SHERIDAN — Sheridan resident Marie Lowe can’t tell you exactly when her extended family took a backpacking trip into the Cloud Peak Wilderness. It may have been the summer of 1998. Maybe 1999.
But Marie still remembers the joy and chaos of the trip with a large party including her brother-in-law Alex Lowe. She also remembers a breakfast-time conversation with Alex.
“Alex always got up super early and went out for a hike,” Marie said. “He came back around 8 a.m. to cook breakfast, and one morning I asked him where he had been. He had climbed Cloud Peak. That was really Alex in a nutshell right there. He did things that other people would think were impossible.”
Alex Lowe, an American mountaineer and the subject of the documentary “Torn” released on Disney+ last week, always did the impossible. In 1995, he received the American Alpine Club’s Underhill Award, the highest honor in U.S. mountaineering. The same year, he helped the National Park Service rescue several Spanish climbers from Mt. Denali in Alaska. For nearly a decade, he climbed with the North Face professional climbing team.
Most importantly, he was just a good person, Marie Lowe said, who was married to the mountaineer’s older brother, Andy Lowe, and has remained close to the Lowe family.
“Alex was a positive, delightful person,” Marie Lowe remembered. “He really cared. If you talked to him, you would be his sole attention.”
But today, Alex Lowe is perhaps most associated with how he died: buried under an avalanche in Tibet at age 40 in October 1999. His life ended much too early, Marie Lowe said, and she still remembers the conversations she had on the day he passed.
“I remember it vividly,” she said. “We always knew, given the lifestyle Alex had, that something like this could possibly happen. But nothing can prepare you for that phone call.”
Suddenly, the Lowe family found itself in the center of a media frenzy. Everybody wanted to tell a story about the worst day of their life.
“It was not fun,” Lowe said. “We had to be very protective of (Alex’s) kids. They couldn’t even go outside because we didn’t want them to be bothered by the media. But that’s part of what comes with fame.”
The mountaineer’s story has been told dozens of times in the last few decades in articles and films, but “Torn” is different because it allows the family to reclaim and tell their own story for the first time. The film is directed by Alex Lowe’s oldest son — and Marie Lowe’s nephew — Max Lowe.
“Lots of people have tried to tell our story, but ‘Torn’ was an opportunity to let the world around us know the truth of what losing someone to what they do feels like,” his son said. “It’s something I wanted to do not only for us, but for other people. And as a storyteller, this is the only way I know to work through these sorts of things.”
There were many discussions during production about whether the family was ready to tell Alex Lowe’s story or whether it would open old wounds, Max Lowe said. But his family ultimately decided it could be therapeutic — not just for them, but for others who have lost loved ones and struggled to move on.
“As the oldest brother, I became the man of the house when Alex died,” he said. “I’ve always tried to make decisions that I thought were for the benefit of the family, and I saw that benefit in this movie potentially. I hoped that, when I started sharing our story in a powerful way, it could be a powerful healing experience for other people.”
Marie Lowe has seen the film twice now — once at its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and again at a recent screening at Centennial Theatres in Sheridan. And each time, it brought back a flood of memories and tears — the exact type of catharsis the director was hoping to achieve.
“It’s a beautiful film, but for me it was heart-wrenching because it pulls back all those memories of growing up with them,” Marie Lowe said. “Things I had not thought about for years.”
She said her favorite scene in the film is old home video footage of Alex Lowe skiing with his boys.
“It was just so Alex,” she said. “He was so joyful being with his kids when he was home. He loved sharing his passion for the outdoors with his kids and with mine. That footage is just the essence of Alex, I think.”
Even with “Torn” having been on Disney+ less than a week, he had already received hundreds of letters and emails from people sharing how much his story of loss and healing had meant to them.
“I’ve received hundreds and hundreds of letters,” the director said. “Some had very similar experiences of losing a father figure and having a friend of that father figure stepping in to raise them. (The mountaineer’s climbing partner Conrad Anker eventually married the director’s mom and adopted him and his brothers.) There are some who lost someone they loved and never knew how to process it. While the story this film tells is very personal, it’s also universal, and it’s connecting with a lot of people.”
Lowe said she couldn’t be prouder of her nephew and the way her family’s story was told on screen. She sees a lot of her brother-in-law in her nephew, she said, and the world could use a lot more people like Alex Lowe.
“Max’s mom is an artist and his dad was an adventurer, and he’s really combined the adventure life with his artistic side as a filmmaker,” Marie Lowe said.
“I see a lot of Alex in Max: the way he listens and gives you his sole attention. He is doing great things, and I’m really so proud to be his aunt.”
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