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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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The Purists (cont.)


	MONEY MAN: Marc Ewing inside his Jackson living room (Michael Lewis)

Like Beckwith, Marc Ewing discovered climbing in college. A computer-science and mathematics major at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, he occasionally weekended at Seneca Rocks, in nearby West Virginia. After graduating in 1992, Ewing began tinkering with something called Linux—a new, free, nonproprietary computer operating system that was sprouting up in pieces all over the Internet. He soon realized that the working version he'd cobbled together for himself might be something his fellow techies would pay for. "It wasn't like I had some sort of business plan," Ewing says. "I just wanted to avoid getting a real job."

In 1994, Ewing and a partner formed Red Hat, a company that made and distributed Linux products and would later be swarmed by investors keen to cash in on the tech boom. Red Hat was capitalized at around $6.5 billion in 1999, and though a lot of that value subsequently vanished, Ewing is in no danger of going broke. According to the 2004 Forbes "40 Under 40" report—an annual ranking of the youngest, richest people in the country—Ewing occupies the 24th spot, just ahead of Julia Roberts, with a fortune estimated at $217 million.

With time and money to spare, Ewing found himself drawn back to climbing, this time in the Tetons. In 2001 he hired Exum guide Kevin Pusey to teach him the basics of winter mountaineering, and a few months later he and his wife, Lisa Lee, bought a house in Jackson. The following winter, Ewing told Pusey he'd been

In a letter to Beckwith detailing his vision, multimillionaire Marc Ewing stressed his love of classic alpinism and single-push assaults. "These styles strip away as much of what is not climbing as possible," he wrote, "leaving only the cleanest interactions with the mountain, the purest ascents, the most intimate experiences."

mulling the idea of launching a new climbing magazine. Pusey told him he ought to call a guy named Christian Beckwith.

A lot of people, hearing the short version of the Alpinist story, assume that Beckwith lassoed a gullible nouveau-Jackson type into bankrolling his vision. But in Ewing's first, unsolicited letter to Beckwith, he proposed something very close to what Alpinist became, albeit with a different name.

"Unlike existing books...which cover the world of sport climbing, climbing ‘news,' and competitions, Mountaineering will...place an emphasis on ‘alpine style' climbs, and ‘single push' ascents," Ewing wrote. "These styles of climbing strip away as much of what is not climbing as possible, leaving only the cleanest interactions with the mountain, the purest ascents, the most intimate experiences."

"It was fantastic," recalls Beckwith. "He wanted a magazine devoted to single-push alpine climbs—the market for which is 50. I was like ‘Oh, my God.' " Within a couple of weeks of their first conversation, Beckwith flew to Chicago to meet Ewing in person. The two look-alikes—Ewing is also short, short-haired, and bespectacled—hit it off immediately.

"I remember thinking, Wow, this guy is pretty rough," Ewing says. "I mean, he looked like a real climber, all weathered and kind of buffed out. But he was charming, very polite, and I thought, This could work out."

Beckwith and Ewing launched Alpinist six months later, in August 2002. The offices they chose, all 870 square feet of them, are still located on the second floor of a boxy commercial building in West Jackson—the unchic, industrial-park end of town. Inside are work spaces for six people: Beckwith and Alpinist's marketing-and-circulation director, Andy Leinicke, who sit in separate cubicles; Jon Jones, the production supervisor; office manager Thea Inoue; and two unpaid interns. But it doesn't take long to realize the truth of what one ex-employee, former "mountain editor" Jeff Hollenbaugh, says: "It's an edit staff of one."

One afternoon during my visit to Jackson, Beckwith wheels across the floor in his chair to show me a mock-up of the latest issue, Alpinist 9. There are only about a dozen full-page ads, clumped at either end of the magazine so as not to distract from the edit pages. The layout is almost self-consciously uncluttered, and the text highly legible. "I want the design to be so utterly simple that readers don't even notice it," he says. "As soon as your design gets too busy, you lose your ability to affect a reader on an aesthetic level."

Beckwith obsesses this way about everything in his life. He likes to quote the 19th-century designer William Morris, who once said, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." And in a strange way his own house—a sagging Victorian, surrounded by a fence planked with old skis, that he rents for the astonishingly low Jackson price of $450 a month—bears that out. There's nothing expensive inside, but there's perfect order in the gear closet, an enameled blue saucepan hangs over the stove just so, and it seems that every wall is painted in a different artsy shade.

It's hard to imagine another person sharing this shrine, but lately Beckwith seems to have settled on one girlfriend, a New York ob-gyn who's apparently keen to move to Jackson and start a new lifestyle. Beckwith admits he's not sure whether he's quite ready for her to move in. "I'd like to live in the same town for a while first," he says.

"Why am I difficult?" he adds rhetorically. "Because I'm a fucking artist—and a perfectionist to boot."

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