Valedictory Ascent for a Lost Comrade

On a lonely Tibetan slope, storied mountaineer Rick Ridgeway spotted the blue and yellow of a half-buried climbing suit. He warned the young woman with him to prepare herself. Ridgeway climbed to the ledge, found a grave marker of flat stones and moved a rock. The body of his old friend, Jonathan Wright, was still there. In October 1980, Wright, 28, had broken his neck in an avalanche, plunging 1,500 feet down the icy face of Minya Konka. He died in Ridgeway’s arms.

Ridgeway, now 51, returned to the Himalayas in May 1999 with Wright’s 20-year-old daughter, Asia, who was a toddler when her father died. Their journey is chronicled in his new book, “Below Another Sky: A Mountain Adventure in Search of a Lost Father” (Henry Holt & Co.). Ostensibly, the trip was for Asia, who had asked Ridgeway to take her to the grave site as a way to connect with and learn more about her father.

But the trip also resonated for Ridgeway, an Ojai resident, in the second half of his life now, a married father of three, no longer at the forefront of adventure travel. By choice, he stays away from death traps such as Mt. Everest and K2, the world’s two highest mountains, which he climbed in another life on headline-making expeditions.

Ridgeway still makes his living as a writer, photographer and filmmaker, documenting the wilderness. But he calculates and weighs risks now with the care of a husband and father whose kids know that he has lost friend after friend on expeditions, leaving families such as Wright’s bereft. In that other life, Ridgeway and his buddies had not worried much about avalanche potential on Minya Konka, even though they hit chest-deep snow at 20,000 feet. (The avalanche not only killed Wright, but also left Ridgeway bruised, and his two other climbing partners with broken bones). The day after the avalanche, Ridgeway, then 31, sat on a rock next to a tent in base camp. He felt the sun on one cheek of his face, heard the water curling over rocks in a stream. A blinding blue sky peeked over the snow ridge. At that moment, Ridgeway promised himself that he would wring everything he could from Wright’s death. He had an obligation to his friend to live life more fully, to savor not just the big moments, but the tiny ones, too.

Then life got in the way. Distractions and deadlines intruded, with all the usual frustrations. Family and work kept him hopping. “I didn’t realize how much I had drifted until I went back on this trip with Asia,” Ridgeway said in his Ventura office, where he helps run an agency that represents outdoor photographers. He is a sunny, compact man who wears flip-flops to the office; he has an easy smile and unhurried bearing. “It brought back the importance of that vow, and . . . what her father had expressed in his journal--to live each day as if it were your only one.”

For Ridgeway, that means living for simple moments. The other day, for instance, he took a second on his drive to work to notice the drift of high clouds over the Channel Islands. In the morning, before he rushes off to work, he and his son review Lakers statistics together in the newspaper. And that also means living for the glorious moments that find him on treks into the wilderness--say, the cloud of butterflies that swept up from the deserts of western Tibet at an improbable 23,000 feet, while he and a friend clung to a knife-edge snow ridge on K2 on a 1978 climb.

But bit by bit, with the death of each climbing buddy, Ridgeway scaled back--friends such as 40-year-old Alex Lowe, a married father of three, perhaps the world’s best climber until he was swept away by an avalanche on an icy peak in Tibet 15 months ago. Or Frank G. Wells, who set out in 1983 with Ridgeway and others to climb the highest peak on every continent for the first time--and made it to the top of all but Mt. Everest. (Wells, president of the Walt Disney Co., was killed in a helicopter crash during a remote heli-skiing expedition in 1994.)

Or Ridgeway’s two old climbing partners, Ron Fear and Chris Chandler. The trio had vowed to climb the highest unclimbed peaks in the world. But Fear was killed in a rafting accident in Peru, and Chandler died of cerebral and pulmonary edema while trying to climb Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, without oxygen.

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As a young man, the promise of risk propelled Ridgeway to unprecedented challenges, including a 1978 climb of K2 without oxygen. He spent five days above 8,000 meters, or 26,240 feet, the so-called death zone at which the oxygen-starved brain can be permanently damaged; the expedition team spent 68 days waiting out storms above base camp, running out of food, fuel and time. The experience left him so weak that it took him a year to recover.

Over the years, Ridgeway has learned to reconcile the two passions that tug at him: his drive for adventure, and his love and concern for his wife, Jennifer, and three kids, Carissa, 18; Cameron, 14; and Connor, 12, none of whom are mountain climbers. His kids know Lowe’s children and Asia Wright. “When something like [Lowe’s] death comes along, they pause,” Ridgeway acknowledged. “And they realize that this could happen to their own father. . . . But they also recognize that these climbs have made me who I am.” His book’s dedication reads: “For Jennifer. I promise never to go above 8,000 meters.”

Two years ago, Ridgeway’s kids got to know Asia when she spent a summer living with the family. Asia worked part time at Ridgeway’s photo agency and at Ventura-based Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company founded by Yvon Chouinard, who was also in the Minya Konka avalanche with her father. One night, Asia approached Ridgeway with an out-of-the-blue request. She wanted to go to Minya Konka. Would he take her?

Ridgeway’s kids and wife immediately agreed that he should. Asia’s mother, Geri Wright, also gave her blessing and sent along photocopies of her husband’s journals for them to read on the 2 1/2-month trip.

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Asia, who is now 21, hikes, skis and snowboards in the Colorado Rockies, where she is a junior at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She had never made a major climb before and was a little worried about the physical challenge. But she knew that Ridgeway would not put her in danger and that he had reviewed the terrain for avalanche potential with veteran climbers who knew the area. “I’m not as into pushing my limits like Rick is,” said Asia, an architecture major. “I would not necessarily do anything to see if I could do it or as far as I could do it.”

In Boulder, though, she knows sponsored athletes who are paid to break ground in extreme sports, and others who have died in outdoor-sports accidents. Last August, in Kyrgyzstan, two of her friends were among four Americans who were shot at and kidnapped by anti-government forces while climbing a peak. The four climbers eventually escaped by pushing a rebel guard off a cliff.

Despite what happened to her father, Asia is not critical of her friends who pursue high-risk adventure travel. She said she would sign onto another expedition herself . . . but not for the thrill of the risk. “To me, it’s about life--living,” she said.

On Minya Konka, she hesitated on the final climb to her father’s grave. Ridgeway climbed ahead to check out the site and then called to her. “Please prepare yourself,” Ridgeway told her, “because he is not intact.” First, Asia said she didn’t want to go up. Then she made her way up and sobbed in Ridgeway’s arms. Together, they rebuilt the stones that mark her father’s grave.