The
Longest
Journey

Lena Rowat skied 1,600 grueling miles across the Coast Range to quiet her demons. But she didn’t begin to silence them until tragedy struck.

_{by cassidy randall}

“It is important to affirm, and prove, that we go to the mountains to live and not to die, that we are not fanatics but firm believers, and that the few accidents which occur are hard but not useless lessons.” —Italian alpinist Guido Rey

ONE

The tent quaked in the howling wind. The storm had raged for three days, trapping Lena and Ruby Rowat at a narrow notch in the mountain ridge. By now the ceaseless sound of flapping nylon had become maddening. When the storm was unleashed on March 25, 2001, the sisters had only just skied to this pass, called Manatee Col. They hastily assembled a tent; there’d been no time to build up enough snow to create a windblock. Snow now piled against the shelter’s walls, threatening to collapse and bury them. When the women went outside to shovel it away, they threw themselves through the door to keep their sleeping bags from being covered in snow, which could soak the down that kept their bodies warm. They couldn’t afford to be careless. The nearest town—the British Columbia ski mecca of Whistler—was at least a four-day journey south on skis, up snow-draped peaks and down unpopulated valleys.

Lena, 28, and Ruby, 30, lit a stove inside the tent to cook food and dry their gear—a calculated risk, given that the tent wasn’t flame-retardant. But the heat from the stove and their bodies melted the snow beneath the floor, and it began to dip like the hull of a canoe, pooling water and pitching the sisters toward each other as they slept. Above the rampaging wind, they could hear the muffled roar of avalanches around them.

Such dangers might explain why no one had done what Lena and Ruby were attempting on this expedition: traverse North America’s Coast Range, a giant’s backbone of mountains stretching nearly 1,000 miles from near their home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. Some veteran mountaineers and skiers thought that it was impossible to ski it in one go. The Coast Range was remote and glaciated, shot through with raging rivers, almost laughably difficult to access, and notorious for unholy elevation gain, from sea level to peaks as high as 13,000 feet.

Then there was the wild scale of it all: Many considered it the longest nonpolar ski journey ever attempted. Some called it the longest technical ski traverse in the world. It demanded months of arduous travel and route finding. Anyone who tried it would have to navigate crevasses, avalanches, and the storms that broke across the mountains like waves. Traveling the entire length was the equivalent of climbing and descending more than eighteen Mount Everests over a distance equivalent to nearly fifty marathons.

Yet Lena Rowat thought it could be done. Outwardly, Lena lived a life of epic adventure: skiing, mountaineering, through-hiking, cycling across the continent. She was known in Whistler’s ski community as a six-foot-tall powerhouse with insane endurance, game to try almost any mountain objective. She wore thrift-store clothes, preferring bright tights and flowery dresses over brand-name gear, and sometimes shed clothing altogether to ski naked. She dyed her short hair—once bright blue, now bleached white—and danced on tables at parties, without any need for alcohol or drugs to let loose.

But underneath the hard-charging, fun-loving exterior, she mostly felt lost and depressed. She had no structure in her life, no steady job, and was often overwhelmed by a bottomless feeling of isolation. The mountains were the only place where her brain calmed. Which was one reason she was excited to tackle the Coast Range traverse: It had the tantalizing potential to fill her inner emptiness.

She just needed her sister, equally capable in the mountains, to join as her partner. The two had had matching facial features, but Ruby was much shorter, with a gymnast’s compact body, and hair dyed a deep magenta. Lena liked the idea of achieving this first together. Other than their mother, she knew of very few women in the world of mountain sports, and sometimes struggled to find adventure partners—simply, she assumed, because she was female. Lena liked that she and Ruby could model the kinds of possibilities for women and girls that the two of them didn’t have growing up.

Except it seemed that it would be men who completed the Coast Range route first. Somehow, after so many years when a full traverse was thought impossible, a young Canadian alpinist had dreamed the same dream at the same time. His team of four men left four weeks ahead of the Rowat sisters.

The women had raced to begin their own journey, and three weeks later they were pinned down by the storm. Now, in the besieged interior of their meager shelter, Lena’s stomach began to roll with nausea. In the hours that followed, it worsened. She had to exit the tent repeatedly to relieve herself. The storm showed no signs of abating as Lena’s illness intensified. In that moment, dejected mentally and cut down physically, she considered abandoning the attempt altogether.

But she couldn’t go back now. Not after all the work that had gone into planning the expedition. Not when all that waited back home was crippling loneliness and the lurking sense that she’d failed.

Lena wasn’t the only one in adventure sports who’d battled demons. Such endeavors often draw the misfits, the slightly crazed, the traumatized. Acute levels of risk, like those found in mountaineering, ski touring, whitewater kayaking, and climbing, can offer a tantalizing opportunity to mask a void—or, for people like Lena, fill it. Walking the thin line between life and death demands the kind of focus that can cause the demons to fall away entirely, and help athletes feel part of something bigger than what plagues them. But many never take the next step and figure out what’s behind an interior wound, or do the deep work to heal it.

Lena would do both—but only after her Coast Range journey brought her face-to-face with death.

She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.

Lena was born in the aftermath of a snowstorm. In 1972, Nona and Peter Rowat spent Christmas and New Year’s in a rustic cabin at the base of the Whistler ski resort, north of Vancouver. Nona was nine months pregnant with Lena, and had sworn to press pause on skiing; she was due any day. As a family doctor and a pioneer of preventive medicine who’d publicly supported midwifery decades before it was recognized as a medical profession, she knew how to take care of herself and her unborn baby. But a New Year’s Eve storm delivered so much fresh powder that Nona couldn’t resist. At the end of a day on the slopes, she went into labor. Lena was born just after midnight on January 2, 1973.

It was a fitting entry into a family that prioritized outdoor adventure. Ruby and Lena learned to ski by the time they were school-age. Soon they were carrying their own backpacks on multiday trips on Vancouver Island’s rugged West Coast Trail, through rain and mud and mosquitos. With such activities came risk. When Lena and Ruby were in middle school, Peter took the girls on a winter backcountry trip. He taught them to dig a snow cave and melt water with a stove, which Ruby said released so much carbon monoxide they nearly suffocated. A few years later, as the family returned with friends from a wilderness hut in the Tantalus Range, a torrential storm brought flooding that caused Lena and another girl to be swept off their feet as they crossed a swollen creek. Lena still has a clear memory of being submerged in the water, desperately clinging to a branch at the creek’s edge, her feet hooking her friend to keep her from being carried away.

As Lena and Ruby grew older, they appreciated that their parents instilled in them the passion and the skill set—not to mention the capacity to handle themselves when things went sideways—that were key ingredients for staying safe outdoors. But it also seemed to them that their parents too often prioritized their own desires over the needs of their children. (Nona and Peter once left two-year-old Ruby tied to a tree, watched over by a friend’s dog, while they executed a nearby multi-pitch climb.) Lena often felt like she only deserved love when she was getting after it in the mountains. At the same time, she felt unprepared for regular life, with its responsibilities and rules. Worse, she lacked the ability to relate to others. Lena struggled to connect with people beyond her family. She had few friends growing up.

Things briefly improved during college. She made friends and experienced her first romantic relationships, which were with other women. One lasted a year and a half. When it ended, Lena blamed herself. She noticed her baseline mood lowering, her emotions sinking beneath the surface.

After graduating, Lena moved back to Vancouver, into the house where she grew up. Her parents had moved to San Diego when Peter, a neuroscientist, took a job at the University of California campus there. They leased most of the house to tenants, and Lena paid a nominal rent to live in the basement. With her family gone—Ruby, a talented gymnast, was traveling the world as a trapeze artist—Lena had next to no social contact. She lacked a steady job too, following a short stint planting trees and a brief try at medical school. She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.

The only thing that gave Lena relief was skiing. She volunteered on the ski patrol at Whistler, biking or hitchhiking nearly 75 miles each way from Vancouver. She soon bored of the resort runs and began skiing outside the ropes. Avalanche education was new and hard to obtain, and Lena’s parents paid for her to take the only course she could find. She slept in her car in the parking lot during the weeklong instruction, taking naturally to the dirtbag lifestyle pioneered by climbers and ski bums.

In the winter of 1998, Lena and one of her only friends, Merrie-Beth Board, ski-toured in the backcountry outside Whistler as often as they could. After she’d descended several big lines, people said that Lena was good enough to go pro in the burgeoning sport of big-mountain skiing. But being in the backcountry gave her an elusive joy she was reluctant to saddle with obligation. Plus, she could hardly handle everyday tasks let alone chase sponsorships.

And God, she was still so lonely. On top of Lena’s stunted ability to connect with people, the seasonal nature of mountain towns made social attachments ephemeral for everyone, contributing to a feeling of isolation in a place with few mental health services to turn to. Not that mountain culture in that era was ready to prioritize mental health. The mostly male community overwhelmingly prized strength, speed, stoicism, and infallible expertise. A willingness to show vulnerability was—and too often still is—sacrificed as the cost of belonging.

And so Lena sacrificed. By the late 1990s, her depression was so deep that she found herself sometimes thinking about suicide.

Then, in the summer of 1999, Peter took his daughters to climb Mount Waddington, the highest peak in the Coast Range Mountains at 13,000 feet. One day on that expedition, Lena gazed at the glaciers spilling out in every direction. She thought how easy it was to travel on them through the mountains. She pulled out a map of the range. The glaciers seemed to stretch from her home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska, into the Saint Elias Mountains, up and over Mount Logan (Canada’s highest peak), and down to the Gulf of Alaska. You could strap on a pair of skis and just keep going.

From that moment on, Lena’s plan was to connect the entire stretch over several years, in two-month segments. That’s how Peter tackled long traverses too, traveling in March and April when conditions were optimal. Here, she thought, was a project that would take three or four spring seasons to complete. A sense of direction that would span years.

TWO

Lena didn’t leave on the expedition immediately. Ruby needed to block out enough time away from performing to join her sister. In the meantime, Lena floated through jobs and undertook a last-minute cycling trip on a rickety second-hand bike, riding 2,500 miles from Florida to her parents’ San Diego home. Then, around Christmas in 2000, she heard that another local skier was planning a Coast Range traverse—and aiming to do it all in one go.

His name was Guy Edwards. He was the ex of a woman Lena had hiked nearly a thousand miles of the southern Pacific Crest Trail with in the summer of 1997. He was known as Fast Eddie, renowned in both the American and Canadian mountain communities for his climbing feats on ice, snow, rock walls, and boulders. He had an almost hyperactive energy and an effervescent personality. Like Lena, Guy preferred fluorescent secondhand clothing to technical apparel. He painted his toenails. He had a monkish dedication to traveling light and held several climbing speed records. But he wasn’t chasing fame with his records and first ascents. Like many in the B.C. coast’s outdoor community, he believed that a person’s accomplishments should fly under the radar.

When Lena heard what Guy was planning, she called his house and left a message on the answering machine: She wanted in on the trip, and maybe Ruby could come, too. Guy returned Lena’s call in early January. His team was aiming to reach Skagway in Alaska, he said, a 1,200-mile journey over seven months. It was short of Lena’s vision of going all the way to Mount Logan—an additional 420 miles—but she was still interested. He said he’d have to speak to his other teammates first.

Guy had been planning the traverse for months and had already assembled an all-star team of alpinists: Vance Culbert, John Millar, and Dan Clark. Guy and Vance connected years earlier through the Varsity Outdoor Club (VOC), a cadre of climbers and mountaineers at the University of British Columbia. He and Guy had done expeditions together, including climbing Waddington without any maps, testing their route-finding skills up the complicated mountain. Guy and Vance left from their back doors in Vancouver; kayaked nearly 50 miles up Bute Inlet; skied 55 miles to the peak through trail-less rainforest; and after climbing to within 65 feet of the summit, bushwhacked to a logging road, where they hitched a ride home. The trip exemplified the human-powered ethos that prevailed among the coast’s adventure community at the time; fueled by environmentalism, they eschewed helicopters, ski lifts, even their own vehicles when on expeditions.

Dan Clark grew up in Calgary and had learned to climb in the Rocky Mountains. He’d skied other long expeditions, including a first-ever traverse in the Columbia Mountains west of Banff. When he heard that a few guys were planning an epic journey across the Coast Range, he drove out to persuade Guy to let him join the team.

