BY THE TIME I REACHED college, I seemed to be following in my mother's footsteps. I planned to become a biologist, like Mom, only my discipline would be Arctic ecology. But at the University of California at Santa Barbara I fell in with climbers, and in 1977, during my senior year, I became president of the UCSB Mountaineering Association, as Dad had been at Stanford 20 years earlier. I also met an 18-year-old freshman named Adele Hammond, who agreed to marry me when she graduated.

Adele would spend her junior year abroad, in France, and I planned to use her Paris apartment as a base camp while climbing my heart out. First I intended to repeat all of Dad's big routes, then I wanted to finish his namesake line on the Eiger. After that I planned to do new routes of my own.

But my first stop that summer would be the Canadian Rockies, where I hoped to hone my skills in preparation for the Alps. The Rockies came as a revelation—the most magnificent mountains I'd seen since the Alps. My heart was already set on the highest summit of them all: 12,972-foot Mount Robson. I soloed the easiest route on Robson, then went to Jasper to find a partner for stiffer fare. There I met Chuck Hospidales, a first-generation Canadian of Venezuelan descent. Chuck was overflowing with enthusiasm and we hit it off immediately. I was 23 and he was about a year younger. We climbed a couple of moderate ice faces, and then I wanted to try a more difficult route on Robson.

We settled on the Wishbone Arête and reached the crux climbing not long after daybreak on the second day. Almost the entire mountain seemed to be a consistency halfway between talus and rock, with runnels of rotten ice for diversity. We moved together, with me ahead placing protection and Chuck cleaning the gear as he passed it.

Finally we got high enough that the rubbled ridge had a permanent coating of glassy ice. At last we'd found something worth climbing! For nine 150-foot rope lengths, we wove among pillars of ice. A few hours later we were high-fiving on the summit. We had only one concern in the world: getting down. The perfect weather hadn't changed, but the sun insisted on keeping its own schedule.

There were two ways to reach the Ralph Forster Hut, where we intended to spend the night. We deemed the Hourglass Route the best choice, as it was more direct. It had the disadvantage of passing under a long ice cliff, and the guidebook warned of falling seracs as bits of the hanging glacier calved off. But the Hourglass would be more likely to get us down before dark. We would rely on the standard mountaineer's trick in realms of falling rock and ice: speed.

We made good progress—descending fast, unroped—until encountering an eight- or ten-foot band of steep rock. I climbed down to see how it would go. The holds were solid and secure and led to a snowy ledge about five feet wide. I walked along the ledge briefly and could see that it led to a snowfield, which in turn led to the glacier below. This was it, the end of difficulties.

Chuck's crampons were ten feet above me as he studied the problem. "There's a good foothold just down there," I said, pointing, "and good handholds at about knee level."

He found those, and then started pawing for more handholds in the deepening dusk.
"The handhold is right there," I said. "Can't you feel it?"
"No, I can't!" he cried.

And then panic gripped his voice as he moaned "Oh, no!" and fell backwards. I lunged at him and touched his coat but couldn't get my fingers on it. I thought he'd stop on the ledge I was standing on, but instead he bounced right off.

"Omigod, omigod, omigod!" I screamed as sparks flew into the dusk each time Chuck's crampons hit rock. I heard whimpering noises through my screams, then nothing more as Chuck was swallowed by darkness.

Two people were brewing tea in the Forster Hut when I burst into their cocoon. After quickly telling them what had happened—Chuck had fallen more than 500 feet, and his lifeless body was already turning blue when I reached him—I crawled into a bunk to wrestle with my demons. Eventually I wrote something in the hut log, a short passage that tried to distill what had just happened. Twenty-five years later, the president of the Alpine Club of Canada sent me a copy. The account concluded, "Having lost my father on a 4,000 ft fall, and now watching Chuck die, I think I am coming to the conclusion that climbing is a bit too serious a game. Chuck was the most safety conscious and careful climber I knew. Were it not for my superior skill and impatience, I am sure that he would have been roped. But then with a rope we might have been slow enough to fall victim to one of the icefalls an earlier party mentioned [in the logbook]. I think too many people are dying in the mountains, are they worth it?"

When I called Mom I remember gasping, crying, and the feeling that if it had been me who had fallen, she might not have survived the news. My alpine climbing dreams had crumbled, and in particular my dream for the Eiger. I vowed to stick to safe rock, and maybe some protectable ice. To a certain extent, I managed to keep those vows for the next two decades.