But the mountain, so much larger than it looks from town, was loath to return what it had taken. Its rocky slopes ripped spiked crampons from searchers’ feet. Its muddy slopes twisted their ankles. And it kept raining. Four days after LeMaitre disappeared, the state troopers, who’d spearheaded the search, ended their effort. The Seward Volunteer Fire Department kept looking. A cadaver dog arrived from Oregon. Friends pored over high-resolution photographs. The LeMaitres’ son, Jon, came to Seward from Anchorage to comfort Peggy during the search. Daughter MaryAnne flew up from Utah and stayed for six weeks, climbing the mountain’s gullies with volunteers. Once, she steeled herself to poke through fresh bear scat on the trail, looking for a bone, a scrap of clothing, any grisly hint of her father’s whereabouts. “If it would’ve been me on that mountain—I know my dad. He’d be doing the same thing,” she told me later as she fought back tears. “I know he wouldn’t give up on me.”
Finally even Chief Squires reluctantly called off the fire department’s effort, hoping that when autumn stripped the jungle, a clue would appear. But soon the autumn too would pass, and then the snow would fall, and still, nothing.
In mid-August, before MaryAnne returned home, she headed up the mountain one last time. She left at three o’clock, arriving at Race Point nearly exactly when her father did. She sat by the turnaround rock and wept. Then she pulled a Dremel tool from her knapsack and carved I LOVE YOU DAD into the rock. Having experienced the mountain and Seward for these weeks, she wrote friends afterward, “If this ends up being my dad’s final resting place, he is happy here.”
Volunteers were still on the mountain when the soul-searching, and the questions, and the finger-pointing started. Should the race timekeepers have left LeMaitre? Shouldn’t he have been stopped? Why didn’t officials know who remained on the mountain? Who is responsible?
Two months before the race, former race director Chuck Echard had warned in the Seward Phoenix Log that race directors were asking for trouble by boosting the cap on adult racers by another five entrants last year. More bodies on the mountain meant more flying rocks, more unprepared racers. “Take care of the runners and the mountain,” Echard cautioned. “Not everyone can run the race.” Women’s champ Holly Brooks caught the thoughts of several people I spoke with when she said, “I’m kind of surprised that something like this didn’t happen sooner.”
“Do we need to change some things? Of course we do,” said Flip Foldager. Foldager is the 55-year-old member of the race committee with a push-broom mustache who is patriarch of one of the first families of the Mount Marathon Race. Officials, for instance, recently put a new rule in place to turn back slowpokes if they don’t reach the mountain’s midpoint within an hour.
But many Alaskans—organizers, runners, even the editorial writers at the Anchorage Daily News—reacted to LeMaitre’s death with a lionlike protectiveness toward the race. They sniffed talk of any big changes suspiciously. When I was in Alaska, the adjective that modified the Mount Marathon Race the most—it dangled from the name proudly, a little provokingly—was “dangerous.” It was this event’s red badge of honor. Without danger, there was no race.
“It’s not a safe race,” Foldager told me flatly over beers one evening. “We have to manage that as well as we can.”
But don’t misunderstand: you can’t put bumpers on a race like this, he said. The mountain won’t allow it. Helmets? Ropes? Cover up one danger, another still lurks. Just as important, Alaskans won’t abide it. Danger is in the very marrow of this contest. You cannot separate the two. It is part of its deep mystique. Cancel the race? Ha. People will run it anyway, guerrilla-style.
“The only way you’ll ever make the Mount Marathon Race safe,” Foldager told me, before finishing his beer, “is by not doing it.”
And time and again during my visit, people inevitably turned the blame back on the missing man. “We were unprepared for someone being that unprepared,” Draper, the race committee member, told me. Many locals see Alaska as the ultimate non-nanny state. Yes, there is community, the kind that emerges when people must rally against outside forces. But at the same time, there’s still a frontier attitude, and the elbow room to go with it; you can have all the rope you want to lasso your big dreams and adventures—or all you need to hang yourself. The lesson: don’t look to anyone else for help when the grizzly charges and the rifle jams. You made your bet against this country. It’s your fault if you come up short.