The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  The caller that morning told Schell he was a friend of Adam’s who’d heard about his death. “I know you can’t tell me detailed information,” the man said. “But I’d just like to ask one question.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “I want to know if Adam was skiing alone, or if he had a partner with him.”

  “It’s my understanding that he was with a partner,” Schell said.

  The caller sighed, then said something that struck Schell as odd. “I feel a lot better hearing that.” He was worried Adam had gone into the mountains alone, in the hope that he would be swept away.

  * * *

  More than a decade before Adam was born, Steve and Judy Roberts bought 35 acres of a steep mountain clear-cut above the logging town of Randle, south of Mount Rainier. It was the mid-1970s. The couple saw themselves as back-to-the-landers, eager to live closer to nature. “They called us the hippies on the hill,” Judy remembers of their initial reception by locals.

  The place was heaven. Hiking trails were everywhere. So was easy access to deep powder, 35 miles up the highway at the family-friendly White Pass Ski Area. In time a small wooden sign would appear above an out-of-bounds powder shot to mark Steve’s passion: ROBERTS’ RUN. The couple adopted their first son in early 1983. Two years later they adopted Adam.

  The parents wasted no time introducing their boys to the natural world. They took Adam on his first overnighter when he was five months old, a burro carrying the diapers. Soon there were weeklong pack trips into north-central Washington’s Pasayten Wilderness. At 13, Adam climbed Mount Adams, a 12,276-foot stratovolcano, with his father and brother.

  Adam thrived in Randle. He got good grades, ran cross-country, was elected student body vice president. He was a Tom Sawyer type who, when excited about pursuing a goal or a hobby, was relentless in cajoling others to help him. When he was about eight, in need of more room for his expansive Lego collection, Adam convinced his brother to sell him the “air rights” to his room. Then he convinced his dad, a contractor, to build him a loft. “He could talk me into building constantly for him,” Steve says.

  When Adam was seven, his parents enrolled him in the school district’s learn-to-ski program, which involved night skiing at White Pass. Decades later, Adam could still recall his first night on skis—the sugar-spill of stars, the crunch of snow underfoot, the intimidating rope tow. He practiced and practiced. For a ninth-grade science project on acceleration, he decided to ski off a rock while a friend filmed him. The snow was thick and the landing poor. “Knocked out his two front teeth,” Judy says.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2003, Adam headed 200 miles up Interstate 5, to Western Washington University in Bellingham. The city sits on a bay of north Puget Sound, so close to Canada that French-speaking voices from Vancouver occasionally invade the car radio. It’s a mossy Brigadoon of 87,000 college kids, graying hippies, and people who have fled Seattle. The town’s unofficial motto, “City of Subdued Excitement,” fades from a mural on Prospect Street. Adding to its appeal is the Mount Baker Ski Area, 55 miles east, which holds world bragging rights for the deepest snowfall ever recorded in a ski season—1,140 inches in the winter of 1998–1999.

  The university suited a creative kid who loved to ski. Adam took environmental classes at the school’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, where students design their own major and receive “narrative evaluations” instead of grades. Even in an unconventional setting, Adam stood apart. He was the boy with the atomic smile who rode around on a dual-axis swing bike that invited double takes.

  “One of the coolest things about Adam was that you didn’t need to know his phone number. He was everywhere,” says Rylan Schoen, a friend and fellow skier. By night, Adam went dumpster diving behind the local Trader Joe’s for discarded flowers to hand out on campus. Women who could look past his aversion to showering, which was considerable, often found his smile irresistible. He made friends at every turn. One day at the library, Adam struck up a conversation with a cyclist who was crossing the country. He invited the man home to stay the night.

  “Adam had a timelessness to him,” says another acquaintance from those days. “He could’ve been the oldest soul, or the youngest guy, at once.”

  People agreed that you really didn’t know Adam until you’d spent a day with him in the mountains. A few years ago, a local skier named Chris Farias was at a high camp with some of her friends above Mount Rainier’s Flett Glacier, toasting the summer solstice with a round of drinks. Adam skied past with a friend, and then stopped to join them. Farias was struck by the guy with a Pigpen appearance who laughed and joked and complimented people lavishly. “He was sparkling,” says Farias, an attorney who now lives in the mountain town of Leavenworth.

