An uphill climb: Famed mountain climber from Ogden battling MS

He has come to accept his physical decline and has made peace with it. "I had 50 years of nothing but playing," he says. "I had no serious job. Everything I did had to do with what I love to do. I had jobs, but they were all doing what I wanted to be doing."

The return to Ogden proved to be fortuitous and timely. Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey was reinventing Ogden as an outdoor Mecca, and climbing certainly fit the theme and the scene. Lowe was recruited to create a climbing park and to develop Ogden's potential as a climbing haven.

As director of the Ogden Climbing Park, Lowe has started an annual climbing festival — Climbfest-Ogden — which features clinics and mountain-related arts and literature. He is preparing to launch a program that gives the disabled opportunities for outdoor experiences and other programs that will expose locals, especially kids, to the world of climbing and lure climbing enthusiasts from around the world.

Lowe is working with the U.S. Forest Service to develop and improve access to favorite climbing haunts around Ogden, including doing some "ice farming," in which creek water is sprayed onto cliffs to develop ice fields.

The hallmark of Lowe's work is the construction of an ice tower in Ogden, which will be open to year-round climbing. Ogden has purchased and upgraded the ice tower that Lowe designed for ESPN's X-Games. The ice will be enclosed in 50-foot-high "garage doors," which can be closed to refreeze the ice. On the exterior side of the three-sided tower, there will be an 80-degree ice slope and a 90-degree wall. On the inside of the tower, there will be a 10-degree overhang of mixed rock and ice, complete with icicles, and another gently sloping overhang of ice. In the middle of the structure, there will be a free-standing 50-foot pillar of ice, 4 feet in diameter.

It is a massive amount of ice — after the contraption was closed following the X Games, it took six weeks to melt; it will take a month just to build up the ice once the tower is constructed.

"This will be actual ice climbing, the same stuff as you climb on in the mountains," Lowe says. "I'm convinced it's a great thing to have as something for kids to do rather than video games."

This is pretty much all that is left for Lowe and his yen for climbing — bringing it to others.

"I enjoyed climbing so much that I'm getting a lot of joy in passing it along," he says.

"I do miss climbing immensely. I sure wish I could still climb. About the best I can do is enjoy the memories of the climbs I've had. In the end that's all we've got anyway. At some point there are only memories."

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E-mail: drob@desnews.com