http://www.adventure-journal.com/2012/1 ... d-gilletteEdward “Ned” Gillette in some ways followed a classic adventurers’ path — rebellion. He came from hidebound New England stock, went to Dartmouth, became one of the better nordic skiers in the U.S., attended the University of Colorado to get an MBA…and then couldn’t toe the line for another second.
(H)is appetite for feats of huge endurance quickly became legendary. A circumnavigation of Denali in 1978 was the first achieved in more than 70 years, followed a fortnight later by a brass-balls, single-day climb of the peak, joined by legendary photographer Galen Rowell. Nobody had ever dreamed you could ascend Denali in one day, and yet Gillette was only getting warm. He followed up with the first climb and ski descent of 24,757-foot Muztagata in China, notable in part because he and his team were the first Americans allowed to climb in China since before WWII; a 1980 trip, again with Rowell and two other members traversed the Karakorams in winter; and a 1981, 300-mile Everest Grand Circle trek, in which he and his team, including then-girlfriend Jan Reynolds, took 120 days skiing, climbing, and hiking. In Balf’s Men’s Journal story Reynolds explained that this was Gillette finally coming into his own.
He was still pushing boundaries, like the first telemark ski descent of Aconcagua, a solo climbing/skiing journey through Uganda while the nation was wracked by war, and in 1988, a brutal, two-week, 600-mile row across the Drake Passage from Chile to Antarctica in an open dory. The crew made it, but the self-righting craft was constantly capsizing, and it was an expedition short on glory and long only on Gillette’s mighty will. And building that trip and making it happen drove Gillette and Reynolds to split up.
Eventually Killed by Towelies...
The mujahideen had flooded into the Karakoram a year before Ned Gillette and Suzy Patterson would head there to attempt another grand traverse, this one around Nanga Parbat....... It wasn’t just a challenge, it was in a region fraught with political rancor, just as it is today.
What transpired on the night of August 5th, 1998, will always be a bit murky.
Gillette and Patterson were shotgunned in their tent, Gillette mortally wounded, dying 36 hours later from internal bleeding and Patterson barely survived herself, with a collapsed lung filling with blood. Eventually a pair of men were captured for robbery, a charge that always seemed implausible; shooting people when you just want their money doesn’t make sense, and considering that Patterson received incredibly gracious help from the locals who eventually saved her life, it’s also hard to say they were unwelcome......
Gillette was a badass, cut down too early in an act of caprice and malice. But probably his death was no more random a way to leave this world than if he’d had his druthers: going out while climbing up a peak or skiing down one just because, in his own pure, grand style.
