NOT LONG AFTER THEY CAME to Lander, the Absolons moved into an 1,100-square-foot log home east of town. The garage is now almost as big as the house; Pete added a climbing gym, financing the effort with $250 "membership fees" wrangled from friends. Mostly, though, it was a place where he could go to work out by himself.

"There are a lot of people who are members of that gym who have never climbed in it," Molly Absolon explains. "Almost everybody got suckered into joining."

These days, the phone rings frequently in the Absolon kitchen. Since Pete's death, Molly has been inside a tight network of family and supporters. Seeing the Leg Lake Cirque from her yard every morning triggers a wave of emotions. It's where Pete died, but it also reminds her of their last family camping trip, during which Pete and Avery sang and played games and Pete made fish chowder from the brookies that were practically jumping out of the lake.

"I remember thinking how great it was that she was comfortable in the mountains, that Pete was teaching her all this cool stuff," Molly says, sitting at the breakfast table as she talks publicly about her husband's death for the first time. "There are a lot of us who got to places we never would have gotten because he was willing to take us."

Molly had worked at NOLS herself, and she climbed mountains and skied down couloirs next to Pete. They never had "a huge conversation" about risk, but they both scaled back considerably when Avery was born. "It's the classic dilemma," she says. "This is who this person is, this is what you love about him, that's what our relationship is about. We thought we were being safe. It never, ever occurred to us that we had to worry about this—"

She breaks off. Molly shudders when she reads accounts that refer to Pete's death as a "climbing accident." Pete and Steve could have been at equal or greater risk from a thrown rock if they were hiking at the base of the cliff, she says. Such loose terminology is part of what troubles her about how the case has been handled by the authorities. "My anger at this point," she says, "is directed as much toward Ed Newell as Luke Rodolph."

Newell's statement that he wouldn't press charges mentioned that he'd consulted with Molly before reaching his decision—giving many people the impression that the victim's family didn't want to see Rodolph prosecuted. But Molly says she never took a position on the matter, that she told Newell it was his call to make. "I was still in shock," she says. "It's not like I could have any kind of perspective on the act or whether Luke did it intentionally. Newell showed me some law books, how this could be construed as a criminal case. Then he went into his reasons for thinking it wasn't a good idea to pursue charges. He threw in Rodolph's military service. But the fact that he's an Iraq veteran shouldn't be any part of the decision as to whether or not this is a criminal act.

"I agree that Luke Rodolph did the right thing after he did the wrong thing," she says. "But I just lost my husband and the father of my child, and I'm mad and sad. I'm struggling with this feeling that Rodolph has gotten off really lightly."

Newell declines to go into detail about his meeting with Molly but says he never intended to imply that she didn't want to prosecute—or that her wishes, either way, would have dictated the outcome. "We always try to get with victims and get their input, but we never let them make the call," he says.

His decision was based on a combination of factors, he adds, including the sheer freakishness of the accident. Locals say the Leg Lake Cirque attracts maybe one climbing party a year. Upper Silas Canyon is a popular hiking area, but few hikers go as far as the rim. For Absolon, Herlihy, and the Rodolphs to be in the same location at the same time; for Luke Rodolph's throw to line up perfectly with Pete's route—it all seemed to defy astronomical odds. "You could give somebody a pile of a thousand rocks and tell them to try and hit a dummy on the cliff, and he just couldn't do it," Newell told me. "It's like getting hit by a meteor or something."

Molly has made no decision yet about whether to pursue a civil suit. There's some life insurance, but the family lived largely on Pete's salary, and the prospect of going forward without her husband at her side, having to redefine herself and figure out how to live, seems overwhelming. "Money is not necessarily a determining factor in pursuing a civil case," she says. "It's not the point for me. I'm mainly looking for some accountability."

Recently, Molly had a dream about Pete. He said he was "98 percent OK" but missed her and Avery. He also assured her that his death had been swift and painless. But the dream was scant comfort. "I feel like my rudder is gone," says Molly. "More than anything, I'm just so sad for Avery. Pete was so involved in her life, and I was so grateful for that."

She smiles grimly. "You should go look at the gym," she tells me. "It's hard for me to go in there."