The men had spent nearly a year planning; Lena and Ruby would have just weeks.

The VOC also placed John Millar in Guy’s orbit. Only 22, John emanated a quiet maturity. He was the middle child of a largely absent father, both physically and emotionally; John’s mother, Eileen, had raised him. He was a sensitive kid who grew into a big youth, ultimately reaching six-foot-five, with explosive emotions. At the University of British Columbia, he discovered an outlet for his unwieldy inner life: Climbing, skiing, and mountaineering provided a focus for his energy and immense strength. He learned quickly and became just as strong an alpinist as Guy, although he broadcasted his accomplishments even less.

Lena endured another restless week before Guy called her back a second time. He apologized, but his team was only a month out from departure and already too far along in their planning—which included 24 food caches, nine of which would be dropped by helicopter or ski plane—to add additional members. He kept her number just in case.

In tears, Lena called Ruby in Montreal. Could they at least do the first of their spring traverses—more than 400 miles from Vancouver to Bella Coola—this year? It seemed improbable. The men had spent nearly a year planning; Lena and Ruby would have just weeks. And Lena’s capacity for the complicated logistics of a three-month expedition was close to nil. Had Ruby said no, the idea might have imploded right there.

But Ruby said yes. She spent hours each day on the phone counseling Lena through her depression and anxiety as Lena organized nearly two dozen buckets of food into daily rations and grouped them by traverse section. They also had to pinpoint locations for food drops and find pilots to handle them. Perhaps most important, Ruby needed to obtain a pair of telemark skis, made for touring. Though she had some experience in the backcountry, she had never tele-skied before. Yet she didn’t think twice about undertaking a massive expedition on unfamiliar equipment, in perilous terrain, with limited options for getting back to civilization if something went wrong. Neither did it seem to bother her that she’d just broken a rib performing. After all, this was a Rowat-family adventure.

On March 2, four weeks after the men left, Lena and Ruby stepped into their skis and began skinning—skiing uphill using long strips of synthetic material stuck to the bottom of their skis for traction. They were undaunted by the enormity of the journey before them. Lena’s brain didn’t roil. She didn’t sense the ever present welling of tears. Heading up into the heights with her sister, she was singing at the top of her lungs.

THREE

Three weeks later, inside the storm-racked tent on Manatee Col, the Rowat sisters dug out their satellite phone and desperately dialed their father, hoping for moral support, advice, and a weather forecast. Lena’s stomach had settled some, but the fact that they were trapped by the storm for days had deflated her confidence.

Through a crackling connection, Peter Rowat told his daughters that the storm wouldn’t clear for a while. But, he reminded them, conditions were often calmer below the ridgeline. And one more thing, he said. Guy Edwards had called the Rowats’ house from his own satellite phone.

The men’s expedition had hit a snag, too; they’d run into a storm of their own a couple of weeks prior. It pinned them down for a few days as their food supply dwindled. Once the weather calmed, they raced to a logging camp for one of their food caches. Desperately low on provisions, the group were traveling in the dark when Dan skied off the lip of a drainage ditch and slammed hard into the ground below. He came up bleeding and unable to shoulder his pack, let alone ski. They arranged a float plane for him to see a doctor, hoping he’d soon rejoin the team. But Dan had fractured two cervical vertebrae in his neck. He was lucky he wasn’t paralyzed. His Coast Range traverse was over.

The men replaced Dan with a skier named Kari Medig, but he was only available for a portion of the trip, and the team needed a fourth to climb technical sections in pairs. Guy had called to ask if Lena wanted to join for the northern stretch. The invitation sparked her spirits. She asked her father to tell Guy that she would be there as soon as she could. She only needed to reach Bella Coola with Ruby—after three weeks, they were just shy of halfway there—then she could join for the 620-mile leg to Skagway. The sisters quickly took their father’s advice to abandon the ridge, packing up their snow-drenched gear in the gale. Five hundred feet below camp, the wind disappeared. The snow let up as they descended farther.

Days stretched into weeks. More unstable weather forced more idle time in the tent. In the rainforested valleys, they slogged through the thick, slushy snow skiers refer to as elephant snot and bushwhacked the sharp spears of a plant called devil’s club, with spines that can pierce skin even through sturdy clothing. Higher up, they contended with avalanche danger and crevasses. Ruby once stepped through snow into the empty air of a thinly covered chasm, her heart nearly stopping before she stepped carefully backward onto solid ground.

It wasn’t all misery, though. Under the spring sun, the sisters traveled topless and skinny-dipped in glacial pools. Lena occasionally skied in a bright print frock she called her party dress. Several inches taller than her sister, she moved with the long strides of a giraffe. Ruby was an accomplished athlete herself, yet she often found herself lagging behind. When Ruby led, doing the hard work of breaking trail through the snow, the women found that their pace matched if Lena took on just a few pounds from Ruby’s pack. Despite substantial experience in the mountains, Lena’s self-doubt had kept her from seeing just how capable she was. “I think she realized, for the first time, that she was stronger than her older sister,” Ruby told me. “That trip helped launch her confidence in some respects, that she had that competence out there.”

Yet both felt their relationship fraying. Lena wasn’t just moving faster because her legs were longer. She wanted to join Guy’s team, and could seem impatient to do so. For Ruby, the 400-mile journey from Vancouver to Bella Coola—an enormous feat in itself—was the goal. As was spending time with her sister. After the call to their father, Ruby sensed the dynamic with her sister shift. “This was something we said we’d do together,” she said, “and then suddenly Lena was just keen to get on with these other people.”

By the time they reached the tiny settlement of Bella Coola, the Rowats had covered more than 400 miles in 54 days—a day faster than the men. Ruby gave Lena her skis, since Lena had damaged her own. The sisters hugged goodbye on the side of the highway. Then Ruby caught a ride south with family friends to return to the life she’d built. Alone on the road, Lena stuck out her thumb to hitchhike north, toward a life she still needed to create.

Lena met the team in Terrace, British Columbia, where Guy, Vance, and John were staying to regroup and make repairs. Lena and John knelt on the floor of a house to examine a pair of busted skis. Lena had met him before, back in January; though he’d turned down her request to join the expedition, Guy invited her to come look at maps with his team. But in Lena’s anxious and depressed state, she retained none of her first impressions. She’d been apprehensive walking into the Terrace house as a new team member; she didn’t know the others well and had no idea if they’d get along. Now John turned to her, his chin wispy with the thin beard of an adolescent. “Let’s see if we can find a Leatherperson,” he said.

Lena stared up at him as he lifted his full height off the floor. The name of the tool he’d referred to, a sort of Swiss Army knife on steroids, was Leatherman. Who was this guy who’d thought to say Leatherperson instead? She could tell it wasn’t to impress her. It just seemed to be the way his brain worked.

With the mountains as his guide, John had grown from a troubled youth into a good and jovial man. At potlucks, he was always first to do the dishes—then mischievously hide them in obscure spots in the kitchen. In Yosemite during one climbing trip, he stepped in when a group of policemen roughed up a drunk climber on crutches. John asked them to stand down; they threw him in jail for the night. Vance called him a warrior monk. Guy called him a superhero with morals.

Despite feeling welcomed by John, worries about the expedition gnawed at Lena during those few days in Terrace. Would she be able to keep up? Ski well enough? Be a capable team member? What would they think of her if she couldn’t?

Finally, the team of four headed into the mountains. They hadn’t gone far when Lena skied over a dip in the slope, bumped into Vance’s back, and fell backward in her heavy pack. She looked like a stranded turtle. Everyone, including Lena herself, burst into laughter. She felt the tension ease, like a pressure valve releasing.

The feeling wouldn’t last. A few days later, the men pulled out collapsible sleds—helpful for moving gear over flat terrain. Lena and Ruby had brought one, too, but opted not to use it. Now it took Lena a long time to assemble hers as the men skied off. Once underway, she had to stop repeatedly to adjust it. As she fell farther behind, anxiety rose in a sour tide.

“It was an abandonment trigger for me,” Lena recalled. “A lot of my childhood was, ‘You better keep up or else.’ ” When she was older, she noticed that being able to go far, fast, won her positive feedback. But if her teammates paid any mind to the trouble she had with her sled, no one said anything about it.

Over the next few weeks, Lena began to feel more comfortable. She skied in her party dress. She skinny-dipped in glacial ponds. Evenings, she sat with the others watching the sun set over the spires and ramparts of mountains few people had laid eyes on. And she proved herself a valuable member of the team. Once, while navigating a complex icefall—a steep section of jumbled ice—Guy was in the lead, tied onto a rope with Lena. He stepped onto a pile of snowy ice to jump across a narrow crevasse. When it collapsed, he disappeared into the void. Lena sat down immediately to use her body as an anchor until Guy could pull himself out.

Lena also experimented with ways to navigate the Coast Range’s numerous rivers, whose banks were choked with tangled alder and thickets of devil’s club. After bushwhacking a difficult stretch, she inflated her sleeping pad and placed her pack and climbing gear on top—including her sharp crampons and ice axe. Then she waded into the river to swim while pushing the makeshift raft ahead of her. The men had begged her not to do it; it would be catastrophic to lose everything in the river or be swept away herself. Lena was undeterred, and paddled past the men as they struggled onshore. “She did things her way,” Vance said. “Which often turned out for the better, even though there was a high degree of risk involved.”

On June 1, about a month after she’d joined the men in Terrace, Lena and John were walking together when he turned to Lena, pulled her in, and kissed her.

Lena felt a jolt of thrill—and surprise. Not because previously she’d been with women; if she was honest, she’d fallen in love with all three men on the expedition. She’d thought she and Guy might end up together—John was several years younger, and Vance was already in a relationship. But Lena had come to know John as a strong, quiet goofball. He was caring and selfless; without fail, he was the first to wake up on frigid mornings to make something hot for the rest of them. He was completely himself, and he made Lena feel appreciated for who she was. So when John kissed her, she relaxed into the moment.

It had been a bold move on John’s part. He was painfully shy around women. By the time he was 22, he hadn’t even kissed a girl. Inexperienced though he was, John was mature enough to want to avoid upending team dynamics with what could turn into a budding romance. He suggested they keep their mutual attraction secret, confined to nights when they were paired up in the tent rotation or during rare moments alone. Lena went along with it. Guy and Vance remained cheerfully oblivious. And though Lena and John’s relationship didn’t really exist outside of intermittent nights spent pressed against each other in the scant privacy afforded by nylon walls, the loneliness that had strangled Lena for years began to loosen its grip. Soon, John became the love of Lena’s young life.

Weeks later, in the long midsummer light of southeast Alaska, the small party of skiers blazed like beacons of color against the glistening pale of the Stikine Icecap. Their figures were dwarfed by its expanse and the stark silhouette of the great spire they skied toward. Like an ancient stone monolith, the Devils Thumb rises more than 9,000 feet from a glacial basin dubbed the Witches Cauldron. Its sawtoothed massif—a forbidding wall of rock and ice—had called to alpinists for decades and was one of the most challenging climbs on the continent. To this day, fewer than fifty people have made it to the summit.

The team had no intention of merely passing by the Devils Thumb; to climb it, even by an established route, was still a great prize in alpinism. The men had arranged for a food cache and some climbing gear to be dropped there, just enough for two climbers at a time to make the attempt. Vance went first with his girlfriend, Cecelia Mortenson. A competent mountaineer who’d just returned from a solo traverse in the Himalayas, Cecelia had met up with the team at a fishing lodge on the Stikine River. The pair were turned around before the summit ridge by an impassable pinnacle of rock. Next went Guy and John, the group’s strongest climbers, choosing a different route straight up the face; they, too, were stymied.

That left Lena. She wanted to climb with John, but he was exhausted from his attempt. Vance offered to go back up with her. It was only after they’d ascended the first steep snowfield that Vance realized Lena had never climbed a technical alpine peak before. “She was so confident in herself, she just believed she could do anything,” Vance said. Still, to realize that he was on the Devils Thumb with an inexperienced partner, far from any help should something go wrong, was unsettling.

