After reading an Alpinist Mountain Profile on Hyalte Canyon and explaining Alex Lowes’ connection, I was surprised how little Jennifer Lowe-Anker wrote about it. I took away from that profile that the icy crag south of Bozeman, Montana was immensely impactful on Alex Lowe, but when I read Forget Me Not: A Memoir by Jennifer Lowe-Anker, his widow, there was more, much more about the Tetons in Wyoming.

That was the only notable surprise in her 2010 book, because I knew the story. Most climbers who have been around or seen Max Lowe’s film Torn, knows the story. Alex Lowe enchanted everyone he met, including his wife, Jen, climbed hard, had three boys, and in 1999 went to climb and ski the Tibetan side of Shishapangma with David Bridges, Conrad Anker, Mark Holbrook, Kris Erickson, Hans Saari and Andrew McLean. Everyone went home except Lowe and Bridges, who were swept away in an avalanche. Anker married Jen, and Anker continued to climb and Jen rose to a revered figure among the climbing community. Yet, reading it, I still held my breath for the emotional strikes and gentle nudges of the hardness of life.

Lowe-Anker begins by explaining that she knew a book would have to be written about Alex, but she didn’t anticipate it would be a memoir like this. At the end of the book, she has a conversation with Reinhold Messner, who warns her that one day Alex will melt out of the glacier. Alex and Bridges were found in 2016. Everything in between was Lowe-Anker, the climber, the mother, the romantic, and the artist.

The language takes the reading experience higher than a memoir of life with her late husband. Lowe-Anker makes a realization about life with Alex, who can’t stay still for very long, and she visits the Louvre in Paris and has a delightful one-on-one with Mona Lisa, woman to woman, or rather the portrait. They bought a home, which they didn’t live in very long, on Guide’s Hill in Jackson, Wyoming, and describes their neighborhood more through their boys’ lives. And nearly everywhere she goes in the story, she observes the flowers around her, like the blue alpine forget me not.

Alex contributes his own words in Forget Me Not. Lowe-Anker includes volumes of letters Alex wrote her and her boys. Alex was frequently traveling away from home to climb for recreation and professionally, and increasingly professionally after they had kids. He wrote love letters and descriptions of what he did or saw, all with his audience, Jennifer Lowe or one of his sons, in mind.

I didn’t know Alex or follow his climbs, I sort of knew the immediate aftermath and I know Conrad’s story best, since I actively started following climbing news around 1999. This book seems to have caught me up on what everyone loved and admired about Alex. Perhaps the most valuable part of Forget Me Not is the insight Lowe-Anker gives into the psychology of Alex and what drove him. I won’t get into it here, because her words are far superior, but Alex had to be constantly in motion. He had goals and ambitions and had to feel he was working towards them; even climbing with Jen, while good, was lowering his standard, and he would grow unsettled and grumpy. Lowe-Anker said at the core of Alex was the demanding expectations of his father he might never meet.

What I didn’t like about the book was that I knew the core of the story and I was always bracing myself. It’s sad. And it’s beautiful. It actually made me appreciate the precious time with my own family a bit more. Actually a lot more. In fact, I became more grateful and expressing that became easier, even in our hurried lives with two kids in a lot of places to go. (Thanks for writing this book for that, Ms. Lowe-Anker.)

Forget Me Not discusses climbing, and I loved it for the window into their climbing life and community out West, but I think it is fundamentally a climbing adjacent book. It is a memoir, not a biography or an autobiography, or a chronicle of adventure and nature. It is a memoir of love despite hardness in a climbing world. I still rate it very high on my scale (which is not an Amazon book seller scale where five stars means you liked it; five has to be outstanding.)

Stars: 4 — Three stars just for the good and significant story, but Lowe-Anker’s romantic writing brings it up to four. Read it, but read it quick, and go live.

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Additional source, aside from Lowe-Anker’s memoir: Andrew McLean, “Remembering Alex Lowe, David Bridges and the 1999 Shishapangma Avalanche,” Backcountry Magazine,” May 6, 2016, downloaded November 14, 2024.