OGDEN — It is cruel irony that the man who once solo-climbed a 40-story pillar of ice and became a legend and a Sports Illustrated cover boy with his international climbing exploits can't walk across a room without a pair of canes.

Jeff Lowe, who has dug his crampons into the top of icy 23,000-foot peaks, set out for a run one day a few years ago and fell on his face.

He got up and tried to continue but couldn't coordinate the movements and bagged it for the day. In the coming months, similar symptoms became so pronounced that passers-by stared at him as he lurched down city sidewalks, and still he ignored the signs for a year. He was in denial, but he was busy, too. Who had time for a doctor?

When he finally did visit a doctor in 2001, he was forced to confront the one challenge he never wanted to meet: multiple sclerosis. Give him an ice-glazed mountain, and he could use his will and skill to scale it; but how do you attack MS? By 2004, he was forced to quit climbing completely, at 53.

"I may have had some symptoms as early as 1998 — dizziness, vision problems, balance," he says. "Anyway, it's been a progression. It hasn't stopped since I first noticed it. Each year there is a considerable decline."

Lowe leans heavily on canes just to get around. In the climbing world, it's as if Lou Gehrig had left the game. It's like seeing Lance Armstrong on training wheels.

This is a man who made numerous climbs up sheer 8,000-foot faces in Europe, Asia and South and North America. He has climbed everything that could be climbed — sheer rock walls, cliffs, frozen water falls, mountain peaks and glaciers.

He is credited with more than 1,000 first ascents, in the Alps, Dolomites, Cascades, Himalayas, Rockies, Andes. He once calculated the number of nights he had spent bivouacked in a tent on the face of a cliff; it added up to several years.

He climbed up and down the north ridge of Latok 1, a notorious 8,200-foot peak in Pakistan set at 23,000 feet above sea level, for 26 continuous days and nights, carving ledges in the ice to sleep.

He was one of the early American pioneers of alpine ice climbing (glaciers), but his biggest influence was in the frozen waterfall form of ice climbing. In the late 1960s and '70s, he made numerous landmark climbs and established new levels of technical difficulty.

One of his most famous climbs was on the 5,000-foot face of a peak in the Himalayas called Kwangde, 21,000 feet above sea level. In 1982, Lowe and famed filmmaker/mountaineer David Breashears spent four days climbing the face, which was covered with waterfall ice and had an average slope of 80 degrees. Their Kwangde summit is considered one of the greatest climbs in history.