IN 1979, LOWE fell in love with an outdoor-clothing designer in Telluride named Janie Hannigan. They married in 1982 and had a daughter, Sonja, six years later. At the time, he was consulting for his brothers Greg and Mike at Lowe Alpine Systems, the specialty outdoor company Greg had founded in 1967. Jeff was their sponsored climber and chief tester, overseeing catalog production, refining hardware and soft goods, and influencing the design of revolutionary gear like the Lowe modular ice tools.

Desiring more creative freedom, Lowe started his own company, Latok Mountain Gear, in 1983. Under the Latok label, he developed RATS (the first ratcheting-action screw) and a belay/rappel device called the Tuber. Latok grew faster than Lowe could manage, though; money problems consumed him, and he sold the company to Lowe Alpine in 1987. Instead of consolidating his finances, he launched International Sport Climbing Championships a year later, in an attempt to promote climbing competitions. But, once again, Lowe's big dreams and bigger expenses flattened his wallet. By 1990 ISCC was going broke.

While that played out, Lowe jetted to Pakistan to film an ESPN production featuring himself and Catherine Destivelle, from France, who was considered the best all-around female climber in the world. They freed a mammoth spire called Nameless Tower. Though the climb was successful, it ended Lowe's marriage. In the thin air of the Himalayas, Lowe and Destivelle started an affair.

"It went way beyond just sex with Catherine," says Lowe. "It was more like recognizing a time of shared destiny of our souls. We were both born to climb, and we each glimpsed the possibility of the perfect partner in the other." Lowe returned to the U.S. and started dealing with divorce and bankruptcy proceedings.

In 1991, Lowe revisited the Alps to complete one of the world's most difficult climbs—alone and in midwinter. His route, Metanoia, on the notorious North Face of the Eiger, involved a direct line over 5,000 feet of wispy ice, rotten cracks, and tottering limestone overhangs. Lowe's life depended on tiny hooks draped over popcorn-like nubbins and ice so thin and glassy it threatened to dislodge in crushing panes. Wet, exhausted, and in danger of freezing to death as a storm blew in, he was airlifted from the summit ridge after nine days. The audacity of the landmark climb made him famous again, and he rode a new wave of six-figure sponsorship.

Two years later, his relationship with Destivelle ended when she fell for another climber, Erik Decamp. A new romance blossomed with Teri Ebel, a tall brunette who was the managing editor of Rock and Ice magazine. "Jeff was an ice dancer with a hacking asthmatic cough," Ebel recalls. "He was a struggling visionary and a big dreamer. When we met, I didn't have insight into his history as a climber, but he was friendly, had no attitude, and was articulate." Ebel belayed Lowe on his groundbreaking Octopussy climb in 1994. Not long after, they were honeymooning in the Utah desert.

In January 1995, the pair turned to Colorado's Ouray Ice Festival, managing the small, grassroots party that today raises 50 percent of the Ouray Ice Park's operating budget. Later, with financial help from a host of investors, Lowe also launched a clothing company called Cloudwalker.

In business, as in his best climbs, Lowe pushed things as close to the edge as possible. He worked more and climbed less. By 2001, Cloudwalker had folded. In the wake of the company's demise and the earlier Sport Climbing Championships bankruptcy, Lowe developed a reputation among peers for flakiness, unpaid debts, and a pie-in-the-sky style better suited to freewheeling ascents than to running a company.

"It was a huge disappointment," says Mat Tyndal, an investor from Alabama. "I lost maybe $30,000, and I'd convinced my friends to invest. Lowe had incredible vision but also a stubborn blind streak. Still, no one worked harder or was more disappointed than Lowe when Cloudwalker failed."

The end of Cloudwalker ushered in what Lowe calls "my darkest era." In October 2001, Lowe and San Juan Mountain Guides—a local outfitter he worked with—were slapped with a $10 million wrongful-death suit. The previous winter, during a seminar at Ouray Ice Park, a 35-year-old public-affairs manager named Peter Ro had been prematurely taken off belay by another student; he leaned back, perhaps expecting a tight rope but instead plummeting 135 feet to his death. The suit was settled with a payout to Ro's widow in 2002, by which time Lowe had sold the ice festival to the Ouray Ice Park.

In 2003, Lowe finalized his divorce from Teri Ebel. "When he got depressed, he'd drink a lot and cut himself off from the world," she says. "He could be focused climbing, but it was hard for him to slave at a desk. When things came to a close, there was anger, trauma, wrenching, yelling, hatefulness, heedlessness, harshness, heartbreak, confusion, longing. It was hard. He finally moved back to his mother's house in Ogden."