UNTIL EARLY 1999, relative youth and luck allowed Anker to focus single-mindedly on the positive, upbeat aspects of his sport. That May, however, he began a protracted confrontation with climbing's hardest truths. The Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition, led by Mount Rainier guide Eric Simonson, represented the latest in media-friendly commercial climbing projects: a demonstration of emerging technology that can broadcast events from remote corners of the globe and a chance to feed the ravenous appetite for tales of disastrous adventures. Invited along as the technical climbing specialist, Anker had never been above 24,000 feet. He jumped at both the free ride to Everest and the enormous career opportunity.

At 5:15 on the morning of May 1, Anker and four others left Camp V for the "search zone," high on Everest's northeast ridge. Wandering around at 27,000 feet looking for two dead climbers was novel enough, and even slightly bizarre, given that the usual goal at that fatal altitude is a dash to the summit and down again. The prior Himalayan snowy season had been the lightest in a hundred years, and almost immediately Anker and his companions came across what one of them, Tap Richards, would later describe as "a virtual graveyard of frozen bodies, a kind of collection zone for fallen climbers." Anker encountered a corpse in a purple nylon suit with its face eaten to the skull by goraks (ravenlike birds that haunt the high Himalayas). Finally, at about 11:45 a.m., he came across Mallory himself, wool-clad, frozen into the scree, and preserved well enough that bruises still showed through his skin. While the others emptied Mallory's pockets for clues, Anker lifted the body. He wrote later that it "made that same creaky sound as when you pull up a log that's been on the ground for years. It was disconcerting to look into the hole in the right buttock that the goraks had chewed. His body had been hollowed out, almost like a pumpkin."

A few days later, after a short rest, Anker and his teammates headed up again, this time to tackle the question of whether Mallory, without modern equipment, could have free-climbed the Second Step, a crucial obstacle near the summit. (En route they found the body of a woman from Telluride whose family had asked that they unclip her from the fixed ropes so that future climbers wouldn't have to step over her). Anker's difficulty on the Second Step led him to believe that Mallory could not have gotten past it; after summiting, he returned to Base Camp convinced that the two British climbers had perished before reaching the top.

Five months later, Anker had a much more devastating encounter with mountaineering's mortal consequences. In early October, Anker, Lowe, and seven other climbers started up Shishapangma in an attempt to become the first Americans to ski down an 8,000-meter peak. According to Topher Gaylord, of The North Face (which also sponsored Lowe), Anker and Lowe had by this time become "the closest of friends—I mean true soul mates." For more than five years, the two had climbed together around the world and occasionally visited each other's families. Anker and Lowe were close enough in size to share climbing shoes, and they often zipped their sleeping bags together during bivouacs. Anker recalls that they also talked about becoming old men together. "You're going to come out to Big Oak Flat," Anker remembers telling Lowe, "and I'll come visit you, and we'll be in rocking chairs, reliving our youth." They shared the belief, Anker says, that "climbing's a wonderful thing, but if you don't come back again it's not worth it."

With every move documented in online postings and webcasts, the trip was precisely the kind of media spectacle that Anker and Lowe were tiring of, but they had so much fun together it hardly mattered. They would wake in the wee hours to brew coffee, e-mail home, and talk. "We're so in synch," Lowe wrote in a dispatch to Mountainzone.com, "words become superfluous—I'm awake—Rad's awake, my still, small voice speaks to me and echoes its words to Conrad. Partners are golden and Conrad's the motherload."

On October 5, 1999, the two partners, together with cameraman Dave Bridges, were crossing a flat section of glacier when they heard a crack high above. A huge avalanche began heading straight down toward the glacier. Lowe and Bridges ran downhill—Anker thinks they intended to jump into a crevasse—and Anker ran horizontally. Lying flat, he dug in his ice ax, only to be blown down the mountain."It dragged me about 20 meters along the snow," Anker would later write. "It cut my head in four different spots, broke two ribs and stretched out my shoulder from the socket. During the course of this, I thought that I was going to die. Then light came and I realized I was alive." Holding his watch, Anker began searching for Lowe and Bridges, knowing that the last seconds of their lives were ticking away. Several hours later, Anker endured what he calls "the worst moment of my life." He used the expedition's satellite phone to call Jennifer Lowe.