  Farias and others couldn’t help but notice that Adam had his share of oddities. “The concept of boundaries just wasn’t part of his operating system,” says Russell Cunningham, who met Adam when Roberts was a sophomore at Fairhaven. His few possessions spilled away from him in an ever-widening circle. “The Adam Bomb,” someone dubbed him. If he encountered a locked door, he might use a window. Once, unable to reach Schoen to ask if he was skiing the next day, he called Schoen’s girlfriend 14 times. “He just didn’t get that that was weird,” says Amy Schoen, who is now Rylan’s wife.

  Not long after Adam and Cunningham met, they started going to the mountains together and became best friends. Both had spent a lot of time in alpine terrain but were novices in terms of doing big backcountry efforts on skis or boards.

  Together they would scare themselves at Table Mountain and other peaks near Baker. On a few occasions, Adam would walk in the front door of Cunningham’s house, climb the stairs, and crawl into his bed. “I’m just kind of bumming,” he’d say. “Hey, you want to go skiing?”

  They went even if it was raining, making turns in manky snow for five hours. They got high together and ran through Bellingham in the middle of the night, chasing the trains that rattled through town. They promised to be each other’s best man someday. “Most guys, at least in the Western world, suffer from this disease that I like to call tough-guy syndrome,” Cunningham says. “Adam just didn’t have that. He and I had a relationship that, I think, is very, very rare between male peers. I’d never loved a girlfriend as much as I loved Adam Roberts.”

  * * *

  Mount Adams is the second-highest peak in Washington after Mount Rainier. In summer a fit person can walk to the volcano’s summit on the south side without a climbing rope. The north side is a different place—steep, glaciated, lonesome. Extreme skiers Doug Coombs and Glen Plake first descended the north face of the northwest ridge in the 1990s, and at the time Adam did it, it had rarely been repeated. This is the route Adam had in mind when, on a summer day in 2010, he called Cunningham and asked if he wanted to do something scary.

  At first the face is no more difficult than a challenging pitch at a ski resort. But as a skier descends, the mountain becomes convex, as if you’re dropping over the side of a bowling ball. Ahead, all that’s visible is the Adams Glacier, about 3,000 feet below. The mountain steepens dramatically, to more than 50 degrees; the face widens and grows enormous. Landmarks that the mind and body use to navigate space disappear. The world starts to spin, but falling is not an option.

  “At any point in that route, if you fall you almost certainly die, because there’s zigzagging 500-foot cliffs and seracs and crevasses,” Cunningham says. “It might be the best line in the lower 48.”

  After completing his descent of the run with Cunningham, Adam’s confidence skyrocketed. The next year, with alpinist and snowboarder Liz Daley—who died in an avalanche in Argentina in 2014—Adam skied the Coleman Headwall on Mount Baker, which Cunningham declined to attempt. “It was bulletproof ice and 50, 60 degrees for 2,000 feet,” he told me.

  That year, Adam also made a first descent of Mount Adams’s Klickitat Headwall. Then he turned to Mount Shuksan, the 9,131-foot peak that stands
guard above Mount Baker Ski Area. Broad-shouldered, regal, robed with glaciers, Shuksan is often said to be the most photographed peak in the nation. A tongue of ice pours down the western flank of the mountain until it’s forced over a 500-foot cliff by a steep face: the headwall of Hanging Glacier. At some points the headwall tilts at nearly 55 degrees. A mistake would toss a skier toward the void. Adam skied that too.

  He also started to get somewhere with his dream of becoming a professional athlete: A full-page photo in Freeskier in 2010 of him skiing Hollywood Spine on Mount Baker. A full page in Skiing. The cover of Red Bulletin, Red Bull’s adventure magazine. He appeared in a Patagonia catalog and on the side of city buses in Seattle. He got free gear from smaller companies that made ski packs, goggles, and bamboo poles.