They spent a long afternoon and night—a dusky twilight so far north—ascending, including a pitch of aid climbing, which Lena had never done before. Under Vance’s direction, Lena learned to step up and pull on pieces of a webbing ladder and loops that Vance fixed in the rock and ice. They crested the knife-edge summit ridge, empty air dropping away for thousands of feet on either side, as the sun lit the basin.

But just before the summit, they were stopped by a pillar of smooth rock. The only way around it was to traverse the wildly steep, snow-covered north face, and the day was too warm for the snow to support their weight. They were forced to turn around. Vance built a snow anchor for them to rappel off a steep pitch. He explained that if the snow anchor appeared to hold his weight, she should pull out the backup anchor, called a picket, so as not to leave any gear on the mountain. As he rappelled down the pitch, Lena saw the snow anchor give only the slightest bit. She pulled the picket, tied onto the rope, and leaned her whole body back into space.

The snow anchor failed immediately. Vance watched, horrified, as Lena sailed over his head, somersaulting down the nearly vertical rock of the south face. The rope screamed through his hands, the friction burning his gloves as he grasped at it desperately. As Lena catapulted downward, her life didn’t flash before her eyes. Instead, a mantra played in her head: Try to stop, try to find handholds, don’t give up.

Miraculously, the rope tied itself into a knot and arrested her fall after more than 100 feet. Lena came to rest on an angled snow patch. She sat up in the sudden stillness, shocked to be alive and amazed that Vance still had one end of the rope. She climbed back up to him as he belayed her. When she reached him, he was in tears. “I was a total wreck,” Vance said. “I almost killed Lena.” She appeared to him as calm as a windless day. (The feeling of free-falling would haunt her in flashbacks, every time she rappelled, well into the future.)

When the pair made it back to camp, they passed along the climbing gear to Guy and John, who were eager for a second attempt, without disclosing Lena’s near-death experience. They only told the others what had happened when the men returned the following morning after another unsuccessful try. For Guy and John, the failure to summit the Devils Thumb was the only disappointment of the entire journey. As they skied away, the image of that tower of ice and stone stamped itself on their brains.

On July 16, the Coast Range team stepped into the Alaskan mining town of Skagway. The streets bustled with cruise-ship tourists, so the team couldn’t have stood out more: They were dirty and disheveled, with skis strapped to their backs in the middle of summer. In the preceding five and a half months, they’d traveled more than 1,200 miles. They navigated avalanching slopes, icefalls, crevasses, and storms, using paper maps, compasses, and the still-developing technology of GPS. They climbed 14 major peaks, including two first ascents. And they completed what many consider the longest technical ski traverse in the world.

But when they got to Skagway, there were no reporters, no welcoming party. Fanfare would have been anathema to them anyway. None of them were after glory. This wasn’t the culmination of some competition. It was a love affair, an homage from a few bold skiers to the mountains they considered home. Later, when word got out that the Coast Range had been traversed, the same people who’d said it was impossible “bowed their heads, calling it the greatest ski ever completed, anywhere,” wrote Geoff Powter, then editor of the Canadian Alpine Journal. “They said these young skiers were the next great generation, that they’d set the stage for a whole new era of exploration.”

Now that it was over, most of them were keen to move on. Guy and John were ready to get back to rock climbing. Vance was headed to graduate school. But Lena felt that the expedition had given her direction, taught her to function through the chaos in her brain. She’d connected with people meaningfully for the first time in her life. And it had delivered John. Lena didn’t want it to end. She could have kept going forever.

FOUR

After Skagway, Lena had a new objective: completing the pieces of the traverse she’d missed. But without companions for the endeavor, she felt herself begin to drift again. John tossed her a lifeline. He invited her to come to Vancouver and learn to rock-climb with him and Guy. The three of them lived in a rental house dubbed the Mansion, which overflowed with a rotating cast of climbers connected to the VOC. Only four names were on the lease, yet at one point 17 people got their mail there. John had once claimed the kitchen closet as his room.

The bustling house meant that Lena and John were rarely alone. Even when they climbed together, it was often with Guy or other housemates. In the few months they cohabitated there, she and John made only one trip that was just the two of them. It was to Mount Sedgwick, a hard-to-access peak in the Squamish wilderness that generally called for what one local mountaineer had called “two days of extreme-level sufferfest” to summit. When they’d reached the peak, Lena sat in John’s lap, the whole of the B.C. coast laid out below them, and they enjoyed a quiet moment together. Despite having spent little time alone together, John was certain enough of his relationship with Lena to introduce her to his mother, Eileen, at her house on Quadra Island, north of Vancouver. In Eileen’s kitchen, Lena and John danced to the ukulele notes of his favorite song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

By the fall of 2001, Lena was restless and making plans to undertake what she considered the complete Coast Range traverse: from Haines, Alaska, to Mount Logan, the roof of Canada at 19,551 feet, and back down to the Gulf of Alaska. She asked John to join her, but he was more interested in climbing than skiing, and about to join an expedition dubbed the Endless Summer—a group of climbers sailing all over the world and summiting peaks from Alaska to Antarctica. He left for New Zealand in mid-September. The decision and the distance would have ended many relationships, and Lena still battled her belief that people didn’t really love her if they didn’t want to go on adventures with her. As she mulled over their relationship, Lena decided to join the expedition, too, in late January. But by then John was getting ready to leave it—which left her to suspect that he didn’t want her there.

The pair overlapped for just two nights in Ushuaia, Argentina, where John proudly gifted Lena a sweater he’d knit. Lena loved it—both the sweater and the gesture, which helped ease her angst about their prospects as a couple. On their first night together again, they slept on a mattress in a storage locker by the dock; the second they spent in a high valley, holding the tent down against a fierce wind.

Lena returned to Canada in March and left for her Logan traverse in late April 2002. The logistics of this expedition were easier. The long stints of glacier travel were more straightforward, and there were teammates to help. She’d enlisted Kari Medig, who’d skied a portion of the Coast Range traverse before Lena; Merrie-Beth Board, with whom Lena explored the Whistler backcountry; and Jacqui Hudson, a VOC member who was dating Guy. Also, her brain felt calmer. She’d begun to develop a community around her. And she still had John. Although he wouldn’t be joining, he drove Lena and the others down to Bellingham to catch the ferry to Alaska.

Most people who climb Mount Logan set up a base camp on its flank and ascend via the King’s Trench, considered the easiest route up the mountain. But Lena’s team planned to ski nearly 280 miles from sea level in Haines and ascend the more difficult East Ridge. Once underway, the Logan traverse was not nearly as exciting to Lena as the others had been, although the team did nearly run out of food at one point, and Jacqui fell 25 feet into a crevasse while dragging a sled. There was little of the sense of newness around every bend that the southern part of the range had held; instead, it was a slog across the mind-boggling enormity of flat glaciers. And where Lena had enjoyed a dreamy group dynamic with the Coast Range team, this quartet—all strong personalities—rubbed each other raw at times. Merrie-Beth was training to be a ski guide and tended toward group decision-making, Jacqui said, “Whereas Lena will just ask for what she wants or tell you what she’s going to do. So she and Merrie-Beth butted heads a lot.”

Still, the team completed the Logan traverse in 55 days and 420 miles. There was only one piece of unfinished business on the Coast Range.

In April 2003, Lena, John, and Guy returned to the only peak they’d failed to summit during their traverse: the Devils Thumb in Alaska. They wanted to complete the Northwest Face, a massive 6,500-foot, nearly vertical wall that avalanched ice and snow. The climbing community considered it both the last great unachieved challenge on the continent, and, in the words of local Petersburg climber Dieter Klose, “a perfect place to commit suicide.”

Lena, still more of a skier than an alpinist, had no plans to try the Northwest Face. Instead, she enlisted her father for an attempt on an established route up the south face, while Guy, John, and a climber named Kai Hirvonen tackled the more perilous route. Once the expedition was over, Guy planned to head to Nepal. In John’s journals, he wondered whether he should be done pushing dangerous limits in the mountains. He’d been thinking about medical school.

After a few days of boating and skiing to the mountain, the group spent one more night together in its shadow. Lena pulled out her harmonica and played John’s favorite song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” as they all sat in the long light of a northern sunset. They skied out the following morning under gleaming skies. After John, Guy, and Kai broke off on their own, Lena tied a surprise goodie bag to a rock for the men to find on their way back. She didn’t worry much as they skied away. That was one of the things her parents had ingrained in her—the Rowats were experts at underplaying physical risk.

Six days later, as she slept after the climb with her father, the whine of a chainsaw invaded Lena’s dream. When she woke, she realized that the sound was a helicopter landing so close that it blasted the tent walls with snow. Her heart sank with a sick certainty. Kai emerged from the helicopter with search and rescue personnel and said, “We’re looking for John and Guy.”

Thank God, she thought. They’re not dead yet, then.

After peeling off from Lena and Peter, Guy, John, and Kai had set up base camp at the foot of their route and spent three days assessing conditions on the Northwest Face. On the evening of the third day—climbing at night was safest, because warm snow and ice can be unstable—they approached the wall under clear skies, carrying several days’ worth of food and fuel. At the base of the wall lay an enormous pile of avalanche debris. It made Kai so uneasy that he decided to turn around. “There was something in my body screaming at me not to go,” he said. “I’d never sensed that in my entire life.” He was embarrassed and ashamed to let John and Guy down. They’d spent so much time saving for the trip, planning it, and getting to the remote location. “We took planes, we took boats, we skied,” he said. But he felt that it was too dangerous.

John urged him to reconsider. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “You should come.”

But Guy said gently, “I get it. No worries.”

Kai skied back to base camp, where he watched the tiny lights of John’s and Guy’s headlamps ascend the rampart into the night. He stayed up for an hour, following their progress, before he turned in. As the days passed, he kept a close eye on the mountain but couldn’t make out any figures or headlamps. Finally, after three days, he skied out alone—covering in a hurried 12 hours what had taken three days on the way in—and summoned a rescue. Then he came to find Lena.

The helicopter airlifted Lena and Peter out to Petersburg, where Lena began making calls. People flew up and gathered in the small town: both of John’s parents; John’s sister, Jerusha; his brother, Hamish, who’d been on a ski trip in southern Argentina when he’d gotten word that John was missing; and Jacqui, even though she and Guy had broken up by then. The group took turns looking for the climbers from the helicopter.

When Jacqui first glimpsed the Northwest Face’s restless ice and hanging glaciers, she thought only one thing: They’re dead. There was no way anyone could survive such a pitiless place. The scale of it played tricks on Eileen. Flying over the peak, she told the pilot she would just step out of the helicopter onto the snow and ice to look for John herself; the pilot told her they were 100 feet in the air. Jerusha watched her father get out of the helicopter to scream at the mountain, and at John for losing himself to it.

After two days with no sign of John or Guy, the local search operation ceased its efforts. Eileen used her own money, borrowed from John’s grandparents, to hire a helicopter and keep looking. After another five days, that search was called off, too. It was presumed that John and Guy had been swept away by an avalanche and buried at the base of the massive wall.

Still, some in the climbing community secretly hoped that they’d show up on some logging road trying to hitch a ride home after summiting the unclimbable face, having given everyone the slip. For years afterward, the sound of helicopters in the mountains dropped Lena into the hope that it was John and Guy, alive, coming to reunite with her.

FIVE

On a late September day in 2024, more than two decades after that expedition to the Devils Thumb, I joined Lena to hike an unforgivingly steep route to an alpine lake above her home in Squamish, north of Vancouver. She was 51 and still possessed much of the youthful drive that had propelled her across the impossible spine of North America. Her long legs ate up the slope effortlessly. As she led me upward, she told me stories about her past.

After John and Guy died, Eileen’s house on Quadra Island became Lena’s haven. She spent weeks there, the two of them grieving alongside each other. For a long time, Lena would awake with the sudden memory that John and Guy were gone. It was like a punch to the heart. It took all day for Lena to finally, somehow, feel OK. But as she went to sleep she’d collapse into grief again, then repeat the whole process the next morning.

When she wasn’t on Quadra, Lena was at the Mansion. If the climbing house had once been full, now it burst at the seams with people coming together to remember John and Guy over potlucks and at parties, sitting on the floor and painting each other’s toenails in homage to their lost comrades. This was a community acquainted with loss; John had seven or eight friends die in the mountains by the time he went to the Devils Thumb for the last time. But this one seemed to hit especially hard.

