A FEW WEEKS AFTER the Zion climb, Lowe and I are sitting in a restaurant called Buen Tiempo, the place to be during the Ouray Ice Festival. I'm teaching clinics on behalf of Marmot. Lowe is an honorary festival guest. We've had a few drinks, and we're talking about our past triumphs and failures. Lowe is excitedly describing his ongoing book project, a compilation of his 150 finest first ascents—a personal magnum opus.

"I'm hoping it will be unlike any other climbing book," he says, "but it's a little bit overdue." (Later, his publisher will tell me it's several years overdue.)

Ouray is a scene: people climbing, girls and guys hooking up, industry moguls mingling with the public—it's part bacchanalia and part rock gym. Everyone from the sheriff to the latest twenty-something climbing phenom drops by the booth to pay homage to Lowe as he finishes off a huge plate of fajitas.

"You know, I watched my diet after this MS thing started," he says. Gesturing with a beer, he adds, "I stopped drinking alcohol for two years because of the MS, but it never made any difference."

He reflects, "I used to think that my business mirrored my climbing—if I wasn't failing at something, I just wasn't trying anything hard enough. Now that I can't climb, I can focus on just succeeding."

(Indeed, 2007 saw a reversal of fortunes. Lowe's nonprofit, Ogden Climbing Parks, garnered substantial municipal support and corporate sponsorship. He secured a $200,000 grant to build a year-round ice-climbing tower in Ogden's historic downtown commercial district, and the 2008 ClimbFest grossed $43,000 for local projects to promote climbing. Another project, the High Adventure Mountain Film Festival, is expected to raise upwards of $50,000.)

I broach the subject of his unremitting MS. It's clear that Lowe doesn't want pity. He's fully aware of his frightening future. "If I go downhill, I'll need someone to take care of me, but I don't know if I want to put that on someone. Based on the progression I've seen—"

Lowe stops, then bangs his fist on the table so hard that the salt shaker topples over. "I don't know, and I don't like thinking about it, but every year I just get worse." He stops again, then adds, "I've always felt, well, if your life is not what you want it to be, then ... suicide is viable. It's like the Indians: When they became a burden to the tribe, they'd walk off into a blizzard."

Listening to Lowe, I'm reminded of a statistic: Although MS patients can expect a nearly normal life span, in severe cases like Lowe's, almost half die prematurely from complications such as pneumonia, which Lowe will struggle with for weeks in the spring of 2008. Some 15 percent commit suicide.

"Last night I dreamed I had legs and could run," Lowe says as he stares at the crowd, glowing and red-cheeked from beers and windburn. "I was running and I was free and it was flat, and then I was running through hills and everything was sunny and green."

There's an uncomfortable pause. "If there's one thing I regret, Pete, it's that we never climbed a big route together," Lowe says. I want to tell him that if I could do it over, I'd max out my Visa card just to be with him in the greatest mountains in the world. But before I can respond, two bodies slam in beside us—Mark Wilford, a onetime climbing partner of Lowe's, and leading American alpinist Jared Ogden. They're buzzed on tequila, boisterous, and oblivious to the conversation they've just interrupted.

Later, in Lowe's motel room, I show him my next climbing project—a 22,605-foot mountain in Pakistan called Peak 6890. We'll regret our hangovers the next day, but the buzz enhances the images on the flat laptop screen. I show him my pictures and point out my line, a circuitous path weaving up the left-hand margin of the mountain's east face, a massive thrust of rock and ice, profiled like a bullet.

"That's where I hope to go," I say. Lowe raises his beer with his right hand and pauses. With a thick middle finger, he draws an imaginary route up the face's steepest, most direct, and most fiendish path.

"No, Pete," he says, "the real line is obvious. The only route worth doing is straight up the middle. What you're looking at is just second-best."