bulldog, Mugs, and fawned over Alli, with images of them frolicking in romantic locations—Thailand, Iceland, Costa Rica. He had a playful, irreverent sense of humor, with a penchant for fart jokes. Once, halfway up an ice climb, he radioed his wife, who was ski-touring nearby.

“Are you there? Over.”

“What’s wrong?” she replied, alarmed.

A pause, then she heard a blast of flatulence rumble over the speaker.

“Jess!” she shouted, and burst out laughing.

He had always been bright, but school had been challenging. He developed a keen ethical sensibility and a temper to go with it. Bullies infuriated him. Joyce, a ninth-grade teacher, made more than a few trips to retrieve her son from the principal’s office for fighting. In junior high, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. He had trouble staying focused. “If he was in a quiet classroom, he would hear the teacher at the pencil sharpener in the room next door,” Joyce told me. He was prescribed Adderall, which helped. Even more therapeutic, though, was rock and ice climbing. It channeled the energy and anxiety into his hands, into his ice tools, helping calm his mind.

In 2003, when Jess was 20, he and John climbed Everest together. The expedition was long and grueling, plagued by dodgy weather. When they finally reached the summit, they could see only clouds, and the wind was blowing so hard they were forced to their knees. The pair embraced and wept.

Everest was a turning point. Jess didn’t much care for traditional Himalayan expeditions—on the MSR blog, he referred to Everest as a safari, “a luxury experience for the well-to-do”—but he had proven himself on a serious climb at extreme altitude. Afterward he “decided that alpine climbing was the purest form of the sport.” He dropped out of the University of Montana during his sophomore year and took a welding job on Alaska’s North Slope. It was demanding work but lucrative; most important, it allowed him to climb for weeks at a time. 

For the next decade, Jess tackled icy peaks and walls in Alaska, Montana, Canada, and South America—striving to turn his passion into a profession. On a climb, he always seemed to be at his best when things were at their worst.

“I’ve seen Jess in tough situations where shit’s going down and he’s got this iron underneath,” says Coldiron, a former Army sergeant in Iraq who now works for the Spokane fire department. “It’s this quality you don’t see often, this ability to go to another level and do what needs to be done. I saw it in combat in Iraq. I see it in really intense, big fires when people’s lives are on the line.”

In the spring of 2017, Clint Helander, a climber based in Anchorage, reached out to Jess to try a first . The ridge rises in a series of steep pinnacles, like a row of giant shark’s teeth, each more imposing than the last. The pair hadn’t climbed together before but had crossed paths in Patagonia and hit it off. “There are a lot of guys who can climb hard ice and hard snow,” Helander told me, “but Jess had the kind of commitment you long for on this kind of route.”

Success on Huntington helped secure Jess a contract with the North Face. “He had really gotten to a place where he was making it,” Alli said. “He wasn’t going to have t