Jennifer Lowe-Anker | Forget Me Not, A Memoir

Published: June 30, 2008

A cataclysm shook the close-knit mountaineering community when one of its premier climbers, Alex Lowe, was smothered in a Himalayan avalanche in 1999. The tragedy reverberated even more because he left behind three small children.

In this heartbreaking and equally inspiring memoir, his wife, artist Jennifer Lowe-Anker, recalls the spark of adventure that first attracted them to each other and the life they led together. She tells their story through reminisces and the correspondence that connected them “and sustained our love” even when they were thousands of miles apart.

As Lowe ascended peaks around the world, his wife cultivated her own career as a painter and tended their growing family in Bozeman. Their relationship survived the long separations, in part, because she realized that this treacherous endeavor of climbing “defined him. It was his gift, and he pursued it with measured care and persistent glee.”

But the book doesn’t end with Lowe’s death. Rather, from that shattering experience emerges Jennifer’s relationship with, and eventual marriage to, Lowe’s climbing partner Conrad Anker, the sole survivor of the avalanche. In the wake of his death, she also established the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, dedicated to helping people in the remote parts of the world that her husband explored.

Greg Mortenson, a former mountaineer and author of Three Cups of Tea, describes Forget Me Not as a “moving tribute, written with candor and grace, that warms the heart and inspires the soul long after the last page is turned.”

– Kristi Niemeyer