As Lena suffered her way through grief, the outdoor community’s support buoyed her. As it tightened around her, she felt part of it in a way she never had before. The loss also brought her closer to Hamish and Jerusha, whom she’d barely met before those horrific days in Alaska. John’s siblings and his mother became her adoptive family; Eileen told me that she lost a son but gained a daughter.

Finally, here was the thing that Lena had been missing for so much of her life: deep connections. From beyond the grave, John and Guy had given her this. “Having that community helped calm my mind,” she told me, “and allowed me to then home in on midwifery”—the vocation her mother had championed. “I remember thinking when they died that it was so good I had something I could work toward.” For the first time in her life, Lena had purpose outside the mountains.

She goes into the mountains now to connect with herself, with her husband and son, and with her friends. She sometimes feels that John and Guy are with her.

Not that she pulled back entirely from outdoor adventure after John and Guy died. Between 2006 and 2009, Lena assembled two expeditions to finish the sections of the Coast Range traverse she’d skipped when she hitchhiked from Bella Coola to Terrace, which included the most technical stretch of the route. When those sections were complete, Lena Rowat had gone farther in those mountains than anyone else.

In 2014, eleven years after John’s death, Lena married a man with a matching appetite for adventure and a calm temperament that provided balance for hers. They now have a nine-year-old adopted son. She’s worked as a midwife since 2008.

Would that all things in life were tied up in such neat bows. When John and Guy died, Lena shut out her parents and Ruby, a move that devastated her sister—Lena’s closest companion during her youth and her teammate on the leg of the Coast Range traverse that had launched the best years of her young adulthood.

Nor did Lena’s demons fade away easily. She suffered with them for years, until at the age of 50, she committed herself to therapy to confront her tangled attention span and the depression that plagued her after John died. She’s honest about losing her train of thought when responding to a question. She still has a hard time completing chores and what she calls “administrative tasks” at home, and spends time outside before she has to pick her son up at school. She talks a lot about internal family systems, about what makes for a healthy one. She knows that she hurt Ruby, but also that she needed other people at the point in her life. They’re both trying to heal their relationship.

As we topped out at a lake gleaming like a jewel, surrounded by the stark beauty of the south end of the Coast Range, Lena told me that she no longer felt she had to prove her lovability through her prowess at extreme adventures. She goes into the mountains now to connect with herself, with her husband and son, and with her friends. She sometimes feels that John and Guy are with her. She still has the sweater John knit for her; she wears it around the house when she wants to be cozy. She keeps a photo collage of both of them on the wall in the living room. She says there was once a part of her that wished she’d been the one who died doing something she loved, with someone she loved—so she wouldn’t have to go through the travails of the rest of life. But she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

Lena knows that it’s a long path she’s on, exploring these internal reaches. In some ways, it’s a path that began all those years ago when she stepped into her skis to walk the whole of these mountains; it took that long to get where she is now. But pilgrimages rarely end with a single moment of transcendence. More often, transformation comes when the journey leads back home, to the minutiae of everyday life.

That fall afternoon, Lena shucked off her flowery skirt, edged out onto a hanging flake of rock, and jumped naked into the green water thirty feet below. When she emerged, she was laughing, the glorious sound of it rolling to the sky.

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The Balloon that Fell from the Sky

Fifteen teams lifted off from Switzerland in gas ballooning’s most audacious race. Three days later, two of them drifted into Belarusian airspace—but only one would survive.

By Nick Davidson

ONE

THE WINDS were fast and the skies clear for the two days and nights that Mike Wallace and Kevin Brielmann had been airborne. The Spirit of Springfield, Wallace’s 1,000-cubic-meter hydrogen-gas balloon, drifted eastward over Poland at around 5,000 feet. It was already the longest flight either pilot had endured. The Americans had launched from Wil, Switzerland, on Saturday, September 9, crossing Lake Constance in the moonlight alongside a muster of 14 other balloons representing seven nations.

Each balloon carried two copilots vying to prevail in the 1995 Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett, ballooning’s oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race. The goal was to travel the farthest distance possible before landing. Only the world’s most daring and decorated aeronauts could claim a spot in the field. The race typically lasted one or two days, and occasionally stretched into a third. No Gordon Bennett balloon had ever flown a fourth night, but favorable weather and a stretch of newly opened airspace now made that feat attainable for the first time. “It was fabulous, and we knew it,” said Martin Stürzlinger, a member of the ground crew for a balloon called the D-Caribbean.

By noon on Monday, September 11, the race’s third day, only ten of the 15 balloons remained aloft. The rest had flown as far as they could before landing in Austria, Germany, or Poland. From the air, Wallace and Brielmann knew only that their friends Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, who raced under the U.S. Virgin Islands flag, were still flying nearby in the D-Caribbean. The two teams had remained within a couple dozen miles of each other for the race’s duration. Riding the same winds, they’d been in frequent radio contact to check in, share weather data, and trade friendly banter. On the ground, Wallace and Brielmann’s chase crew, tasked with keeping tabs on their whereabouts and relaying weather information, navigated a maze of Polish roads, ready to retrieve them wherever they landed.

Fraenckel radioed Wallace early that evening. “What altitude are you guys flying?” Fraenckel asked. The two men were close friends—they had raced together as copilots—and they used a private radio frequency to communicate. Wallace told him that they were plodding along at four or five thousand feet and struggling with a tenuous inversion, a stable air mass where warm air sits atop cooler air.

“Spend some sand,” Fraenckel said, “and come up to 11,000 feet. Got a really solid inversion here. You can sit on it all night.”

The hydrogen that fills the spherical envelope of a gas balloon is what powers its lift. To climb the wind’s layers, aeronauts toss out spoonfuls of sand from the dozens of cloth bags hung outside the basket, a technique called ballasting. Wind flows in diverse directions at different altitudes, and pilots steer by ascending onto these invisible roads.

The Spirit of Springfield rose to join the D-Caribbean, and over the course of several hours, it surged ahead of Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis. Six of the remaining Gordon Bennett balloons continued on a northeasterly path toward Lithuania, including the Colombus II, containing the young German star Willi Eimers and his copilot, Bernd Landsmann. The wind that the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean caught in Poland, however, had turned them southeastward. Along with the Aspen following somewhere behind them, piloted by two formidable American aeronauts on a winning streak, they now cruised at a rapid 19 knots toward Belarus.

Each balloon in the race bore a yellow banner on its gondola identifying it as a Gordon Bennett participant. Race organizers had secured permission for the pilots to pass through any country the winds might carry them over, barring Russia. Just seven weeks prior, the country had scrambled fighter jets when a Virgin Atlantic passenger flight crossed Russia on a new route to Hong Kong. The jets threatened the plane with gunfire and forced it to land—even though the airline had cleared it with authorities. The organizers considered the country too unstable for competitors to enter its airspace, making the Russian border the hard eastern wall of the race. Any balloon that approached would be required to land or face disqualification.

Belarus and Ukraine, however, were young nations rendered independent by the Soviet Union’s collapse not quite four years prior. Both had agreed to open their skies to the race for the first time. The Cold War’s embers had darkened, and Wallace, for one, found the idea of more room to fly enticing. He felt good about their prospects as they entered a third night with plenty of ballast to spare. Behind them, Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were faring just as well.

Brielmann had better eyes than Wallace, and he performed most of the navigation aboard the Spirit of Springfield once the sun set. Night flying was serene if disorienting; Brielmann enjoyed it. He took occasional 20-minute naps, the sky illuminated by a full moon, and the night passed without incident.

At 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean flew south of Bialystok, a Polish weather probe ascended 60 miles to the west and, for a time, followed the balloons’ course. Both teams crossed into Belarus nearly an hour later.

At 9:34 a.m. local time, a Belarusian border guard in Brest looked up and noticed an object drifting through the skies 40 miles to the northeast, heading toward the town of Pruzhany. The guard wasn’t sure what the balloon was but thought it might pose a threat. He picked up the receiver and dialed the antiaircraft command post.

When it was a few hundred feet away, the Hind veered sideways, affording a menacing view of its machine guns and the cannon mounted in its turret.

JAMES Gordon Bennett Jr., the eccentric playboy and newspaper magnate who ran the New York Herald in its heyday, founded the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1906. Bennett was an avid sportsman who, among other endeavors, won the first transatlantic yacht race on a drunken bet in 1866. He also initiated a long-distance auto race that would morph into the Grand Prix, but by the turn of the century his interests had shifted to the skies. The Coupe Aéronautique’s aim was simple from the outset: The world’s finest gas balloonists would compete to fly the farthest distance from the launch field to claim the trophy. Each race commenced in the previous winner’s home country.

Bennett’s cup was wildly popular. At the inaugural 1906 race in Paris, 16 balloons set off from the Tuileries Gardens over a crowd of one million spectators. It was a risky endeavor. Gas ballooning demands skill and nerve. A balloon filled with hydrogen is lighter than air and travels at the wind’s mercy, borne along it like a leaf on a river. To pilot one for long distances, aeronauts must understand the peculiarities of wind, which can shift speed and direction as altitude changes. Catching a desired current requires expertly managing ballast to stay aloft as the supply of gas—1,000 cubic meters of hydrogen in the Gordon Bennett—slowly leaks from the envelope. Expansion and contraction with the sun’s rise and fall sends the balloon on a roller-coaster ride through the troposphere. All while the pilots dodge storm clouds, mountains, electrical wires, trees, and church spires, and submit to the sometimes violent whims of nature.

Before cars, GPS trackers, and smartphones were widely adopted, pilots were largely on their own. In the 1910 race, which launched from St. Louis, Americans Alan Hawley and Augustus Post were presumed dead when neither surfaced after a week. They had landed in the Canadian wilderness and trudged through dense forest in a snowstorm before stumbling on a French-Canadian fur trapper’s hut, whose inhabitants mistook them for apparitions and fell to their knees in prayer. Hawley and Post had secured a new world distance record in the adventure.

Hawley and Post were lucky; others were not. Since the race’s inception, nine pilots had perished from mountainside crashes, unexpected plummets, or rogue lightning storms. Mike Wallace faced his own harrowing journey during his second Gordon Bennett, which began in Lech, Austria, in 1991. Fighting a 103-degree fever and a storm, Wallace hung his balloon briefly on a ski-lift cable—and in stew-thick fog grazed the top of Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain—before making a rough landing.

Early on Tuesday, September 12, Wallace and Brielmann spotted the eight-story D-Caribbean in the early-dawn light 12 miles behind them. It was the fourth day of the Gordon Bennett. The sun warmed the Spirit of Springfield’s envelope, swelled its hydrogen, and gradually carried it to 12,000 feet. Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis remained some 3,000 feet lower.

The night had been especially frigid in the cramped wicker basket, and Wallace’s back ached from an old injury. In 1966, he was working as a civilian in Vietnam when the military helicopter he rode in was shot down. The fiery crash burned 80 percent of his body and broke his back, his neck, 14 ribs, and a clavicle. He received a Purple Heart for the ordeal, at a time when civilians were still eligible for the award. By late morning, the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean had been airborne for more than 60 hours and 750 miles. Both balloons were well positioned for victory. Fraenckel radioed Wallace to see how he and Brielmann were faring.

“We have 12 bags left,” Fraenckel said, “and all our water”—meaning the emergency ballast that could be dropped to stay afloat even longer. “We’re going for a fourth night.”

Twelve bags of sand was more than Wallace and Brielmann had. The D-Caribbean stood a good chance of winning and would almost certainly set a record if it stayed aloft. Its chase team, though, was having car trouble in Germany, which meant that the D-Caribbean would be stranded if it outstripped the Spirit of Springfield’s chase car.

“If you can’t find your crew,” Wallace joked, “you could still land if you want. My guys are right under you.”

Fraenckel laughed. “I don’t think so, Mikey.”

