Content provided in partnership with

An uphill climb: Famed mountain climber from Ogden battling MS

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 10, 2008 by Doug Robinson Deseret Morning News

OGDEN -- It is cruel irony that the man who once solo-climbed a 40-story pillar of ice and became a legend and a Sports Illustrated cover boy with his international climbing exploits can't walk across a room without a pair of canes.

Jeff Lowe, who has dug his crampons into the top of icy 23,000- foot peaks, set out for a run one day a few years ago and fell on his face.

He got up and tried to continue but couldn't coordinate the movements and bagged it for the day. In the coming months, similar symptoms became so pronounced that passers-by stared at him as he lurched down city sidewalks, and still he ignored the signs for a year. He was in denial, but he was busy, too. Who had time for a doctor?

Most Popular Articles in News: The Ten Best Laptop bags; Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market; GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD; Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...; THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY; More »

When he finally did visit a doctor in 2001, he was forced to confront the one challenge he never wanted to meet: multiple sclerosis. Give him an ice-glazed mountain, and he could use his will and skill to scale it; but how do you attack MS? By 2004, he was forced to quit climbing completely, at 53.

"I may have had some symptoms as early as 1998 -- dizziness, vision problems, balance," he says. "Anyway, it's been a progression. It hasn't stopped since I first noticed it. Each year there is a considerable decline."

Lowe leans heavily on canes just to get around. In the climbing world, it's as if Lou Gehrig had left the game. It's like seeing Lance Armstrong on training wheels.

This is a man who made numerous climbs up sheer 8,000-foot faces in Europe, Asia and South and North America. He has climbed everything that could be climbed -- sheer rock walls, cliffs, frozen water falls, mountain peaks and glaciers.

He is credited with more than 1,000 first ascents, in the Alps, Dolomites, Cascades, Himalayas, Rockies, Andes. He once calculated the number of nights he had spent bivouacked in a tent on the face of a cliff; it added up to several years.

He climbed up and down the north ridge of Latok 1, a notorious 8,200-foot peak in Pakistan set at 23,000 feet above sea level, for 26 continuous days and nights, carving ledges in the ice to sleep.

He was one of the early American pioneers of alpine ice climbing (glaciers), but his biggest influence was in the frozen waterfall form of ice climbing. In the late 1960s and '70s, he made numerous landmark climbs and established new levels of technical difficulty.

One of his most famous climbs was on the 5,000-foot face of a peak in the Himalayas called Kwangde, 21,000 feet above sea level. In 1982, Lowe and famed filmmaker/mountaineer David Breashears spent four days climbing the face, which was covered with waterfall ice and had an average slope of 80 degrees. Their Kwangde summit is considered one of the greatest climbs in history.

In 1974, Lowe and his pal Mike Weiss climbed frozen Bridalveil Falls in Colorado, a 400-foot tower of solid ice. Four years later Lowe cemented his legend by making a solo ascent of Bridalveil.

Until the MS came on at age 50, Lowe was still climbing with teenagers. In 1999, two years before the onset of the most dramatic symptoms, he told Sports Illustrated, "A basketball player from 20 years ago is not still performing at the same level. I am."

But his body finally betrayed him, and his climbing days are finished.

"It's poetic injustice," he says. "I say that tongue in cheek. I'm not saying 'Why me?' I'm saying, 'Why not me?' A lot of people have worse disabilities than I do."

Force in climbing industry

Lowe, now 56, is little known in the general population. Almost no one in Utah -- where he was born and raised -- has heard of him. But, as Sports Illustrated's Kerry Murray wrote nine years ago, Lowe "has retained an almost mythic status among ice climbers."

Even when not climbing, Lowe has been involved in nearly every aspect of the sport for some four decades. He has made two instructional videos and written three books (he plans to release a fourth book -- "Many Climbs" -- later this year). He and his brothers, Greg and Mike, who are also accomplished climbers, have been an industry force in creating and marketing climbing equipment and clothing.

They started their own companies -- Lowe Alpine, Lowepro, and Latok -- and served as consultants for others. They created, among other things, spring-loaded cam nuts (which hold the rope), a new type of step-in crampon, and nearly every item of clothing used for climbing. Greg invented the first modern internal frame backpack in his garage in 1967, and a few years later created plastic buckles and compression straps that are now an industry standard, as well as the soft, foam-padded camera bags that are now so popular.

Jeff, who along with Greg is included on any list of most influential American climbers, has been around every stage of the climbing revolution and had some hand in its development -- wall climbing, rock climbing, alpine ice climbing, frozen waterfall climbing, mixed rock and ice climbing.

He organized the first World Cup climbing competition in the United States in 1988. He designed the 12-story climbing wall on the west face of Snowbird Lodge, which has been used to host America's National Sport Climbing Championships. He started and organized the annual Arctic Wolf Ouray Ice Festival, which has become a top ice- climbing rendezvous.

An uphill climb: Famed mountain climber from Ogden battling MS

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 10, 2008 by Doug Robinson Deseret Morning News

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in News

Most Popular Publications in News