That Charlie Fowler would meet his end while doing what he loved is no huge surprise given the sheer volume of his climbing. At age 52, he'd racked up three and a half decades of it, and had carried his quiet air of a seasoned survivor from hard rock to the high-risk games of alpine climbing and soloing. ...

Forty years ago a team of top american climbers participated in a botched cia operation that lost a plutonium spy device high in the himalaya. Here's senior contributing editor pete takeda's account of that bizarre expedition and his attempts to uncover t...