A Life Lit Large: Galen Rowell (1940-2002)

Appalachia, June 2003

By Lucille Scott

In the spring of 2002 I asked noted climber, photographer, and author Galen Rowell if I could interview him about his life’s work for the December 2002 issue of Appalachia. He accepted readily but later had to postpone our phone appointment because of two book projects that were approaching deadline. He asked me to call him in the fall of 2002, when he would be happy to oblige. At the time, I saw the postponement — which would delay publication of the interview until June 2003 — as fortuitous. Looking ahead to this issue, I planned to run a series of essays entitled “Encounters with Light.” What could be more fitting than an accompanying interview with the author of Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, the man who had said in those pages: “I search for the perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match it” (ML, 4)? This, I thought, was serendipity. But on Aug. 12, 2002, the small plane carrying Galen Rowell and his wife and artistic and business partner, Barbara Rowell, crashed near Bishop, California, killing everyone on board.

I felt Rowell’s loss deeply. Having just reread Mountain Light in preparation for our interview, I could hear the voice of photographer Cedric Wright explaining, in a passage Rowell quotes from “A Credo for Mountain Photographers,” how it was possible to feel so connected to someone I had never met: “The quality of emotional knowing,” said Wright, “has a finer integration with our spirit than anything that comes from barren intellectual processes” (ML, xiii). Rowell invited emotional knowing. He was one of those rare artists with a talent for infusing both images and words with the dual power of intelligence and feeling. In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, his uncompromising account of the unsuccessful 1985 attempt by an American expedition to climb K2, is one of the finest mountaineering chronicles I’ve ever read. No heroes emerge, but because Rowell lets us in on the raw, ego-driven, and often petty tensions that plague the climbers throughout the abortive trek, he gives us something less heady than heroes; he gives us messy, recognizable, full-blooded reality. Maybe it was his ability to shed light on complex human responses that allowed me to feel I knew him.

In his photography too, the art for which he is best known, Rowell sought to illuminate more than the heroic beauty of wild places; he wanted his images to convey an emotional link to the land. “Each time I pick up a camera I’m trying to say something,” he wrote. “I’m trying to communicate my view of the world and to share those high moments when what I see and what I feel are a single experience” (ML, 83).

Rowell’s gift for communication, combined with his penchant for deep reflection, made him an extraordinary teacher. His messages to young artists were based in long experience, intricate analysis, personal vision, and an enduring passion for the outdoors. As a child growing up in the city, he lived for school vacations. “Every summer when I returned to the mountains with my parents, my world turned right side up again,” he wrote (ML, 51). Later, “[I]n my early 20s, I found that my experiences in wild places were imprinting me with the most powerful memories of my life.” (ML, 28). And though he became a lifelong traveler and global adventurer, he never lost the wonder he had felt as a young man returning to the wilderness:

As I walked up a mountain to timberline, I felt a renewed sense of simplicity and understanding. Here was life reduced to bare essentials, a place with fewer species, fewer interactions, and so little vegetation that the bones of the land stood out for all to see. The higher I went, the more simplified things became. Beauty and purpose began to shine through (ML, 56–57).

In Mountain Light Rowell points out that the word photography means “writing with light” (ML, 122). He says, “It is easy to forget that light to photographers, like language to writers, is their only means of artistic expression” (ML, 182). In this issue of Appalachia, five writers share their own experiences, intellectual and emotional, in various “Encounters with Light.” We dedicate the issue — and in particular these five musings — to the memory of Galen Rowell, who sought in his art to “[capture] moments when living became visual poetry” (ML, 132).

—Lucille Stott is Editor in Chief of Appalachia Journal.