On their wedding day in 1991, Don described them as climbing partners. ‘When you’re tied to someone with a rope,’ Jane would later say, ‘you get to know them very well, and you learn about trust.’
At home they were sober, law-abiding citizens, from solid backgrounds: her father had been a scoutmaster, his a cattle rancher. Out in the wilds, they were both risk-takers. Don had hacked up Mount McKinley in Alaska and taken a tumble at Montana’s Rainbow Falls. Jane had traversed the volcanic glacier fields of Mount Rainier and taught cross-country skiing at Spokane Falls Community College. On a clear day, Rainier, the highest peak in the Cascade Range, was just about visible west of Spokane, a laid-back, outdoorsy sort of city on the eastern fringes of Washington state, where the couple lived and worked. ‘The Mountain’, as people called Rainier, with its three peaks, Columbia Crest, Point Success and Liberty Cap, served as a constant reminder of why they were there. ‘Mount Rainier had a special meaning for him,’ said Jane. Don had been brought up in Spokane, whose motto was ‘Near Nature, Near Perfect’, and the mountains, lakes and woods grounded him like no other place, he said.
Most weekends Don and Jane went out of town. They’d head for the Cascades or the Rockies, whose peaks delineated the skyline to the east and north, trekking, skiing or kayaking with friends, many of them doctors and nurses who had trained or worked with Don, a neuropsychologist, or were old classmates from Spokane’s Shadle Park High. On weekday nights Jane liked to cycle with her fellow teachers and friends from the Spokane Mountaineers, whose eight hundred or so members belonged to the region’s oldest outdoor association. ‘What we did was with the Spokane Mountaineers and through the Spokane Mountaineers,’ she says. For two years she had served as club president, one of the first women to do so, and everyone quickly learned not to get on her wrong side. ‘Don’t bullshit Jane,’ the Mountaineers whispered. Don, as fit as a man a decade younger, joked that he was the First Husband.
Once a month a group of Mountaineers would gather at Jane and Don’s, in the Spokane Valley suburb of Northwood, to plan the next club outing over an exotic dinner. The shady wooden house on stilts with verandas back and front, surrounded by Ponderosa pines, its large sunken living room painted blue and red to match a rug the couple had bought in India, was filled with photos of Jane, smiling or waving against a snowy backdrop, and mementos from the couple’s foreign voyages: Tibetan rugs and prayer flags, tribal masks and recipe books from some far-flung place or other. It was an easy spot to hang out, Don’s golden retrievers, Homer and Bodhi (short for bodhisattva, an enlightened being in Buddhism), sprawled across the floor, Jane walking visitors around her latest botanical acquisitions, displayed in pots along the red-brick path that wound around their garden, Don conjuring some Indian or Thai recipe in the kitchen. ‘You move the flowers around so often you ought to put them on roller skates,’ he used to joke out of the window.
In the summer, most of this close-knit group went further afield, and this year Jane and Don were heading back to the Himalayas, which they had explored twice before. The world’s largest mountain range was a place you could visit time and again, and still know little about it, Don told friends. This time Jane was packing extra carefully, as she had a gut feeling that things might get choppy. They were heading for the mountains of Kashmir. From what they had read, this trip would come with additional risks, as the ranges lay on a political fault-line: a disputed border between warring neighbours India and Pakistan. For the past six years the state had been enmeshed in a local insurgency that pitted Muslim rebels calling for independence against the Indian security forces, which accused them of being in the pay of Pakistan.
Unsettling stories of political and religious turmoil had recently emanated from there, and for several weeks Don and Jane had debated whether to go at all. But they had done their homework, listened to other people’s views and read widely, before concluding that this was, like so many others they had negotiated, a risk worth taking. And now Jane was surveying their kit with a sense of anticipation.
Don’s royal-blue fleecy climbing hat, his blue Gore-Tex Moonstone walking trousers with the black inset panels above the knee, an extra-thick blue Patagonia top. On top of the pile she laid thermal underwear, lightweight T-shirts and rainproof gear. As she ticked off the items, Jane thought how among the many things that had drawn her to Don was something that others found galling: his impulse to order. They were both inveterate list-makers. Hers were invariably practical. His were a mix of function and aspiration, scribbles on yellow legal pads that he left scattered around the house: skiing once a year, cooking the perfect Indian meal, semi-retirement by the age of fifty (which only left another eight years to get his work–life balance sorted out) and, most importantly, an annual mind-expanding and physically demanding expedition. Climbers are like that, he would say. Embracing order so as to cope with the disorder, fetishising the planning in order to counter the random. It was the same with their equipment. Although he said he hated technology, he always bought the latest climbing gear and gadgets. And she loved laying it down, cleaning it, counting it out. This time especially, they needed to get the preparation right.
There was a satisfying rhythm to Jane and Don’s life. He was ‘the philosopher’, she ‘the shipwright’. He sought experiences, while she wrangled with logistics. Prepping for these trips, Don always beefed up on the region’s spirituality and history, while Jane wanted to know how many hours it would take to climb to a particular col. At home, he cooked. She rearranged the garden. He took the photos. She put them into frames. He wanted a crystal ball. She preferred a new set of skis. On holiday, he talked to most anyone, while she took notes and crammed little keepsakes into her rucksack. She was capable and devoted to Don, whom privately she called ‘sweetie’, while publicly she remained fiercely independent, retaining her maiden name. The students at Arlington Elementary viewed her with a mixture of bafflement and awe. ‘Stimulating the nation’s young hearts and minds,’ she said to herself every morning in mock-declamatory style before setting off for school.
With her tight brown curls and turned-up nose, at first glance Jane had an impish air. But to those who knew her well, she was the more driven of the two. Among their circle, many had watched, doubtfully, as Jane had made her first attempts to infect Don with the travel bug. She had gone on foreign-exchange trips at school and travelled across the United States from her native Pennsylvania before pitching up in the Pacific north-west. She was already an explorer, and wanted to partner up with someone who felt the same way.
Don was many things, but until Jane came along nobody would have described him as a man of the world. He was of pure north-west country stock, his father, Claude ‘Red’ Hutchings, having been a tough-talking Idaho cattle-rancher, originally from Coeur d’Alene in the neighbouring county. Don was closer to his mother, Donna, a nurse, and there was a bond between mother and son that had its roots in the loss of his twin brother, who had died at just three days old. But Red had been intent on shaping his surviving son’s earliest memories. Almost as soon as Don could walk, Red had him in the saddle, dressing him in a cowboy hat and boots. Sitting astride his own palomino, Don would accompany his father on week-long ‘gentlemen on horseback’ rides, as he called them, into the wild. But Don wasn’t cut out to be a cowboy.
Instead, a freak accident helped him find his niche. After flying through a car windscreen during high school, he spent months in hospital being put back together. ‘With cuts from ear to ear, tongue damage and teeth knocked out, he thought he looked like Frankenstein,’ said Jane. When he had recovered, Don determined to help others who had also been to the brink. He would follow his mother into the health-care sector. As soon as he was old enough he grew a beard, to conceal his scars.
After school and a BSc from Washington State University, Don opted for neuropsychology, a specialism that appealed to a man who had had many months to explore his inner self while in hospital. For a while it seemed as if he would be a student forever, gaining a Masters and then a doctorate, never straying too far from home. But eventually he made a break, taking up a position as a hospital psychologist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country. He married for the first