How making a film about his father's death helped Max Lowe embrace the man who raised him

For years after the avalanche, Max Lowe still believed his father might come home.

After all, his dad's body had yet to be recovered from Shishapangma, the 26,289-foot peak he'd traveled to the Himalayas to ski down. Alex Lowe was a renowned mountaineer — a member of the North Face professional climbing team who'd summited Everest twice and appeared on the cover of Outside magazine. Maybe the rescue team had failed to find him miraculously alive in a crevasse.

And then there was the birthday card. Alex had painted it for his son during the expedition, just days before he was enveloped by a 500-foot-wide cascade of snow. When it arrived in the mail at the Lowes' home in Montana — shortly after the disaster in Tibet — 10-year-old Max saw it as a sort of talisman.

More so than his brothers, who by a climber — that Max would really begin grappling with his relationship to his dad.