Steve Fossett declared dead Tom Smith

I find this bit of news a bit more affecting than I would have thought.  Steve Fossett was of course the rich adventurer who set a dazzling series of records, such as the first the sail a balloon solo around the world .  Yet he died (apparently) on a routine flight scouting landing zones somewhere between Reno and Bishop.

I don't know.  Fossett was resented by quite a few for having the money to follow his flashy dreams, but I think to resent him for that is pusillanimous.  He seems to have been a decidedly curious fellow, perhaps not so much courageous and nerveless.  Though that may be wrong.  His obituary also suggests that he was meticulous about managing the large risks of his feats very carefully.  I admire that.  Perhaps it reflects his background as a commodities trader, where mere stupid risk-taking is (usually) punished ruthlessly.

He wasn't just some physical slob either who let his machines do all the work.  He had swum the English channel, and climbed Aconcagua.  Climbing Aconcagua is something anybody who could, say, run a marathon could do, so long as they acclimatized themselves to the altitude.  It's sort of like running a half-marathon every day for a week, at altitude, with weight on your back.  But swimming the Channel, however slowly (he set the record for the slowest crossing his year) is impressive.  That water is cold, and it's a long way.

He chose, so to speak, some good country to take his rest in.  The rugged basin and range country between Reno and Bishop is some of the most heartbreakingly and unsentimentally beautiful in the American West.  It's no big mystery that they couldn't find him.  He could be a million places in that fractured land.

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He puts me in mind of another adventurer who died doing what he did, H.W. Tilman.  To forestall any outrage, I would agree that Tilman should occupy a higher place in the pantheon of adventure than Fossett, but there are some similarities.  Tillman died with his crew sailing around the horn, on one of the sailing-climbing expeditions he took to when he got too old to climb the big peaks anymore.  He would sail in his refitted Bristol pilot cutter to extremely remote islands and coastlines in the high latitudes and then scale the frequently virgin peaks he found there.  His body was never found either.