Remembering Rob Slater

"hey Jim, if we fall from here we'll fall for the rest of our lives!

Before there was Tony Hawk skateboarding in empty swimming pools there was Rob Slater screaming down the Cheyenne Frontier Days arena ramps and launching himself on his old green Schwinn. Before there was Fear Factor contestants climbing scaffolding with safety lines and eating worms there was Rob Slater topping out on the hardest routes in Yosemite having subsisted for five days on Sara Lee coffee cakes and Mint Milanos, three days on water alone and the last two days on nothing. Before there was the X Games and its generation of pop culture daredevils there was Rob Slater diving off antennae, bridges, skyscrapers, mountain cliffs and canyon walls with a parachute, mostly at night. Before climbers wore Lycra there was Rob Slater wielding the Lovetron on previously inconceivable, death-defying aid moves on El Capitan. Long before “crazy” became cool and popular on TV there was Rob Slater.
If there had been X Games, Fear Factor, skateboard parks and the like, Rob might have found all the danger he needed to satisfy his drive to do what no one else would even dare. Maybe he could have done without skydiving and BASE jumping. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so hell-bent on risking everything time after time putting up the toughest new routes on sheer granite walls. Most of all, he might have been able to do without K2, the world’s deadliest mountain that became his obsession and drew him far too soon to his demise.
But I doubt it. I know about Rob because I am his identical twin brother. We were in many ways as similar as two human beings could be. We looked alike, talked alike and even liked the same kind of Pop Tarts. But when it came to living life, Rob went much further out on that razor’s edge, staring down The Reaper and thumbing his nose at disaster than I ever had the courage for. I have never been afraid of dying, but my twin brother had a much greater need for adrenaline and danger than I’ve ever felt. Quoting the infamous Charles Manson, Rob used to joke he “was crazy back when being crazy meant something.” But it was much more than that.
Rob was gentle, loyal and loving, but also irreverent, ribald, outrageous, sometimes raunchy and impossibly politically incorrect. Rob was incredibly focused and driven, but did not believe in helmets or safety nets. He was also the most courageous and funniest guy I ever met. What made Rob so different from everyone else? What made him so different from me?
Nothing demonstrated Rob’s drive for the ultimate physical and mental challenge more than K2. While Mount Everest, in Rob’s view, was “covered with tourists and their garbage, K2 is covered with the dead bodies of guys who have tried to climb it. K2 is the ultimate mountain. I have to climb it.”
“Summit or death, either way I win,” Rob had proclaimed. On August 13, 1995, Rob and five others reached the summit of K2. As they began their descent, a horrific storm materialized with amazing speed and intensity. Winds of 150 miles per hour tore Rob and the others from the summit ridge. Why had the mountain gods forsaken him?
By telling Rob’s tale and sharing his accomplishments and personality, I hope to understand him better. I know what he loved, but I was compelled to seek out what motivated him and what he feared. I want to be with my brother again, but not just in spirit. Perhaps if I can understand him – and therefore, myself – better through this memoir, we’ll grow closer. Perhaps I’ll discover we weren’t so different after all.