  “Adam perfected the photo turn more than any other skier I know,” says Schoen, referring to a shot in which the skier’s body is frozen in action, the powder a bow wave breaking against their goggles. “He didn’t have any tricks in his back pocket. But he went big.” Sixty, seventy, eighty feet of air.

  In videos that Adam’s friends sent me, he’s unmistakable. His electric green pants and tangerine helmet stand out against winter’s monochrome. He punches through a hedge of trees and accelerates toward a row of cliffs. Then he’s airborne. With his legs tucked neatly beneath him, his upper body quiet, he’s a missile flying true.

  After the camera shutter clicks, the missile veers. He doesn’t crash, exactly. Instead he hip-checks the earth, an intentional move designed to save his knees. This often resulted in Adam embedding deep in a crater of his own making—hot-tubbing, as skiers put it.

  People who saw Adam ski were amazed and sometimes worried. On Mount Shuksan, Adam caught an edge on both the northwest couloir and the line above Hanging Glacier, his body tomahawking through space. In each instance he managed to self-arrest in forgiving snow before hurtling over cliffs.

  “If it had been corn snow, firm, he’d have been dead,” says Cunningham. Another time, Cunningham descended the north face of the northwest ridge of Mount Adams one day after Adam had been there and was horrified to see the sweeping turns his friend had laid down, the signature of a skier moving at more than 30 miles an hour. “To free ride that face,” Cunningham says, “is to tickle the dragon’s testicles.”

  Not infrequently in the videos I saw of Adam—skiing out of bounds at White Pass, on Pelton Peak in the North Cascades, and on the island of Hokkaido, Japan—he’s pursued by “the big guy in the white suit,” as avalanche professionals call the rush of tumbling snow. “He told friends he loved to set off avalanches and outrun them,” says his friend Jeff Rich. “He said it was fun.”

  In pictures, Adam leaps seracs and skis at the lip of dark crevasses. He hangs by his fingertips from a bridge in the Olympic Mountains, his grin broad and serene, even with 40 feet of air beneath his feet. “He stood on edges,” Judy says. “He skied edges. He climbed edges.”

  Some people wondered if Adam had a death wish. What they didn’t understand was that the mountains were helping to keep him alive.

  * * *

  During the winter quarter of Adam’s sophomore year, 2004–2005, something changed. He began to obsess over exercise and food. He would eat with the vigor of a young, powerful athlete and then, despairing, run for two hours and then go to the weight room for two more. Tortured, self-flagellating ideas looped in his head. He became convinced he was a bad person—the reasons why were always changing, but to him the evidence was everywhere. He tried to purge his thoughts by writing them down in dozens of journals. Resolution eluded him. The sentences, scrawled in his crabbed, indecipherable script, bend back on themselves, going nowhere.

  His parents struggled to find answers. A therapist who helped Adam end his exercise bulimia around 2006 told them, “There’s something more here than just an eating disorder.” Over the years they would get other diagnoses: depressive disorder with anxious distress, schizo-affective disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Nothing fully explained him. They began a years-long march through medications: Lexapro, Abilify, Risperdal, Quetiapine. “None of them really ever did much,” Judy says.

  Steve and Judy realized that Adam’s exercise obsession had earlier precedents—events they thought he’d put behind him. When Adam was a boy, a dentist told him to brush his teeth thoroughly. He brushed them so thoroughly that he scrubbed off portions of his gums and had to have a transplant. One day, when Adam was around ten, he told his mother, “I want to be dead.” Eventually, with counseling, such comments subsided.

  They wondered: Were Adam’s adult troubles caused by the same demons, reemerged? The boy with the welcoming smile now struggled to live normally. Within a few years, to remain in Bellingham, he paid $50 a month to pitch a tent in a friend’s backyard during a Pacific Northwest winter. Slugs moved in with him. Mold grew on his pillow. At one point he slept in his mother’s car.

  In his early twenties, he began to move around almost constantly—from Bellingham to the mountains to Randle and back again. Somewhere else was always better, more fun. One day he called Judy from Seattle. “I’m on the freeway. I’m pulled over. I can’t do anything,” Adam said, distraught. “I can’t decide if I want to go to Bellingham or come home.”

