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We all meet unforgettable people during our lives, sometimes in person, sometimes through books, films or folk tales. However we meet them, these unforgettables shape our lives through either positive inspiration or example – or as case studies in how not to be.

Through the pages of Honed you are about to meet two such unforgettable people who embody the example that life should be not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.

Richard and Robert Slater were born about two minutes apart on December 6, 1960, and grew up together mostly in Wyoming with their parents Paul and Mary, and their siblings Tom, Paul and Sissy. Like most identical twins, they were closer to each other than ordinary brothers and shared a kind of secret twins language – in their case, a sense of humor the people around them found often impenetrable and usually obnoxious.

Both were also bold and daring, having grown up in the outdoors and learned early that life was to be lived at full throttle, not at idle.

Still, they took different paths as they grew up. Rob fell in love early with the wild, and with rock climbing in particular, while Rich took the more conventional testosterone-releasing path of raising hell and chasing hot chicks.

It was during their college years that I met Rich and Rob, mostly because Rob had decided to learn how to BASE jump after watching a jumper zoom by him like a jet fighter as he hung one day on ropes and steel far up on the vertical granite face of Yosemite’s El Capitan Mountain – after which he resolved to never walk down from its summit again.

I met Rob one sunny day in Eldorado Canyon, a climbing Mecca south of Boulder, Colorado, where Rob attended the University of Colorado along with renowned climber Randy Leavitt. Leavitt knew us both and had taught Rob to skydive through a rather unconventional training method, then brought him to me to further his parachuting skills in preparation for what would be a short but notable BASE jumping career.

It’s no stretch to say that Rob is one of the most unforgettable people I’ve had the pleasure to personally meet – and believe me, I’ve met several, as well as a good friend and a person I admired greatly.

I had both the privilege and pleasure of helping Rob learn to BASE jump as he taught me to climb, and shared in many of his BASE jumping adventures, then had the continuing privilege and pleasure of watching him from near and far as he sought and reached new climbing goals in the rocks around Boulder, the mud walls of Moab and Monument Valley, and in the icy wilds of Canada and the Karakoram. Rob was, in fact, not only one of the most unforgettable people I’ve known but unequivocally the most vibrantly alive.

So it’s no coincidence that, as almost all Americans remember precisely where they were and what they were doing on 9/11 or the day John F. Kennedy was shot, I still remember as if it was yesterday where I was and what I was doing when I learned that K2 had killed Rob Slater.

I was sitting in southern California at a friend’s kitchen breakfast bar, skimming through the Orange Country Register when I came across a small item about six climbers missing on K2 after a storm.

“Dammit!” I said out loud, because I knew enough about K2 and 8,000-meter peak climbing to know even Rob Slater would need a miracle to live through a storm on Earth’s most heinous dangerous mountain.

I quickly called Randy Leavitt, who had already been in touch with “the community,” and from him I learned that there was conflicting information and the slim hope that Rob and the other climbers may have lived through the tempest.

Then we all became momentary victims of a world media unfamiliar with K2 climbing that reported Rob’s team as having left for the summit after noon on August 13 – 12 hours late and thus utterly suicidal. Suddenly, we all felt some anger and much bewilderment that he and the others would succumb so mightily to summit fever to make a doomed-from-the-start sortie for the top.

Several urgent satellite calls to the Karakoram later, we learned to our relief though not joy that Rob’s party had left at midnight, an hour earlier than the generally recognized departure deadline of 1 a.m. – and that the most formidable K2 storm in living memory or known history had given little sign of its coming until they approached the summit.

“Rob didn’t make any mistakes,” Leavitt concluded after talking with climbers who had been high up on nearby Broad Peak as the storm engulfed the Karakoram and climbed K2’s icy flanks until it reached Rob and his companions as they descended the completely exposed summit ridge toward the relative safety of the mountain’s flanks. “Sometimes you do everything right and you still die.”

By then, however, two or three days had passed and we knew that Rob had taken his last breath somewhere in the ice and snow and stone at the top of the world. We were all sad that he had passed, and some of the less adventurous among us were shaken that a superman like Rob could die at all during any kind of adventure, but eventually we all moved on with our lives.

We never forgot Rob Slater, though, and he continues to be a bond between those of us who knew him, and even those who knew him only through tales of his exploits. A case in point; one day I was at a southern California climbing gym, wearing Rob’s swami belt with his name written on it in black marker when a young man approached me, eyes wide open and a look of wonder on his face.

“That’s Rob Slater’s swami belt?” he asked. I nodded and he said, “You knew him?” And when I nodded again, he immediately recited all the unforgettable stories he remembered about Rob – and I knew that from that day forward, he would add to his Rob Slater repertoire the day he saw and touched with his own hands one of the very climbing harnesses Rob wore during several of his El Cap and desert exploits.

I still have that swami belt, despite Randy Leavitt’s efforts to talk me out of it, and several of Rob’s El Cap etriers too. I keep them as tokens of one of the most unforgettable people I’ve known, and because I still use them, the swami belt for climbing and the etriers for various projects where some bulletproof tubular nylon is needed.

That gear remained my closest connection to Rob until one day in late 2009 when Randy called to say that Rich Slater was writing a book about his twin brother and that, given my knowledge of Rob and his life, and my professional skillset as a writer and editor, it might be good for Rich and me to hook up.

As I mentioned earlier, I met Rich about the same time I met Rob, during a couple of Rob’s BASE jumping adventures. We didn’t spend much time together, but he came across as a solid guy in the commando-style environment of illegal BASE jumping – and, of course, Rob always spoke highly of his twin.

Soon after we started working on Honed together, however, I discovered that Rich had picked up the unforgettable mantle his brother first wore and ran with it – literally. Let me bottom-line it for you this way: Just as 8,000-meter climbers are the most elite of the world’s mountaineers, “ultra runners” are the most elite of the world’s long-distance runners.

Ultra runners don’t just run marathons; they run marathons to train for their “real” races, which range in distance from about 31 miles (five miles longer than a marathon) to 100 miles. Ultra runners don’t just get blisters and shin splints; they get hallucinations and their kidneys shut down.

Rich isn’t into organized racing much; he prefers to just go out alone in the mountains and run as far as he can. At first he did it to escape the rage and despair he felt over his twin’s death; now he does it to embrace his brother’s memory – and because Rich Slater now wills himself on to ever greater extremes along his own wild path in precisely the same way Rob Slater did on his.

So as Honed takes you on an journey to meet two unforgettable people whose lives will take your breath away, you may find that they inspire you to get honed and do something breathtaking yourself.

– Robin “Black Death” Heid

Crawford, Colorado, December 2011