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Sep 24, 2021 · The snows entombed Lowe and David Bridges, a 29-year-old cameraman who took part in the expedition organized by North Face, the recreation products company. Conrad Anker, Lowe’s best friend and...
- Matthew Carey
Torn is a 2021 American documentary film by photographer and explorer Max Lowe, son of the late climber Alex Lowe, who explored his father's high-profile mountain climbing death on the Himalayan peak, Mount Shishapangma, in 1999. His body was discovered in 2016, 17 years after his death. [1]
Dec 2, 2021 · Alex Lowe, Jennifer Lowe, and their sons Max, Sam, and Isaac a year before Alex’s death. Photo Courtesy of Max Lowe. Survivor’s guilt and filling a hole. Alex Lowe’s best friend Conrad Anker was on the Himalayas trip when the avalanche struck. He was injured but survived — at least physically.
- Overview
- Father to father
- A reawakening
- ‘Attracted to risk’
- Balancing two lives
In 2016 the son of lost climber Alex Lowe made a journey back to the mountains, and into the past, to confront the disaster that fractured his childhood. What emerged was a story of grief, family, hope—and a reckoning with risk.
Scenes from a life balancing adventure and family—a balance that, for Alex Lowe, ended in tragedy.
There are thousands of tales of mountaineers’ risk-strewn, oxygen-starved exploits in the high places of the world. Few of them consider the lives these adventurers lead and leave back home. This misses a part of the story because, for every second many high-altitude professionals spend using the world’s most extreme environments as their workspace, it’s often a second spent away from others—wives, husbands, parents, children—who are enduring a grueling wait.
For them, those seconds can spin into months spent clinging to threads of contact, while their loved ones push their luck in an environment that wants them dead. Sometimes, that environment succeeds.
Torn is a film about what happens to those back home when binding ties are cut in the cruellest way of all. Snatches of its story are famous in climbing circles: that of charismatic and gifted Alex Lowe, whose possibility-bending expeditions to some of the world’s most ballistic mountains during the early 90s threw fuel at a new generation of high-altitude, fast-and-light alpinists. Then, in 1999, during a recce for a ski descent above basecamp on 8,027m Shishapangma, a snowpack on the Tibetan mountain collapsed, triggering a massive avalanche. In an instant, Lowe and expedition member Dave Bridges were buried, their bodies lost.
Caught amidst the tragedy were Lowe's best friend and climbing partner Conrad Anker, who survived the avalanche. And back home in Montana, his wife Jennifer and three young boys: Max, Sam and Isaac.
At Christmas 1999 Conrad Anker—two months after the avalanche that killed his best friend, and almost killed him—turned up at the Lowe’s Montana home, and announced his intention to accompany the Lowes to Disneyland. It’s ‘what Alex would have wanted’, he’d said.
There's that balance that we all have to strike… between selfish love, and selfless love for the people that hold us up.
ByMax Lowe
Traumatised and consumed by survivor’s guilt, he was determined to be a support for his friend’s family. He soon became a literal part of it: Anker and Lowe’s widow Jennifer fell in love, and married.
The subject of their union, for a complexity of reasons, makes for some uncomfortable scenes in Torn, as the film-maker grapples with conflicting emotions around his family’s response to the loss—and in some cases, a palpable reluctance to engage. With memories long sealed and lives moved on, as Max himself notes, many of the exchanges on camera were the first time the family had ever spoken about it in depth. As such trust, he says, was everything: ‘they never would have done this for anyone else but me.’
“I started to try and understand that experience for myself – and see the power that it could be as a story, beyond just our family,” he says. “And [so] I started asking my family about it. It was scary stuff because, you know, when you open yourself up to someone that you're close to in that way, you don't really know what's going to come out of it. You trust that they're not going to hurt you.”
“When it happened it just stirred in me all these emotions that I had kind of sealed up and left behind when I was a kid.” Max says. “I think that I was frozen with him. I shut myself down. I just kind of blocked out a lot of that memory and experience of that time in my life, I think because it was so difficult to cope with.” Max refers to a photograph, featured in Torn, of him blowing out his 10th birthday candles, a week after news of Lowe’s death, as being the image that haunts him the most: “just thinking about, like, what that young boy is thinking about. What is going on in his mind.”