Fraenckel was a rising star on the competition circuit, and he was immensely popular. A handsome man of 55, with a bright smile, dapper mustache, and generous nature, he was an accomplished aeronaut and an airline pilot for TWA on the New York to Cairo route. He’d learned to fly in the Navy. His copilot, 67-year-old John Stuart-Jervis, cut a more reserved if still charming figure. An Englishman, he had run off during the Second World War, lied about his age to join the Royal Navy at 16, and became a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, he was shot down in the Gulf of Suez, and a French cruiser plucked him from the water. He and Fraenckel met at a cocktail party in the Virgin Islands in 1989 and decided to join forces.

Wallace and Brielmann were talented pilots in their own right. This was Wallace’s sixth Gordon Bennett and Brielmann’s first. Despite his lack of competitive experience, Brielmann, who was 43 and from Connecticut, had been flying longer, was savvy with electronics, and, as a machinist and balloon repairman, approached the endeavor with an engineer’s sharp mind. Wallace was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort. A 54-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and real estate developer, he couldn’t afford to fly conservatively. Gas ballooning, similar to jockeyship, favored lightweight pilots, who could stock their baskets with more sand. Compared with his slighter opponents, Wallace’s six-foot-five, 240-pound frame meant that the equivalent of three additional 30-pound bags of sand weren’t available for ballasting—a margin that could keep a balloon flying an additional night.

Despite the Spirit of Springfield’s apparent lead, Wallace had an inkling about Fraenckel’s plan. The crew of the D-Caribbean would simply keep eyes on their friends, watch them land when they ran out of options, and overtake them for the win. Wallace had formed his own plan to counter that possibility. Given the Spirit of Springfield’s southeastern track, they would most likely enter Ukraine, then aim for the Derkul River on its border with Russia, the race’s easternmost boundary. If Wallace could stay up another night alongside the D-Caribbean, he’d land on the riverbank so Fraenckel couldn’t leapfrog him. “We’ll have to damn near put it in the river or they’re gonna hop over us,” he told Brielmann.

Though the two balloons had been in visual contact since dawn, a hazy scrim of clouds now obscured the view, and Wallace and Brielmann could only see the ground 12,000 feet below. They rode the currents in silence. Over the next two hours, Wallace made repeated attempts to raise Fraenckel on the radio, to no avail. Maybe Fraenckel had switched frequencies or decided to remain silent late in the race, even if doing so would be unlike him.

Around 2:30 p.m., the thrum of a helicopter circling below them broke the stillness. Two microlight planes and a chopper had already scouted them back in Germany; curiosity among fellow fliers was common for balloonists. Wallace, having spent his early career arming military gunships, recognized the camouflaged Mil Mi-24 Hind—a sophisticated Russian chopper also dubbed the “devil’s chariot”—as it made close, aggressive passes at them. Wallace waved their permit papers at the Hind and pointed to the yellow Gordon Bennett racing banner. The pilot signaled for them to land and disappeared.

Minutes later, he returned and sped directly at the Spirit of Springfield. When it was a few hundred feet away, the Hind veered sideways, affording a menacing view of its machine guns and the cannon mounted in its turret. “That’s an awesome thing to see,” Wallace said.

Wallace had last reported the Spirit of Springfield’s position to Annette Hockeler, who led the balloon’s chase crew, an hour and a half earlier over the town of Pinsk. Now he jumped back on the radio. “A Russian helicopter is circling us,” he told her. “An armed helicopter.”

Then the radio cut out. It was the last transmission Hockeler would hear from Wallace and Brielmann.

HOCKELER tried repeatedly to reach Wallace on the radio but received no answer. Next she tried Fraenckel, with whom she had also been in regular radio contact. She heard only static. Hockeler was near the Belarusian border but had not yet entered the country. “I was concerned,” she said. Wallace’s final message and both pilots’ silence were disconcerting, but Hockeler told herself not to worry until she had more information. If a balloon was far enough away, flying at low altitude, or on the other side of a mountain, radio signals wouldn’t reach it.

A 38-year-old German from the Düsseldorf area, Hockeler handled radio communications and navigated the roads snaking beneath the Spirit of Springfield. She and Brielmann had been dating for the past year, and things were getting serious. Wallace introduced the couple at the 1994 World Gas Balloon Championships in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a race Hockeler flew with another German pilot. Brielmann worked in Wallace’s crew and helped Hockeler find a quality chase vehicle and a trailer to rent. The two quickly fell for each other and commenced a whirlwind long-distance affair. Three weeks after the event in Albuquerque, Hockeler took a business trip to San Diego. Smitten, Brielmann joined her. Then they spent Christmas together in Germany. Hockeler worked for an airline and began using her flight benefits for frequent trysts in New York.

Hockeler had already chased in three Gordon Bennetts and a number of other competitions. Two weeks earlier, she crewed for Wallace and Brielmann at a daylong event crossing the Alps out of Stechelberg, Switzerland.

With Brielmann’s fate quietly nagging at her, Hockeler and her chase partner, a German named Volker with whom she didn’t get along, were struggling to enter Belarus to catch up to the Spirit of Springfield. They had hoped to speed forward and radio the pilots again, following their southeasterly track. But after the pair spent the evening at the border, the guards there said they would need to backtrack more than 100 miles to Warsaw to obtain visas at the Belarusian embassy. It was already late. The embassy was closed for the day. Hockeler decided that they would find a room in Terespol for the night. “I had no chance to get in contact with Kevin again,” she said.

The D-Caribbean’s chase team, meanwhile, had been stuck near Dresden since Sunday night. Their Volkswagen bus had broken down on the second day. Alan Fraenckel’s older brother, Vic, helmed the crew with support from Martin Stürzlinger. Unable to fix the bus, a local mechanic lent them his Audi station wagon at no charge and asked them to return it when the race was over. In the course of the ordeal, they lost radio contact with the D-Caribbean, which was now far out of range. This was a problem: A chase crew is a balloonist’s lifeline, and Vic and Stürzlinger were now hundreds of miles behind. “At the speed they were going, we would not be able to catch up with them,” Stürzlinger said. “For us, that was pretty bad. It felt like abandoning them.”

Given her proximity, Hockeler had picked up the slack and periodically sent word of the D-Caribbean’s coordinates, altitude, bearing, and remaining ballast to race headquarters. Vic called in from public phones when possible so his crew could stay apprised of the balloon’s status and eventually find them.

Around the time Hockeler received the Spirit of Springfield’s final transmission, Vic and Stürzlinger at last resumed their chase. They were more than 24 hours behind. Stürzlinger saw that his colleague was agitated. “Vic was normally adamant about following the balloon in a line of sight,” he said. As they drove, they knew only that the D-Caribbean was somewhere in Belarus and they needed to get there fast.

Though the crew learned from headquarters that communication had ceased between Hockeler and the two balloons, Vic and Stürzlinger didn’t yet know about the complications at the border and resolved to drive through the night to make up for lost time. When they arrived at dawn, they hit a traffic jam hundreds of cars long. “But these black Mercedes,” Stürzlinger remembered, “they were just passing the line and going forward.” Vic pulled out and followed them all the way to the border station, only to discover, like Hockeler, that they needed visas.

They found Hockeler at her motel in Terespol at 8 a.m. on Wednesday. The Gordon Bennett’s organizers had instructed the crews to wait for their pilots in Terespol while race officials sorted things out. Instead, Stürzlinger later wrote in Ballooning magazine, “we decided to enter Belarus on our own.” The two teams would drive to Warsaw to obtain visas, then turn east again to find their balloons. Their troubles felt like a frustrating inconvenience that had merely shifted from the mechanical to the bureaucratic. “We were kind of naive,” Stürzlinger said.

Volker, Hockeler’s driver, had slept in the chase vehicle in the motel parking lot to thwart thieves. Hockeler, though, stayed awake feeding change into the motel’s pay phone to connect with race officials. “I tried to get more information,” she said. “I called everywhere, and nobody told me anything.”

When Hockeler communicated Wallace’s final transmission to race director Andreas Spenger on Tuesday afternoon, he’d seemed unfazed by the news. By Wednesday morning, though, she thought Spenger was acting strange. “I had the feeling that they knew more,” Hockeler said, “but they didn’t want to tell us. One time I really had the feeling, and I was loud at the phone. I said, ‘Please tell us! What do you know?’ ” She doesn’t recall exactly how Spenger answered. “But,” she said, “it was not the truth.”

“I had it on the radar,” an air traffic controller told Spenger. “He was on the radar over Belarus, but I don’t see it now.”

THE Gordon Bennett command center in Wil ran with the efficiency typical of a Swiss operation. The launch on Saturday evening had been flawless, and officials promptly telegrammed civil aviation authorities in each country that had opened its airspace to the competition to apprise them of the balloons’ launch.

Wil was a quiet agricultural town of low, rolling hills 45 minutes from Zurich, and the hometown of Karl Spenger, the 1994 Gordon Bennett champion. Spenger was a businessman and inventor known for developing lightweight balloon envelopes and baskets. His son, Andreas Spenger, directed the 1995 race on behalf of the Swiss Aero Club. Though the Gordon Bennett had launched from Switzerland on several occasions, this was the first year Wil hosted the race and Spenger’s first time directing it. The younger Spenger ran the command center from his father’s offices.

For three days, Spenger and his team had monitored the balloons’ progress. A large map of the race area covered one wall, with pins indicating each balloon’s known location, which was always approximate. Tracking the balloons’ whereabouts required regular landline calls to a Rolodex’s worth of air traffic control, or ATC, stations to determine who had heard from the balloons and when. The 15 pins were updated accordingly.

Chase crews, too, phoned the command center intermittently with updates on their balloons’ status. Even with rigorous communication, hours passed without feedback, and precise knowledge of any balloon’s actual position was rare. Gordon Bennett aeronauts thus flew practically in isolation. But by Tuesday morning, no major hiccups had arisen, and Spenger reveled in a race unfolding with exceptional ease.

Spenger was on duty in the command center late on the fourth night, monitoring the phone lines and checking the positions of the five balloons he believed were still airborne. The lack of feedback from those that had entered Belarus made him anxious. “I was very worried when we lost contact with the balloons,” Spenger told me. “I tried to call the national ATCs, and nobody knew what happened to them.”

Inexplicably, all monitoring of the Americans and the Virgin Islanders had ceased. Air traffic controllers in Belarus claimed to have no knowledge of the balloons whatsoever. “The negative attitude and contradictory statements of the Belarusian authorities made me very uneasy,” Spenger said. One by one, he redialed aviation authorities in each of the Baltic countries neighboring Belarus. “I had it on the radar,” one controller told him. “He was on the radar over Belarus, but I don’t see it now.”

At 3 a.m. on Wednesday, Spenger finally pried some information from a Lithuanian controller. “He was not allowed to say anything,” Spenger said. “But he told me he heard something.” A balloon, the Lithuanian said, had been shot down in Belarus.

Spenger couldn’t wrap his mind around the news. He thought that Belarus had given approval to fly there. “I was shocked,” he said. Spenger immediately dialed the Belarusian authorities again, but the controllers had stopped answering his calls. Spenger resolved to “work like a machine,” he said, until he obtained the facts. Hockeler and Vic Fraenckel, among others, would be fearful about their loved ones’ fate. Spenger knew this. But he was also aware that his picture of what had happened was incomplete. He still didn’t know, for example, which balloon was shot down, and whether the pilots survived. Until he had more reliable intelligence, Spenger hesitated to reveal the incident to anyone beyond the organization’s inner circle. He summoned them to the command center.

One of the men he called was Jacques Soukup. The wealthy American was the president of the FAI’s ballooning commission, the Comité International d’Aérostation, better known as the CIA. Soukup had been in and out of the command center over the first two days of the competition but had since departed for his second home, Bewley Court, a 14th-century manor outside London. In the predawn hours of Wednesday, September 13, Spenger phoned Bewley Court to inform a sleeping Soukup that a balloon had been shot down and the command center was in a state of emergency. “My heart sank,” Soukup said. He returned to Switzerland by private jet that morning.

That a tragedy was at hand quickly became apparent. Soukup felt especially apprehensive about who had been shot down. Elected CIA president just the year before, Soukup was also a founding member of the Virgin Islands Aero Club, alongside Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, with whom he was close. Furthermore, the D-Caribbean was his balloon. He had followed the race closely and knew that Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were on a promising track into Belarus. Now his friends were unaccounted for and a balloon had been shot down. “I was feeling awful,” Soukup said. “I was terrified.”

