Years After My Mentor Died in a Rappelling Accident, I Retraced His Final Footsteps
This article originally appeared in Backpacker.
When my alarm split open the darkness at 1:00 AM on July 10, 2021, I wondered vaguely if this was the day I was going to die.
In my ten years as a climber, I’ve done a lot of dangerous things, and the climb I was about to do—the Grand Traverse of the Teton Range—was hardly the riskiest. But here, ghosts lurked in the shadows. This was the climb that had killed my mentor. A piece of me wondered if I was doomed to the same.
I forced the thought away and pushed myself to my feet. My climbing partner, Noah, was already stirring in the back of the van. Dawn would be coming soon enough. It was time to go.
The Grand Traverse is a massive, 18-mile, 12,000 vertical-foot linkup of all seven major peaks in the Teton Range, from Teewinot to Nez Perce. It would involve some snow traverses, nebulous route-finding, some scrambling, and a bit of technical climbing. Noah and I knew it was well within our ability—the only catch was that neither of us had spent much time in the Tetons. Navigating in unfamiliar alpine terrain is notoriously tricky. We told ourselves we were aiming for 24 hours, but in the backs of our minds, we were more or less planning for it to turn into an epic.
Scrambling the exposed, fourth-class stretch to the summit of Teewinot, a section that two hikers had died on a few years prior, I remembered something my dad had always said to me growing up. It was a mantra I’d always fallen back on when I had a goal that scared me: “Do what you love, and the rest will follow.” I glanced down at the airy void beneath my feet, and I wondered if this was what he’d had in mind.
I lifted my gaze across the valley. The sun was coming up, glowing red through a smoky haze from fires to the west. On the hike up, I’d glanced over my shoulder every hour or so for a glimpse of the headlamps bobbing along trails to our right and left. It was comforting to know other people were out there; even standing next to a good friend, it’s lonely to be awake before the rest of the world. It’s lonelier still when you’re following the footsteps of a friend long dead, wondering at every turn if he was lonely, too.
I turned back to the trail, shivered, and rehearsed the route beta again in my mind. Anything to keep my mind off of Alexander.
I met Alexander Kenan my freshman year of college. He was long-legged and pale, with a sharp sense of humor and a nervous laugh. He had beautiful hair—a roguish mop of brown curls. In the years when we were friends, I used to have nightmares that he’d gone bald.
In college, we were only ever friends, always dating other people—but we were both enamored with the outdoors. Whip-smart and earnest with a good head for mountain travel, Alexander became my first mentor. We spent every weekend backpacking the Appalachians. After we graduated, he set off to hike the PCT, doing it not only against the grain and southbound, but tagging 21 peaks above 9,000 feet, most of them technical, along the way: Baker, Shuksan, Goode, Glacier Peak, Rainier, Little Tahoma, Adams, Hood, Jefferson, Three-Fingered Jack, the Three Sisters, Shasta, Lassen Peak, Conness, Thunderbolt, Starlight, North Palisade, Polemonium, and Sill. He was the first known person to connect all these peaks on foot.
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