Honed
A twin’s biography of the unforgettable Rob Slater
Rich Slater
Copyright © 2011 Rich Slater
This story is written from my memories of Rob, many of which still make me laugh out loud whenever I think of them, or when I retell them anytime to anyone who will listen. It is also from the tales of those who knew him best and whose lives he similarly touched with his unique brand of determination, forthrightness and his spirit of the wild.
Rob’s tale is not meant to be some highbrow treatise or expose on anything. Those not consulted for this book, or others who may have witnessed or been involved in events described herein may have a different memory. That’s fine-if you don’t like my version you are, with all respect, free to read something else. I didn’t change any names, but I did leave some out for obvious reasons. No serious attempt has been made to protect the sacredness of anything because that wasn’t Rob’s style and it’s not mine either.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the author.
The Publisher makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any commercial damages.
2011-12-24
Dedication
In Rob’s memory, dedicated to the Mary Slaters of my life, my Family, the Team and the Mountain Gods…
Acknowledgements
This has been an epic undertaking for a lot of reasons and I owe many thanks to many people for their encouragement, support and assistance. Thanks to Mary for listening to all the Robbie stories (over and over), the reads and rereads and unwavering love and support. Thanks also to Sis and Dave Jasper and Dr. Delbert and Beverly Fisher for their patient reads and rereads and to Dad, Tommy and Paul for input and encouragement.. Thanks to John “Verm” Sherman, Chris “Nick Cafe” Archer, Al “Poncho” Torissi, Dr. Jim Bodenhamer, Mike O’Donnell, John Barbella, Greg Child, Richard Celsi, Dr. Geoff Tabin, Peter and Amy Sherman, Mark Daly, David Williams, the FBI, Bob and Joan Heid, The Chief Ken Bull, the Lynch Mob, Dr. Brent Weigner and Roger Gill for great input, memories and inspiration. Thanks to Bob Birkby for help with the basic mechanics and to Randy “RSL” Leavitt and especially Robin “Black Death” Heid for helping turn a great tale into hopefully a great book. You guys are honed.
Foreword
We all meet unforgettable people during our lives, sometimes in person, sometimes through books, films or folk tales. However we meet them, these unforgettables shape our lives through either positive inspiration or example – or as case studies in how not to be.
Through the pages of Honed you are about to meet two such unforgettable people who embody the example that life should be not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.
Richard and Robert Slater were born about two minutes apart on December 6, 1960, and grew up together mostly in Wyoming with their parents Paul and Mary, and their siblings Tom, Paul and Sissy. Like most identical twins, they were closer to each other than ordinary brothers and shared a kind of secret twins language – in their case, a sense of humor the people around them found often impenetrable and usually obnoxious.
Both were also bold and daring, having grown up in the outdoors and learned early that life was to be lived at full throttle, not at idle.
Still, they took different paths as they grew up. Rob fell in love early with the wild, and with rock climbing in particular, while Rich took the more conventional testosterone-releasing path of raising hell and chasing hot chicks.
It was during their college years that I met Rich and Rob, mostly because Rob had decided to learn how to BASE jump after watching a jumper zoom by him like a jet fighter as he hung one day on ropes and steel far up on the vertical granite face of Yosemite’s El Capitan Mountain – after which he resolved to never walk down from its summit again.
I met Rob one sunny day in Eldorado Canyon, a climbing Mecca south of Boulder, Colorado, where Rob attended the University of Colorado along with renowned climber Randy Leavitt. Leavitt knew us both and had taught Rob to skydive through a rather unconventional training method, then brought him to me to further his parachuting skills in preparation for what would be a short but notable BASE jumping career.
It’s no stretch to say that Rob is one of the most unforgettable people I’ve had the pleasure to personally meet – and believe me, I’ve met several, as well as a good friend and a person I admired greatly.
I had both the privilege and pleasure of helping Rob learn to BASE jump as he taught me to climb, and shared in many of his BASE jumping adventures, then had the continuing privilege and pleasure of watching him from near and far as he sought and reached new climbing goals in the rocks around Boulder, the mud walls of Moab and Monument Valley, and in the icy wilds of Canada and the Karakoram. Rob was, in fact, not only one of the most unforgettable people I’ve known but unequivocally the most vibrantly alive.
So it’s no coincidence that, as almost all Americans remember precisely where they were and what they were doing on 9/11 or the day John F. Kennedy was shot, I still remember as if it was yesterday where I was and what I was doing when I learned that K2 had killed Rob Slater.
I was sitting in southern California at a friend’s kitchen breakfast bar, skimming through the Orange Country Register when I came across a small item about six climbers missing on K2 after a storm.
“Dammit!” I said out loud, because I knew enough about K2 and 8,000-meter peak climbing to know even Rob Slater would need a miracle to live through a storm on Earth’s most heinous dangerous mountain.
I quickly called Randy Leavitt, who had already been in touch with “the community,” and from him I learned that there was conflicting information and the slim hope that Rob and the other climbers may have lived through the tempest.
Then we all became momentary victims of a world media unfamiliar with K2 climbing that reported Rob’s team as having left for the summit after noon on August 13 – 12 hours late and thus utterly suicidal. Suddenly, we all felt some anger and much bewilderment that he and the others would succumb so mightily to summit fever to make a doomed-from-the-start sortie for the top.
Several urgent satellite calls to the Karakoram later, we learned to our relief though not joy that Rob’s party had left at midnight, an hour earlier than the generally recognized departure deadline of 1 a.m. – and that the most formidable K2 storm in living memory or known history had given little sign of its coming until they approached the summit.
“Rob didn’t make any mistakes,” Leavitt concluded after talking with climbers who had been high up on nearby Broad Peak as the storm engulfed the Karakoram and climbed K2’s icy flanks until it reached Rob and his companions as they descended the completely exposed summit ridge toward the relative safety of the mountain’s flanks. “Sometimes you do everything right and you still die.”
By then, however, two or three days had passed and we knew that Rob had taken his last breath somewhere in the ice and snow and stone at the top of the world. We were all sad that he had passed, and some of the less adventurous among us were shaken that a superman like Rob could die at all during any kind of adventure, but eventually we all moved on with our lives.
We never forgot Rob Slater, though, and he continues to be a bond between those of us who knew him, and even those who knew him only through tales