While the others waited outside, Stürzlinger sat in a room with Kolobajek, listening. “Somebody shot at a balloon!” said the voice on the other line.

AT NOON on Wednesday, September 13, Hockeler, Stürzlinger, and Vic arrived at the Belarusian embassy in Warsaw. (Volker remained in Terespol.) They were told that they would need an official invitation from Belarus to obtain entry visas. The visas would cost $120 per person and wouldn’t be available until the following week. “We didn’t understand why it took so long,” Hockeler said. “We wanted to continue driving.”

Both crews kept up regular contact with race officials in Wil, but Spenger had yet to inform them that a balloon had been shot down. Early that afternoon, race organizers got on the line with a man at the embassy named Borvs Kolobajek, who was in charge of arranging the crews’ visas. While the others waited outside, Stürzlinger sat in a room with Kolobajek, listening. “Somebody shot at a balloon!” said the voice on the other line. An indignant Kolobajek dismissed the claim and ended the call.

Stürzlinger told Vic and Hockeler the disconcerting news on the embassy’s front steps. “We figured that it must have been an American balloon, because only the Americans went to Belarus,” he said.

For three hours they waited, with little acknowledgement from embassy officials. At 4 p.m., Vic managed to reach the U.S. embassy in Minsk from a pay phone. A young consular officer named Janine Boiarsky took the call. She told Vic that the embassy had received disturbing intelligence: A pair of American balloonists had been shot down somewhere in southern Belarus, she said. They had perished in the attack. Boiarsky knew nothing else for certain.

The crews sat stunned on the embassy steps and said little. Two of their friends had been killed—including either Hockeler’s boyfriend or Vic’s brother. “But we didn’t know which one,” Hockeler said. “I hoped not Kevin. And Vic hoped not Alan. It was horrible.” Vic entered the embassy to confront the Belarusians, and Kolobajek assured him that both balloons were safe. “Up to now the Belarusian embassy had ignored us,” Stürzlinger later wrote. “Now they started telling lies.”

By now a third balloon that had entered Belarus—the Aspen, with its American pilots, Mark Sullivan and David Levin—was accounted for. The pilots had recently called Spenger’s team in Wil with a harrowing tale: A MiG fighter jet twice circled them at 12,000 feet the previous afternoon. The shaken balloonists didn’t like the look of the shifting weather, and they were low on ballast anyway. They decided it was best to land. When Sullivan and Levin touched down near the tiny Belarusian town of Zelva, authorities escorted them to a military complex. Together with their chase crew, they were held overnight in its barracks under arrest. Four officers in black leather coats interrogated them for hours. After a long night, the officers drove them to a nondescript government building, charged them for exit visas, and directed them to leave the country immediately. When the balloon team crossed into Poland, they bought a case of Budweiser to settle their nerves.

The Aspen’s report was confounding and raised more questions than it answered for Hockeler and the others stuck in Warsaw. It was late in the afternoon. The embassy would soon close. Vic checked with Kolobajek on the status of their visa requests, but there was still no progress.

At 5 p.m., Vic again phoned the U.S. embassy in Minsk. Boiarsky said she had news. Vic steeled himself. Across the street, he could see the rest of the team lingering on the embassy’s stone steps, the red and green Belarusian flag rippling above them. He held the handset to his ear as Boiarsky spoke.

Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis of the D-Caribbean had been killed, she told him. Their bodies were in a small-town morgue. Wallace and Brielmann had been taken into custody somewhere in the same region and apparently were OK. After he hung up, Vic crossed the street and relayed the news to the others.

“We were hugging. We were all crying,” Hockeler said. For her it was an anguished relief, at once cruel and beneficent. “Vic was very silent,” Stürzlinger said. “He was a silent guy anyway, so he dealt with that quite inwardly.” Vic had led the crews’ efforts throughout the day. Now Stürzlinger took over and charged back into the embassy to speak to Kolobajek, “because Vic was not capable of doing these things at that moment,” Stürzlinger said.

After only ten minutes, the embassy verified what Boiarsky had told them. Kolobajek apologized for the accident and offered them coffee inside the embassy. Also, he said, their visas would now cost only $60 each. He allowed Vic to use the embassy line to dial his best friend, but the embassy disconnected Vic’s call after a few minutes, when it closed at 6 p.m.

Stürzlinger was, he told me, “really pissed.” Gentle by nature, he surprised himself in confronting Kolobajek when he offered to halve the price of their visas again to $30. “Is that for the bullets to shoot down the balloon or for the victory party?” he demanded. Kolobajek gave them their visas at no charge.

Hockeler, Vic, and Stürzlinger piled into the borrowed Audi and left Warsaw by 7 p.m. to return to Terespol. Kolobajek promised them that when they arrived, an escort would meet them and take them across the border to Brest. Wallace and Brielmann, he said, would be waiting for them there. When they reached Terespol, however, they found no escort. No one at the border station knew anything about the balloons. Exhausted and devastated, the crews wanted only to retrieve their friends—living and dead—and be done with the ordeal. After four hours of explaining themselves, they finally crossed into Belarus. But Wallace and Brielmann were nowhere to be found.

TWO

WHEN WALLACE saw the Hind flash its machine guns and signal to land, he wasn’t about to argue. He vented gas from the balloon’s envelope to initiate a dangerous and turbulent thousand-foot-per-minute descent. He and Brielmann had eaten dozens of Werther’s candies, and the foil wrappers swirled in the air around them like radar chaff.

Directly below the basket stretched vast open fields—the Pinsk Marshes, one of Europe’s largest wetlands. “It’s godforsaken,” Wallace said. “If you were gonna give the earth an enema, you’d stick the tube in the middle of the Pinsk swamp.” Wallace aimed for a building roughly five miles away. Nothing stood around it but thigh-high vegetation that choked the swamp. The Hind had vanished. “So I’m thinking, What the hell’s going on?” Wallace recalled. “Why wouldn’t he escort me down?”

As the Spirit of Springfield plunged, letting off the flammable gas that gave the balloon shape and lift, military aircraft shot heat-seeking missiles and dropped bombs around them. This corner of the Pinsk swamplands doubled as a Belarusian Air Defense target range, but was not labeled as such on their charts. The building they’d chosen to guide their landing appeared to be a favorite target in the range. The structure was shot up and pocked with shrapnel. “This is not an appropriate place to go down with a balloon,” said Brielmann. Wallace ballasted a spoonful of sand and ascended to 300 feet.

For the next hour and a half, Wallace worried that the Hind was still tracking their progress and might notice that they had yet to land. But they were still in the race. He figured he’d squeeze out three or four more miles while he searched for a safe place to touch down.

A road appeared in the distance. Soon they heard voices below. Near the road, curious faces peered from the shrubbery. As they neared the ground, a man reached up, grabbed the balloon’s trail rope, and pulled them to the earth. He and the others braved the target range to forage for berries and apples.

Wallace took a GPS reading of the landing site and joined the man, who spoke no English but mimed an offer to guide him out of the swamp. Brielmann stayed behind with the balloon. The dirt road was rough and rutted with tire tracks more than two feet deep. Abandoned trucks and bombshells littered the edges. How the hell are we getting the balloon out of here? Wallace said to himself.

Wallace ducked into the ruts whenever a bomb detonated nearby. He walked in a pair of the soft, round-soled boot liners used by mushers in the Iditarod, a method of saving weight during balloon races. But after several miles, he was limping badly—on top of inadequate footwear, he suffered from peripheral neuropathy, a consequence of the Vietnam crash that mangled his nerves and caused pain and numbness in his legs.

Wallace and his guide came upon a shack several miles down the road, manned by a trio of inebriated soldiers passing around slices of salami. An officer dumped the water from Wallace’s bottle and poured in vodka, insisting that he drink with them. “I’d had a drinking problem,” Wallace told me, “and I hadn’t had a drink in ten years. I couldn’t do that.” He asked instead for water and some food. He hadn’t eaten much more than a few carrots and a chocolate bar in three days.

To the outpost’s guards, this lumbering foreigner had seemed to materialize like an alien from the wild bog. They asked through gestures where he’d come from. “The sky,” he told them, pointing. His forager-guide returned to the swamp. Wallace trudged inside, found an empty cot, and slept.

Back at the landing site, Brielmann was hard at work packing the balloon. Unexploded bombs jutted from the ground, and ordnance thundered around him. Above, jets continued shooting missiles. Brielmann was grateful that none of the shrapnel rained down on his head. As darkness fell, he covered the basket with an American flag, hoping that it would function as a deterrent rather than a target. Away from the balloon, he found a bomb crater where he could sleep, wrapped himself in his military poncho, and prayed that no one would mistake him for a spy.

Sometime after midnight, the growl of a motor awoke him. An old army Jeep pulled in next to the balloon, and Brielmann saw flashlights. Voices called his name in the moonlit dark. Wallace must have found help. Brielmann rose from the crater and walked toward them. In broken English they demanded his passport. “I’ll show it to you,” he told them, “but you’re not going to leave with it.” Only when they produced Wallace’s passport did he hand his over, but he refused to go with them. “I’m staying with the balloon,” he insisted. “Send a truck for it. I’ll go with that. OK?” Initially the soldiers disagreed, but when Brielmann wouldn’t budge, they tossed him a blanket and disappeared.

A couple of hours later, two soldiers returned with a massive three-axle truck. Together they loaded the basket and envelope—some 300 pounds of nylon and wicker—and quietly drove Brielmann to a military base in the nearby town of David-Gorodok. The guards escorted him to the commandant’s office, where he found Wallace in the midst of being questioned.

The commandant had wrangled a young English teacher named Sveta from the village to interpret. She told Wallace and Brielmann that the commandant believed they meant no harm but wanted to know how they got there and what they were doing. “We had a document in Russian that explained what we were up to, that Belarus in particular had invited us to fly through their airspace,” Brielmann told me. The story didn’t seem to compute, despite the letter. “They didn’t know where the hell we came from,” Wallace said. “They could not get it down that we came in by balloon.”

After the questioning, guards ushered Wallace and Brielmann to the second floor of a barracks across the base and into a room strewn with cots. A soldier occupied one; Brielmann assumed he was there to watch them. The adjacent bathroom lacked toilet paper and towels. When a guard showed Brielmann his bed, a thin mattress with a dirty blanket, he fell into it gratefully. “The opportunity to lay horizontally and not be bent up in a ball in a crater or bounced around in a truck just seemed like a great idea,” he said.

Late in the morning, they shared a simple breakfast of bread, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and slices of meat in the empty mess hall. Wallace had visited numerous military bases during his armament work, and they were always bustling. Yet, other than their minders, they saw no soldiers. “That was the strange thing,” Brielmann said. “It seemed like a halfway-deserted base.”

In the commandant’s office, they endured another round of questioning. He wanted to know why they chose to land in a military area.

“It wasn’t marked on our maps,” Brielmann answered. Neither had they chosen to land—they’d been forced down by the Hind.

“You have maps?” the commandant asked. “Where did you get them?”

“Well, airplanes fly over, and they take pictures,” Brielmann deadpanned, “and they can turn it into a map. They don’t have your base on it, so we didn’t know it was there.” He assured the commandant that if their map had described this as a firing range, they would have steered clear of it. But the commandant remained suspicious.

Before he and Wallace left his office, Brielmann asked the commandant for some paper and received a few scraps. Guards escorted them back to their room, where they were to remain when not being questioned or eating twice-daily meals in the mess. Once the two were alone, Wallace pointed to the paper in Brielmann’s hand and said, “Don’t you go writing everything down so they can take it from you and know your thoughts.”

Brielmann regarded him with exasperation. “Hey Mike, it’s paper,” he said. “I’ll give you some next time you’re using the toilet.”

The hours passed without progress. Wallace was peeved that they hadn’t been allowed to leave. “No one knew where we were. No one except for the commandant,” Brielmann told me. Their crew had no idea where they landed, let alone that they’d been taken to a military base. “It wouldn’t have been a far step for the commandant to dispose of an inconvenience.”

Brielmann took a different angle. “Mike, you couldn’t buy a vacation like this,” he told him. They were guests of the military of a former Soviet republic. They should relax. “It just seemed like a classic screwup that eventually would get sorted out.”