Whatever was shut down in 1999 was woken up by that phonecall in May 2016.
“I never thought Alex's body would come back to us,” he says. “It was almost like I came out of the tunnel and again found this path that I had left behind as a little kid. I started to walk it again and started to try and understand that trauma and grief again with new eyes.”
The finding of Lowe and Dave Bridges’ remains, emerging from Shishapangma’s glacier, by climbers David Gottler, and Ueli Steck—who himself would die in a 1,000 metre fall on Nuptse the following year—was the trigger for Max to begin making his film. In Torn, Lowe’s widow Jennifer describes the discovery as ‘like he’d come back to life. He’d showed up.”
Alex Lowe’s life was one that saw his adventurous streak balanced uneasily with a clear love for his growing family. In one scene, an archive report sees Lowe hypothesising that ‘something in [his] chemistry is attracted to risk.’ Amongst some peers, he was considered the greatest all-round mountaineer of his time, with a striking immunity to hardship. Nicknamed the ‘Lung with Legs,’ Lowe once single-handedly rescued several frostbitten Spanish climbers from high on Alaska’s frigid Denali, at one point carrying one on his back at high altitude. On another occasion he sustained a 30-metre fall when an icicle he was climbing collapsed: he pronounced himself OK, declining to notice a flap of scalp so substantial had been torn from his head it was draped over one of his eyes, exposing his skull. Lowe simply taped it back on, secured it with a hat, and headed for the hospital. That was the life the public knew: then there was the life he was growing back home.
His widow Jennifer, herself an artist and adventurer, speaks emotionally about her late husband being torn between the two worlds while she held the fort—and weathered his irritability when he wasn’t able to get his mountain fix. At one point she describes him as ‘not a perfect character.’
(Read: Climbers pay tribute to David Lama.)
Ironically given what would follow, Lowe also once professed to envy Anker, for his life of spontaneous adventure unencumbered by such ties. Lowe’s partnership with Anker was based around both’s need for the kick of climbing, their ability to keep up with each other and a knack for goading each other higher. As Anker says in Torn, it was about ‘how fast and how difficult a route could we do… and how badass are you really?”
Anker today has an equally high profile: a three-time Everest summiteer, in 1999 he discovered the frozen remains of British climber George Mallory high on the mountain’s north face, just months before the avalanche on Shishapangma that killed Lowe. Then as now, the ever-present danger of death was a part of his life, too—in marrying Lowe’s widow and adopting the three boys, was there the fear for Max and his family that history could repeat itself?
“Yes and no,” he says. “I understood why Alex and Conrad went off and chased that feeling. And [After Alex’s avalanche] I then understood that he could die. And it scared me for sure. But just like I told Alex before he left for Shishapangma in 1999… I understood that he had to go. And that it was a decision that only he could make.”
So to the unspoken question at the heart of Torn: the trade-off between what Alex Lowe went looking for, what he left behind – and what a son found in his exploration of his late father.
“I didn't go into this to be pointing a finger, or making anyone seem like they had made the wrong decisions in life. The lives that my parents led, you know, they were my heroes by it,” says Max. “Alex was going off to these amazing places and sending me postcards from Kathmandu and these parts of the world, like from a fairytale. To have your dad going off and doing these wild things, I think it impacted on me in a way that has shaped who I am to this day. That made me believe to my core that I could find something that I loved for myself and make it my life.”
He adds: “If you're lucky enough to have found [that], you will sacrifice something to pursue it. There's that balance that we all have to strike… between selfish love, and selfless love for the people that hold us up.”
Torn is streaming on Disney+. The Walt Disney Company is majority owner of National Geographic.
SAM LOWE-ANKER is an up-and-coming freelance filmmaker based in Bozeman, Montana. Born the middle child to Jennifer and Alex Lowe, he knew a life of adventure from an early age. When Alex...
Dec 22, 2021 · Within a year, Conrad Anker—Lowe’s feral and boisterous climbing partner, who narrowly survived the deadly avalanche—moved in with Jennifer.
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Dec 14, 2021 · Max Lowe, left, has made a documentary exploring the death of his father, who died in an avalanche in 1999 while climbing a peak with friends, including now world-famous mountaineer Conrad...
