By the time I arrived on UAF’s campus as a college freshman in fall 1977, I considered myself a climber, giving up money, relationships, and social prestige for the thrill of steep terrain. And although not yet an “alpinist,” a mountaineer who chooses only direct routes up pointy peaks, I wanted to be one. Starting in high school, that desire would form the backbone of my Alaskan dream for nearly a decade.

Seeking out other climbers, I soon found their cultural center at the Sandvik House, the middle apartment of a three-plex, four blocks from UAF. Climbing the stairs to an open door, I walked into a full-tilt Sandvik party. The Allman Brothers blared on the stereo. Marijuana smoke filled the air. Tapestries hung on the living room walls. Students, vets, and locals sprawled across beanbags or stood huddled together, drinking beer, smoking dope, telling stories, lies, secrets, and jokes. Topographic maps of the central Alaska Range—the local Hayes Range—plastered one side of the hallway leading to the bedrooms. A row of pot plants in five-gallon buckets lined the other. Grow lights made map reading easy. The pot made it fun.

The partygoers were a who’s who of Fairbanks climbing. In the living room, a Harpo Marx look-alike held court. Carl Tobin, then twenty-three, with a sharp wit and a boldness unmatched in Alaska, was both popular and central to Fairbanks’s new alpinism. Three months later, he would make the first ascent of frozen Bridal Veil Falls, a 600-foot waterfall outside Valdez that was more sustained than any ice climb Alaskans had previously attempted.

By February 1978, another UAF student and I had practiced enough on local waterfalls that we attempted Bridal Veil ourselves. Well after dark, we finished the longest, hardest climb either of us had ever done. A week later, following a slideshow on campus, Tobin hailed me: “Hey, I heard you climbed Bridal Veil.” He grinned and I nodded back, starstruck but pleased that he knew who I was and what we had done.

Less than a month later, a group of experienced ski-mountaineers invited me on a ten-day trip into the Alaska Range’s Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier. Flying out of Talkeetna, a skiplane delivered us to the base of Denali. We climbed a minor peak, then skied sixty miles to the highway over sparkling glaciers beneath towering walls. Even though I was by far the worst skier in the group, that ski tour remains one of the few experiences of my life that surpassed all my expectations: simultaneously far more intimidating and alluring than I could have ever imagined. It was my first mountain wilderness expedition. I wanted more challenges like that to both dwarf and empower me.

The technical skills from climbing ice combined with the survival skills of mountain travel provided me with the ingredients to climb alpinist lines and the confidence to lead others on Alaskan adventures. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my high school friend Savvy Sanders joined me for three weeks in the Great Gorge. The year after that, I organized a month-long expedition to the Arrigetch Peaks in the Brooks Range, a trip that taught me painful lessons in group dynamics.

Viewed in photos from books and magazines, the Arrigetch mesmerized me with their geometric summits in a wilderness setting. I spent the winter planning our trip and imagining the routes, especially the most dramatic spire, Shot Tower. I invited Savvy, who convinced Dieter to go. In turn, Dieter enlisted his climbing partner Mike Bearzi, at twenty-five an adult by comparison; both my friends were twenty and I eighteen. After school was out, I hitchhiked to Yosemite to meet Dieter and climb with him for a few weeks.

Dieter and I never got along well, not in Virginia, not in Yosemite, and certainly not in the Arrigetch. Knee-deep in a Yosemite Valley stream, he was nearly washed off the edge of a 600-foot waterfall before I pulled him to safety. Dieter claimed that I had saved his life but he seemed ungrateful for that help while in the Arrigetch, where our Nietzschean power struggle felt straight from Lord of the Flies.

During our August in the Arrigetch, it rained most days. The unclimbable weather kept us tent-bound, where we read books, smoked dope, played vindictive games of hearts, and made sure the Cadbury bars were evenly split. Stronger, smarter, funnier, a better climber, and there with his close friends, Dieter soon made all the decisions and criticized any of mine. My dream expedition had morphed into little more than a glorified camping trip with someone who wouldn’t speak to me without a sharp word. I had learned that if a relationship is weak to begin with—like mine had been with Dieter—then it will only get worse when stressed. Most important, companions matter more than goals and objectives.

Besides my desire to be an alpinist, I saw myself as a field scientist one day and declared wildlife management my major at UAF. My dad had encouraged me to take a math class every semester in college. He knew that mathematics, the lingua franca of science, would allow me to change subjects later on. Wildlife’s curriculum had no room for math but it did require ecology, the science of organisms and their environment. An ecology course at UAF put a name to my lifelong interest in nature and defined my future career.

The science of ecology had been mathematicized in the seventies by the late Princeton University ecologist Robert MacArthur. MacArthur’s ecology was informed by his M.S. in mathematics and Ph.D. in biology. Finding ecology allowed me to flourish academically. It offered a science for quantitative naturalists like me, so I switched majors to biology and took every ecology class that UAF offered, adding mathematics as a second major.

Working toward degrees in biology and math left me “a mathematician who wanted to be a biologist” in the view of the biology department. In contrast, faculty in math gave me access to paper-grading jobs that honed useful quantitative skills. With each succeeding math class, the technical papers published in The American Naturalist and Theoretical Population Biology grew ever more accessible to me. And with each succeeding mountain adventure, Alaska’s wilderness did, too.

IN FEBRUARY 1980, I was flummoxed to find Carl Tobin grinning at my cabin door. He came in, kicked off his boots, pulled a couple of beers from his pack, and showed me a photo of a slender white peak atop a sweeping blue-ice wall. It looked like Mount Huntington’s cute little sister.

“What a peak,” I gushed. “What is it?”

“The east face of Ten Nine Ten,” Carl said. A 10,910-foot-high tetrahedron, the mountain is known to Fairbanks climbers simply by its digits. “What do you think? Want to climb it?”

Although I’d made a few glacier ski trips, rock-climbed in the Arrigetch, and ice-climbed in Valdez, I was still just a pimply-faced teen, bruised from what felt like a failed expedition the year before. “Well . . . um.” I gulped. “How?”

“Right here.” His finger traced directly up the center of the icy blue face, through a rock band, to the airy summit—a true alpinist’s line.

The best climber in Fairbanks was asking me to climb the kind of route I’d dreamed of climbing since I was fifteen. But like a shy high school nerd invited to the Sadie Hawkins dance by the captain of the cheerleading squad, I couldn’t say yes.

“Pretty sweet, huh?” he coaxed.

“Oh, man. I’d love to,” I said, “but,” remembering Dieter, “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“You climbed Shot Tower. And the ice won’t be any harder than Bridal Veil.”

Grateful for his confidence, but aware of my job and school, I asked, “How long would it take?”

“The climb? If conditions are good, a day up and a day down. The whole trip? Two weeks. Fly in and ski out.” He grinned. “Think about it.”

Within a week I had tracked Carl down to tell him yes. Less easy was approaching my boss, who had been an Alaskan climber, too. He once told me, “All my partners either died or quit climbing.” Asked if I could go to the Hayes Range for two weeks, he responded, “Yeah, you can go, but you won’t have a job when you get back.”

I made my choice and sharpened my tools, shopped for food, and trained at the gym over the weeks that followed. From the gymnasium balcony, a pretty, blond girl watched Carl, me, and other gym rats climb hand-over-hand up twenty-five-foot ropes dangling from the ceiling. She looked young and petite, with a broad smile and high cheekbones below almond-shaped eyes. She must be here to see Tobin with his shirt off, I thought.