  “You have to get off the freeway,” she said. Eventually he was able to calm down and pick a direction.

  During this time, Adam began to ski obsessively. He headed into the mountains 200 days a year, going alone if necessary, thumbing in the rain by six in the morning. He had discovered something that he not only liked but needed.

  “Adam, in normal life, felt like he couldn’t feel,” Cunningham says. “He’d see two people walking down the street holding hands and kissing, and be like, ‘God, I wonder what that feels like, to actually be in love?’” Adam had intense feelings—a Tuesday morning bowl of cereal could be the best bowl of cereal he had ever tasted, friends said. “But for him,” Cunningham says, “when he got into some really serious shit that he knows is dangerous, that he damn well knows could kill him, and eventually will kill him, he’s—for the first time in hours, days, weeks, months—feeling alive again. For him, skiing a 60-degree section of icy gnar way up on Mount Shuksan, above a 3,500-foot fall where most people are freaking out, Adam is laser-sharp focused and calm. Perfect. He clicks into his element. That’s what he’s designed to do.”

  To survive in such places, Adam no longer had the luxury of a noisy mind. All else had to fall away. For a few minutes the freight trains that banged through his head grew quiet. The silence was a form of freedom.

  “He wasn’t a poor homeless guy anymore; now he’s wealthy,” Cunningham says. “The beautiful thing about mountains is they’re the great equalizer.”

  * * *

  In the summer of 2012, Adam met a striking graduate student named Eliza Andrews at a bluegrass concert. They danced and shared a few kisses. That night, Adam wrote his number on her hand. She didn’t call. A few days later, Adam showed up at her apartment building. Andrews was surprised and also hesitant. He was so handsome, though, and so flattering and persistent, despite his quirks. “Then I sort of felt like, Oh my God, he’s just misunderstood,” she told me. “Now it’s my mission to help people understand.”

  They dated for nearly three years. They hiked and skied and kayaked. He started taking his medication again and went back to seeing a therapist, which he’d never stuck with. Andrews accompanied him. Their relationship steadied him somewhat.

  Adam was a challenging boyfriend—complimentary and generous but also deeply self-absorbed. “He took, took, took and never gave back, I would say mostly emotionally,” Andrews says. Adam would call her or Cunningham and talk for long stretches about his tangle of worries, then show no interest in theirs. “Just fix me. Just fix me,” he told the therapist. Andrews broke off the relationship several times, but Adam wouldn’t give up. “He kept finding ways to get back in,” she says.

  One spring evening in 2015, when Andrews had re
turned from a ski race to the house they’d begun to share with others, Adam confessed that he’d cheated on her. Andrews asked him for distance. “My ego needed to heal from the fact that he left me, after I’ve given this guy so much,” she says. “It hurt even more, to try and push somebody away who was hurting so bad.” Adam wrote her dozens of emails and texts over the next few weeks, pleading for another chance. “Whatever is wrong with me destroyed us,” he said in one. “It destroys me every day.”

  In July of 2015, Andrews came home one night and found Adam asleep in her bed. She screamed and he left the bedroom. The housemates found him on the back porch and told him to leave. Adam exploded, shoving one woman and striking a guy who intervened. The police were called. Andrews went to court and got a temporary protection order.

  Adam began to slide downhill. He moved around Bellingham in a slow shuffle—the city walk, friends called it. He was never a great self-promoter, and his ski career stalled. He would sell the goggles and skis that companies gave him in order to keep going in the mountains. He stuck with jobs long enough to put gas in his gypsy wagon, a one-room, green-roofed hobbit house he cajoled Steve to build for him on the bed of a pickup truck. Inside was a mailbox-size woodstove. Adam lived for days on end in the parking lot of Mount Baker.

  Meanwhile, he obsessed over his ex-girlfriend. In Adam’s mind, everything would be better if he could only get her back. By the end of June 2016, he’d violated the protection order at least five times—turning up at a bar and a farm where she worked, and near her home. Prosecutors filed felony stalking charges against him.