Brielmann found a way to stave off boredom with the soldiers who shared their room. “Kevin decided he was going to teach them some English so he could communicate with them,” Wallace said. Brielmann learned a bit of Russian in turn, mostly balloon-related words he thought might be useful. “Kevin was brilliant,” Wallace said. He had once called Brielmann the Great Improviser for his ability to make do with anything. “He could put ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, and it’d end up fine.”

Wallace, meanwhile, was in pain from his flaring neuropathy. He needed to get to the truck that still held the balloon to retrieve his medication from the basket. “That’s not possible,” one of their minders said. “The driver took the key to the door where he parked the truck. We can’t get into that garage.” The next time the pilots were outside, though, Brielmann noticed that while the truck bearing the Spirit of Springfield may be located behind a closed door, some adjacent doors were up and the bays appeared to be connected. “Mike,” he said, “they’re lying to us. They’re deliberately keeping us away from it for some reason.”

Before dinner the pilots were summoned again to the commandant’s office. “We’re very sorry to have to tell you,” Sveta interpreted. “There has been a terrible accident, and two of your friends are no more.” The commandant offered no further explanation, but both Brielmann and Wallace understood that Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were dead. Brielmann felt as if he’d been struck between the eyes. “Very cursory. No detail. It was like, What could have happened?” But having seen the firepower and aggression of the Hind that confronted the Spirit of Springfield, he suspected that the D-Caribbean had been less fortunate in its encounter. “That totally changed the demeanor of the visit, knowing that our friends had been killed.”

Janine Boiarsky, the consular officer in Minsk, managed to connect with the balloonists on a line in the commandant’s office. She spoke with Wallace first, then asked about Brielmann, who Wallace said was fine. Boiarsky insisted that he hand Brielmann the phone. “She wanted to talk to each of us personally,” Brielmann said, “to actually hear our voice.” She said the embassy was working to free them. “Knowing that someone in the U.S. government knew we existed, and hopefully where we were, was a great comfort.”

The news of Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis’s deaths, on the other hand, devastated the pilots, and it was difficult to process in the midst of their detainment. The next morning, a Thursday, Wallace demanded that their captors let him into the truck to retrieve his medication from the balloon. “Look, do you want me to die here on you?” he asked. “They’re in the basket!” The prospect of another American’s death on their hands persuaded them to give the men access to the balloon and Wallace’s meds. Wallace, though in pain, had exaggerated his limp. “I was blowing smoke up their ass to get back to the balloon,” he said.

Brooding and perhaps naive about his jailer’s magnanimity, Brielmann wrote a statement that afternoon for the commandant to sign. “I wanted to try to document the fact that we had been forced down,” he said. Race rules required them to obtain signed testimony from witnesses to their landing. More crucially, he was leaving breadcrumbs where he could. The statement included the latitude and longitude of the landing site, along with a concise declaration for Gordon Bennett organizers asserting that he and Wallace could have flown farther. The commandant pointed out that he didn’t know whether they could have continued flying. Above all, he took exception to Brielmann’s description of the Hind as a “military gunship.”

“You didn’t know that there were guns on it,” he protested. Brielmann said that he could see its machine-gun barrels. “You don’t know if there were bullets in there,” the commandant countered. They agreed to call it a “military helicopter.” Brielmann rewrote his statement, and the commandant signed and dated it.

Maybe this was a step forward and maybe not. But Brielmann no longer considered this “vacation” the lark he previously had, and he was afraid. He wanted out. In the confines of their guarded room, he couldn’t shake the dire possibilities from his imagination. Are we going to be able to leave this country? he wondered. Are they going to disappear us?

ROADS in Belarus were in bad shape. The land was flat, desolate, and dark. No one in the chase crew had slept in 24 hours. Once they settled in for the drive, Vic Fraenckel began to cry. Vic had learned from Boiarsky that his brother’s and Stuart-Jervis’s bodies lay in a small morgue in the town of Biaroza, near where the D-Caribbean struck the earth. They would need to be officially identified. Boiarsky had gone ahead to ensure that the deceased aeronauts and their effects were properly looked after and that no autopsy would be performed without an American physician present.

By the time the crew arrived in Biaroza, around 4 a.m. on Thursday, Boiarsky had already gone back to Minsk. Vic phoned her from a post office, and Boiarsky said that she would return to meet them later in the day. The Belarusian Air Defense Forces, she said, were detaining Wallace and Brielmann at a base in David-Gorodok, a three-hour drive east. Vic asked Boiarsky what they should do. “As a U.S. embassy official, I can’t advise you to go,” Boiarsky told him. “But as one human being to another, get there as fast as you can.”

Stürzlinger got behind the wheel and they hurried off. Hockeler dozed in the back seat. Whatever their worries, at least their mission was clear, a lens to focus their grief. “We functioned as a crew throughout. We never really stopped to think,” Stürzlinger told me. The few road signs were in Cyrillic, and the crew struggled to match them to their maps, which often proved inaccurate and tested their patience.

Stürzlinger sped down the rough pavement, occasionally passing tiny hamlets almost before noticing them. “It got very empty out there,” he said. A police officer pulled him over somewhere along the way, but Stürzlinger wasn’t having it. In polite English, he told the officer, “Sorry, we are not going to deal with this. We’re just going to drive on.” Stürzlinger grabbed a picture and pointed at it, saying the Russian word for “balloon.” “That was our secret password,” he said. “We used that at every occasion. I think he was just confused, and he let us go.”

Around noon the crew finally found themselves in David-Gorodok. They stopped at the first official-looking building they saw and announced that they were searching for two Americans and a balloon. The building turned out to be a bank. The proprietor wouldn’t allow them to phone the U.S. embassy in Minsk but dialed a number himself, reporting back that Wallace and Brielmann would arrive in 15 minutes.

When after half an hour the pilots hadn’t appeared, the banker let them call the embassy. “Waiting for the right person to get on the line proved too long for the man in the bank, who was getting more and more nervous,” Stürzlinger later wrote in Ballooning magazine, “and he disconnected the line.” Then he shepherded them to the gate of the military base and departed.

At the base, a small man with a big hat and a bushy mustache instructed them to leave their car and drove them to a guard station, where an officer checked their visas and sent for an interpreter. While they waited, the crew asked to call the U.S. embassy, but the mustached man said that the three telephones on the desk wouldn’t reach Minsk and he told them to wait.

Sveta, the interpreter, arrived after an hour and inspected their passports. First she asked why they were in Belarus. With all the patience he could muster, Stürzlinger answered, “We’re here to fetch our dead pilots and the two surviving ones.” He demanded to see their friends. “They’re busy,” the man in the big hat said. “They have to do some paperwork.”

Vic insisted that they contact the embassy—perhaps from a post office, as they’d done before—and eventually the guards relented. They escorted the chase crew to the David-Gorodok post office, which doubled as a small grocery store, its shelves mostly barren. On the phone, Vic talked with embassy officials, who concurrently spoke on another line with the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, relaying what Vic told them and pressing for action.

Then Brielmann arrived with an armed guard. He’d been planning to make a call to Switzerland, hoping that organizers would pass along a message to the chase crew. Surprised to see Hockeler standing before him, he rushed to embrace her. “I don’t have the right words in English. I was relieved to see him,” Hockeler told me. “But it was so sad.” When Brielmann saw Vic, he felt the heartbreak his friend was enduring and hugged him next. “We really didn’t need a whole lot of words,” Brielmann said. “Just sharing an immense loss.”

Wallace remained unaccounted for when they returned to the base. Brielmann explained that guards had taken him into town earlier to call his sons in Massachusetts. Brielmann and the crew waited in a small grassy park, surrounded by soldiers smoking, until Wallace lumbered toward them with an escort, still wearing his boot liners. He had just endured a final round of questioning. The commandant wanted him to sign a statement in Russian, but Wallace refused to do so without an American official present.

With the chase crew on the base and the U.S. embassy making noise, the Belarusians’ attitude seemed to shift. “They realized they made a huge international mistake,” Wallace said. Brielmann decided to take advantage of the momentum. He needed to get the balloon into the crew’s trailer so they would be ready to leave quickly. Observing the squadron of troops milling around in the training field at the center of the base, he approached the commandant and indicated the Spirit of Springfield on the three-axle truck. “It won’t fit the way it is. I need to pack this thing up really neat,” he said. “Can I get some help?”

The commandant rounded up a few dozen soldiers. Brielmann employed the Russian terminology he’d learned and directed the troops to lay out, repack, and load the Spirit of Springfield. When they finished, he regarded Stürzlinger and Wallace with a sly grin. It was the best packing job they’d seen in ages. The pilots were allowed to gather their things from the barracks while the crew bought drinks and fuel for the drive. They asked for an official document from the military to ease their passage out of the country. Sveta produced a statement in Russian that they couldn’t read, but no one protested as they crammed into the Audi and drove away.

Around 8:30 p.m., the crew and pilots arrived back at the morgue. Boiarsky was waiting for them. She told Vic that he could view his brother if he chose. “I’ve already been in to see the bodies,” she cautioned, explaining that she’d used their passports to confirm their identities. “I recommend that you don’t go look, unless you really want to. It’s not pretty.” One of the men had a crushed rib cage, as though he’d struck the ground flat on his back. The other appeared to have been in a seated position at the moment of impact: face smashed, tailbone and legs shattered. Vic opted to stay outside, and no one else wanted to look either.

Around 10 p.m., Boiarsky and her driver chaperoned the group to the Polish border and told the other car to stay close. She would return to the morgue afterward and accompany the bodies by plane back to Minsk. Their remains would then be sent on to the United States. Stürzlinger wouldn’t let Vic drive, and Wallace was exhausted and in pain despite his meds. Brielmann rode with Boiarsky. Five hundred yards from the border, the Audi sputtered and ran out of gas. By the time Boiarsky noticed, a column of some dozen tanks had entered the road between them and stopped traffic. “Shit,” Wallace said, “we almost made it.” Boiarsky turned her driver around, parted the tanks, and found fuel for the chase car.

At the border station, guards reprimanded Wallace and Brielmann for lacking entry visas and charged them $30 apiece to exit the country. Boiarsky offered packs of Marlboro cigarettes she’d brought along to barter with, but the guards didn’t budge. What’s more, Brielmann only had a hundred-dollar bill and the guards didn’t have change. So Boiarsky wrote a check for the exit visas.

On the Polish side of the crossing, a drunken border guard gave the crew grief about the contents of their trailer. Brielmann leaned from the window and shouted, “Vozdushnyy shar”—Russian for “balloon.” The term “got through the vodka fumes,” Stürzlinger later wrote, and the stumbling guard gave up and waved them through to Terespol in the early-morning hours. After three exhausting days, Belarus vanished in the rearview mirror.

This was the first instance outside of war that a manned balloon had been shot down in what many deemed a profound act of aggression, even murder.

SCORES of balloonists and their crews gathered in Switzerland that Saturday, September 16, to attend a memorial service for Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis on Wil’s pastoral outskirts. The church, Kapelle Maria Dreibrunnen, was a 13th-century pilgrimage chapel adorned with rococo golden altars and a painted ceiling depicting biblical battles.

In a black suit, Jacques Soukup stood visibly distraught before the congregants packed in the nave, a stack of notes in hand. Once a Roman Catholic priest, he’d been up all night marking his Bible and struggling to prepare the eulogy for his friends. Light scattered from the frosted beehive panes flanking him before the pulpit. Behind Soukup, the U.S. Virgin Islands flag was draped over an altar. In front of that stood a black-and-white photo of Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis beaming in the wicker basket of Soukup’s balloon.

Soukup read from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, a passage that recounts love’s best qualities. “The man that wrote these words was known as a traveler,” Soukup said. “This man was also an adventurer. He went to strange and often hostile places. He took risks. Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis did the same.” He described the pilots’ unflagging generosity and jovial spirits, their many contributions to the sport of ballooning and to the lives of the people who loved them. “This was a great tragedy, a senseless loss of life,” Soukup said. “But they died doing what they loved.” His voice caught in his throat. “To Alan and John, we say, ‘We will greatly miss you. But we know your spirits will fly on.’ ”

Neither Wallace nor Brielmann were at the service. Wallace had already flown home to the U.S., and Brielmann and Hockeler skipped it entirely, with race director Andreas Spenger’s encouragement, to rest and avoid a frenzy of questions. The two pilots learned at an intimate, somber awards ceremony the next morning that, having flown 872 miles, they had placed second in the 1995 Gordon Bennett Cup, behind the Germans Willi Eimers and Bernd Landsmann, who flew more than 1,000 miles to Latvia and set a duration record of 92 hours and 11 minutes. Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis, shot down just eight miles short of Levin and Sullivan, placed fifth.

