AN EXPEDITION THAT WAS supposed to be the next big thing turned out to be the end of an era. The Shishapangma trip coincided with the high-water mark of the dot-com days, when the easy cash created by the stock-market bubble flowed generously into the adventure world. Even though most of the team members were old friends, McLean felt the expedition was hamstrung by too many sponsors, too many climbers, and too many media demands.

"The Shish trip had about 50 subplots going, and it scattered the focus," McLean recalls.

Like many elite climbers in their forties, McLean has weathered the loss of friends to avalanches and accidents. "I'm not sure why, but having friends die in the mountains doesn't shut me down as much as some people," McLean told me once. But the loss of Lowe was—and still is—hard to swallow. "One of the saddest parts of losing Alex, for me, has simply been his absence," he says. "And it's not just about skiing. I'll read a great book and think, Oh, man, I gotta tell Alex about this! And then I realize Alex isn't around anymore."

In the years following Shishapangma, McLean abandoned his ambition to ski an 8,000-meter peak and swore off high-profile expeditions. He downsized his trips to two- and three-person endeavors. He resigned from Black Diamond so he'd have more time for these smaller excursions, particularly ones that tapped the potential presented by kite-skiing. Then, in 2001, he attended a slide show put on by Mike Libecki, a Sandy, Utah–based adventurer known for his solo trips to Baffin Island, Greenland, and other northern extremes.

Baffin is an enormous and sparsely populated island that straddles the Arctic Circle in Canada's far northeast. It's well known in climbing circles as a big-wall nirvana. Ambitious craggers had been spidering up Baffin's granite for decades, but none had ever looked at the walls with an eye out for skiable lines.

As the images flashed by, McLean's pulse quickened. Baffin offered dozens of untouched chutes, though each stood miles away from the other, separated by flat, frozen fjords. McLean knew the solution: He would kite-ski between them. In an April 2002 expedition that lasted three weeks, he and fellow dawn patroller Brad Barlage traveled fast and light up and down the island, covering more than 250 miles and recording 19 first descents. "The first day, we were psyched to find a run with 2,500 vertical feet," McLean says. "By the end of the trip we weren't bothering with anything less than 3,000 feet. There were couloirs between 3,000 and 5,000 feet all around us. We could afford to be choosy." (Yosemite's El Cap, by comparison, runs about 3,600 feet, base to summit.)

The low-profile adventure, which had no professional photographer, film crew, or live Web link, opened up a whole new world in long-distance ski expeditions. Ski historian Louis Dawson, author of Wild Snow: 54 Classic Ski and Snowboard Descents of North America, ranks it as one of the most exciting advances in ski mountaineering in decades.

"Those couloirs have been there forever," says Dawson, "and we've had athletes capable of skiing them for 20 or 30 years. But Andrew was the only one with the vision to see them as skiable chutes. And then to think of taking kites to whip around those fjords? Fantastic."

No doubt, McLean's next act waits in places like Baffin, distant locales where towering chutes split massive granite faces. This fall he'll be in Patagonia. After that, he can't say. Wherever there are mountains that haven't been skied—Antarctica, the Caucasus, the Altays—he'll be looking for a way to get there.