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DANIEL DUANE FIRST MET Conrad Anker, the subject of this month's cover profile, in 1991 on the northwest face of Yosemite's Half Dome. Duane had just spent three days clawing up to a bivouac ledge, more than 4,000 feet above the valley floor, where he and a friend were battening down for the night in the face of a massive storm system. "Lightning was
detonating all over the place," Duane recalls, "when Conrad and two other guys popped over the ledge. As they charged past, I asked jokingly if he was just going to leave us there to suffer through the storm. 'Yeah,' he said, 'but think of the story you'll have to tell the Bettys when you get down!' And with that stirring sentiment, he vanished into the
night."
Since then, Anker has evolved from a swaggering wall rat into a Zelig-like adventurer with a flair for finding his way to the center of some of the epochal moments in his sport. In May 1999, he discovered the long-missing body of George Mallory on Everest. Five months later, he narrowly escaped death in the same avalanche on Shishapangma that claimed the
lives of two companions, including his best friend, Alex Lowe. With each expedition Anker has undertaken, his fame has grown, creating opportunities that most climbers can only dream about. These events also forced him to grapple with the messy truths that can make the business of climbing mountains seem less like a noble effort to push the limits of human
possibility and more like an act of profound selfishness. In recent months, this duality has only been underscored by Anker's decision to make a go of life with Lowe's widow, Jennifer, and her three boys, in Bozeman, Montana.
Duane, author of Caught Inside and Looking for Mo, initially approached his subject with skepticism, but after more than 18 hours of interviews for his story, "The Climber Comes Down to Earth", he came away believing that Anker is confronting his challenges gracefully. "When he
actually gets real, there's an awesome clarity to his thinking," says Duane. "What he seems to have found now, and to be reconciling with, is the fact that climbing is a lot like life, with all of its pain and ambiguity and mystery."
Since completing the first source-to-sea navigation of the Amazon River in 1986, Joe Kane has written extensively about how change and modernity can affect indigenous communities throughout South America. But his piece chronicling the conflict between Native Hawaiians on Molokai and a troubled ecotourism resort ("Arrested Development") is Kane's first real foray intothe Pacific."The only other stuff I've done in Hawaii," he says, "is a story I wrote about getting my diving certification."
During the four months he spent reporting on Ed Burke, the man behind the movement to aid muscle recovery after strenuous exercise, Paul Roberts filled his office near Seattle with boxes of whey powder and bottles of glucose polymer. "I'm pretty much covered now," says Roberts, who hopes these products will improve his performance as an amateur bike racer
and foster favorable comparisons between himself and Lance Armstrong. Read his story, "Ed Burke's Got a Rocket in His Pita Pocket".
For inspiration, Missoula, Montanabased freelancer Bryan Di Salvatore says he often has to rely on the kindness of friends. "I'm not a great idea guy, so folks are always coming up and saying, 'Jesus Christ, have I got a story for ya!' And sometimes, in fact, they do." Thus the genesis of "Tracking the Elusive Western Shoe Tree," Di Salvatore's deliciously unhinged homage to trees into which, for reasons too complicated to explain here, people fling unwanted footwear.
"Because my dad was a shepherd from the eastern part of Greece and didn't have enough money to buy shoes, he'd probably find the idea of shoe trees pretty frivolous," says Anastasia Vasilakis, who was raised in south Florida by her immigrant parents and now works as a photo and video illustrator in New York City (she created the illustrations for Bryan Di
Salvatore's meditation on shoe trees). "To me, though, it kind of makes sense in a weird way," Vasilakis adds. "I think it's just wacky."
"What really stands out is the danger of the sport," says Martin Schoeller, who photographed this month's cover portrait of Conrad Anker. After moving from Germany to New York, Schoeller spent four years working as an assistant to Annie Leibovitz before being commissioned as a staff photographer for The New Yorker. "Mountain climbers are different from
anyone else," he says. "These guys go to work and don't know if they're going to come back. Death is always with them."
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