This was the first instance outside of war that a manned balloon had been shot down in what many deemed a profound act of aggression, even murder. In the chapel, Soukup called upon the gathered balloonists to emulate love in the heat of bereavement. “It does not take offense and is not resentful,” he reminded them. And yet, St. Paul went on, it “delights in the truth.” A burning question hung over the ceremony: Why on earth did Belarus shoot down a balloon to begin with?

THREE

IN THE TWO days after the D-Caribbean was shot down and two Americans were killed, Belarusian media published a flurry of articles lambasting the country’s military, based largely on assumptions and a slow trickle of details. Then a journalist named Vasil Zdanyuk wrote a front-row account no one had expected to see in the Svobodnye Novosti, or Free News, where he worked as a reporter.

On Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean were flying into Belarusian skies, Zdanyuk was reporting a story about a recently conceived joint military air-defense system involving Russian and Belarusian forces. He needed to speak with General Valery Kostenko, the Belarusian Air Force commander, about the collaborative endeavor. Though Kostenko had been on vacation, he told Zdanyuk that he needed to stop by his office and would make himself available. They arranged to meet at 11 a.m. at the military headquarters in Minsk.

Kostenko was around 50, a big man, professional but friendly, with a foul mouth. Despite being off duty, he dressed in his military uniform. His office was a simple room with a desk, chairs, and a couple of telephones.

Eight years earlier, in May 1987, Kostenko had been a division commander in the Soviet Air Defense Forces when Mathias Rust, an idealistic 19-year-old amateur pilot from West Germany, flew a single-engine plane from Helsinki to Moscow and landed on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, adjacent to Red Square, in a brash bid for peace. Kostenko had spotted Rust’s plane near Saint Petersburg, but Moscow brass denied his and other defense units’ requests to engage. At the time, many thought that Rust had made a mockery of Soviet defense shields. Kostenko was the man now empowered to make such calls for Belarus.

As the interview began, Zdanyuk turned on his tape recorder. Even Kostenko was unsure how the joint system would work absent a single command. As an example, Kostenko told a story about a weather balloon that had recently drifted over Minsk and caused a panic, though ultimately it posed no danger. Kostenko was in the midst of carping about the nuisance such low-flying probes could be when a duty officer rang with an urgent message. An unidentified object, perhaps some kind of balloon, had infiltrated the airspace buffering their facilities 150 miles to the southwest, near Biaroza. What should they do?

Only a few years before, Kostenko would have sought direction from his superiors in Moscow. Now, Kostenko told the duty officer to observe where the craft was going and find out why. He hung up and surveyed Zdanyuk. “See how lucky you are?” Kostenko said, leaning toward him. “There is a balloon flying. You get to experience how this air-defense system works.”

Ten minutes later the line rang again, and Kostenko flicked on the speakerphone as Zdanyuk’s tape rolled. The officer said it looked like a weather balloon. A navigator at the Air Traffic Office heard that a meteorological probe had been released in Lomza, Poland, that morning. The balloon was heading toward the Osovtsy airfield, which would create problems for military flights scheduled to launch in about 30 minutes. Kostenko, raising his voice and cursing, told him to find out exactly what the craft was. He ordered a Hind helicopter sent up to get a closer look.

The general dropped the phone onto the receiver and motioned for Zdanyuk to continue with his questions. When the phone rang a final time, Kostenko spoke directly to the captain piloting the helicopter as it rose into the air. The general instructed the captain to circle the balloon, then asked if he could see a suspended load.

“Comrade Commander, I have visually detected the balloon.” At a glance, the pilot said, no one appeared to be inside. The balloon was nearly on top of the airport. “Your decision?”

Zdanyuk sat quietly across from the general. “What should we do?” Kostenko said. “Let’s shoot the thing down. Destroy!”

At 11:53 a.m., Zdanyuk’s tape recorder captured the fusillade from the Hind’s machine guns. Kostenko regarded him. “See, this is how we work,” he said. “This is how we serve.”

ZDANYUK’S story wasn’t the last word on the D-Caribbean incident. Under pressure from the U.S. State Department, Belarus agreed to establish a special commission and appointed a veteran investigator from Russia to lead it. International Civil Aviation Organization regulations entitled representatives from the U.S., whose citizens had perished, and from Germany, as the balloon’s country of manufacture, to assist with the inquiry.

The commission’s 81-page report was released in June 1996. It revealed an astounding series of lapses. In the months before the 39th Gordon Bennett Cup, race organizers sent repeated requests to the Belarus Center for Organization of Air Traffic, or BCOAT, to be granted permission for balloons to enter Belarusian airspace. Organizers received a telegram that OK’d the flights and stated that permit numbers would be issued after BCOAT received flight plans. But no Belarusian agency recorded either the requests or the approval.

Director Andreas Spenger’s team faxed 18 flight plans on September 9, 1995. Because the fields for time and place of entry and landing airfield were left blank—these being impossible to specify for balloons that would drift on the wind—BCOAT shift workers assumed that the plans had been sent erroneously and tossed them. This left ATC and Air Defense officials unaware that Gordon Bennett balloons might enter their territory. When they received a call from the border guard who first spotted the D-Caribbean, and subsequently discovered that Poland had launched a weather probe that morning, Air Defense forces assumed that they were the same craft and made little effort to verify.

Though the report laid the brunt of culpability on BCOAT and the Anti-Aircraft Defense, it also made a series of questionable arguments. Namely, that Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis bore a measure of blame for their deaths by failing to communicate with ATC centers and request permission to enter Belarusian skies. It said that Spenger’s team neglected to provide pilots with proper radio frequencies for Belarus’s ATC centers, and that the D-Caribbean had not displayed its national flag nor any other identifying banner. The report’s authors speculated that Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis “most probably were sleeping” and proposed that altitude hypoxia and edema of the brain and lungs may have contributed to their presumed unconsciousness.

These arguments infuriated Mike Wallace. He and Fraenckel were talking “all morning, up to 20 minutes before the shooting occurred,” he wrote in an issue of Skylines, the newsletter for the Balloon Federation of America. “I can attest to the fact that Alan and John were not asleep, fatigued, or stress-impaired in any way.” Given his own experience with the Hind, he charged that no one could sleep through such an event. Moreover, he had confirmed the radio frequency with Fraenckel as they crossed the border. Both balloons tried to contact Minsk, but the ATC center there had been too far for their radios to reach.

The FAI, the international governing body of aero sports, quickly conducted its own probe of the investigation, with Jacques Soukup’s help, and published a scathing analysis of the Belarusian report. Among the “omissions, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies” it noted, the FAI rejected and sought to disprove all suggestions that Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis or the Gordon Bennett Cup’s organizers were at fault. Wallace had personally helped Vic Fraenckel attach the Gordon Bennett racing banner to the D-Caribbean’s gondola. The flag, mounted on the foot ropes high above their heads, would have been impossible to detach midflight. “It is just conceivable that the banners were ripped off during the plunge to earth,” the FAI said in its analysis. “The flag was made of nylon and could therefore have burned during the fire.”

The FAI noted that investigators never interviewed Wallace or Brielmann, and that the Belarusian report lacked transcripts of conversations between ground controllers and the pilot of the Hind that intercepted the Spirit of Springfield. In fact, the report never mentioned Wallace or Brielmann at all. The investigation, the FAI felt, pandered to Belarus’s sense of its actions as the result of a tragic misunderstanding.

Wallace and Brielmann couldn’t shake one fact unearthed by the Belarusian investigation. Amid the debris strewn through the trees surrounding the downed D-Caribbean were the pilot’s two radios. The first was found tuned to 154.515 MHz, a frequency whose purpose investigators couldn’t fathom. This was the private channel on which Fraenckel spoke with Wallace throughout the race. The second was tuned to 121.5 MHz, the international emergency frequency. “It tells me Alan was very alert,” Brielmann said. “He was trying to communicate with them. If it was tuned to 121.5, he saw something bad going down and he was trying to end it.” But according to the Belarusian report, the Hind never checked that frequency or attempted any radio contact whatsoever.

The radio’s tuning suggested that a chilling struggle had ensued. Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis likely noticed the Hind’s whir in the gathered clouds and may have watched its advance with curiosity. Soon enough, its hostility would have become apparent when, from nearly a half-mile away, the gunner fired three bursts from the Hind’s nose-mounted machine gun. “Take that, and that, and that, too!” he shouted, according to audio transcripts. The shots missed by more than 300 feet, and he reloaded. “Go ahead and cut him up,” the commander ordered. “We’ll have one more go at it.”

Just over a minute after the first shots were fired, a final burst exploded the hydrogen and ignited the D-Caribbean’s envelope. Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis plummeted 9,000 feet to the earth.

EPILOGUE

THREE WEEKS after their release, Mike Wallace and Kevin Brielmann flew the Spirit of Springfield in the inaugural America’s Challenge race at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Vic Fraenckel led the chase crew. A reporter asked the pilots if they had second thoughts about flying again. “They don’t have that particular helicopter in the U.S.,” Brielmann deadpanned.

In a tribute to Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, the festival opened with the launch of one of Fraenckel’s rigs, alone above a field of balloons, while “Taps” echoed through the crowd. Wallace and Brielmann hung the U.S. Virgin Islands flag with the Stars and Stripes, as they would during every flight afterward, and traveled a personal distance record of 1,290 miles. It earned them a second-place finish and a spot in the 1996 Gordon Bennett Cup. Wallace was elected president of the Balloon Federation of America shortly before the race got underway.

The following September, Wallace and Brielmann traveled to Germany for the 40th Gordon Bennett. Annette Hockeler was newly pregnant, and she and Brielmann planned to marry early the following year, before their son was due. At the pilots meeting before the race, organizers announced that, although Belarus was closed, they had stretched the competition zone to include the Balkans, a landscape riddled with mines from years of war. Concerned about Vic and Hockeler following on the ground, Wallace stood and made a rousing speech condemning the move. This race paid homage to Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis, he said. “Who will die this year to be memorialized for the 41st race?” The organizers conferred and, to widespread relief, decided that the Balkans would be closed after all. Wallace and Brielmann again silvered behind Willi Eimers and Bernd Landsmann.

Outside the town of Biaroza, on the forest floor near the Brest–Minsk railroad tracks, Belarusian activists had recently set a modest stone in the ground, a tribute to the fallen balloonists on the tragedy’s first anniversary, at the spot where they’d struck the earth. Inscribed in the stone were a cross and the date “12.9.95,” along with two Belarusian words carved in Cyrillic: “Forgive us.”

At the opening ceremony of the FAI’s annual General Conference meeting in Slovenia that October, Vic accepted his brother’s and Stuart-Jervis’s posthumous Montgolfier Diploma for Best Sporting Performance in Gas Ballooning while the crowd gave an emotional standing ovation. Jacques Soukup was there. He would resign as president of the FAI’s ballooning commission the next year. “The lowest time for me was the night the telephone rang from the Coupe Gordon Bennett headquarters in Switzerland to inform me that there was a problem in Belarus,” Soukup wrote in his final CIA newsletter. “I never quite had the same enthusiasm after that week.”

After the Belarusian investigation closed, in the spring following the downing of the D-Caribbean, Soukup had received the remnants of the balloon: charred fragments of the nylon envelope, pieces of netting, the wooden valve, the load ring, and some mangled scraps of metal, all stuffed into the badly damaged, bloodstained basket. For a while, Soukup housed these macabre remains in a large garden shed at his home in England.

When spring was blossoming into summer, Soukup pulled them from the shed and laid them at the edge of a small lake on the 14-acre property. The sun was lowering toward the horizon. At last, Soukup set what was left of the D-Caribbean aflame and watched its ashes rise into the sky.

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