The Adventurous Life of Wade Johnson

23 August 2017

Whether he was whipping up a batch of elk stew for his roommates or luring them onto the Rec Center’s climbing wall, Wade Johnson ’07 loved sharing his passion for the great outdoors. By establishing Wade’s House as a campus home for canoe, Bruce and Susan Johnson have secured their son’s legacy.

Pictured above: Wade Johnson (left) with Mark Dyson ’07

The front door to Wade’s House is always open on Tuesday evenings.

Anyone walking past the corner of College and East Second Streets is welcome to pop in for weekly dinners hosted by members of CANOE, Carleton’s longstanding group of nature and outdoor enthusiasts. “Whoever is on campus can come,” says house manager Aaron Schwab ’17 (Elk River, Minn.). “It’s important to build community, and a bunch of us love to cook.”

As Chenoa Schatzki-McClain ’18 (Belmont, Mass.) tends to her mom’s recipe for tortilla de patatas—a Spanish omelet—along multiple burners, Schwab and Archie Fraser ’18 (Dallas) chop vegetables and prepare salads. Other housemates arrive, fresh from bike rides and other campus activities, always with a friendly greeting for strangers: “Are you here for dinner?”

In the middle of the prep work, Bruce Johnson arrives with a box of pastries from a Twin Cities bakery. He surveys the bustling kitchen—the smell of onions and fried potatoes beckoning everyone to grab a plate—and smiles.

Wade would have loved this.

Wade's House
Wade’s House

Wade Johnson’s story often begins with the ending. The exact day he died is unknown, since the other two people who were with him also didn’t make it off Mount Edgar alive.

A filmmaker for Sender Films in Boulder, Colorado, Wade Johnson ’07 accompanied world-class climbers Jonny Copp and Micah Dash in May 2009 to Edgar, a peak on the Gongga Shan massif in China’s western Sichuan province. The men spent 19 days waiting for near-invisibility conditions to subside above base camp before Copp, 35, and Dash, 32, abandoned their goal to be the first to climb Edgar’s treacherous eastern wall. As they set out to recover gear they’d stored at a higher elevation on an earlier failed attempt, an avalanche hit. Family and friends back home learned that the three friends were missing only after they failed to catch their flight out of Chengdu.

This is not the story that Susan and Bruce Johnson dwell on, but it’s the story that has to be told in order to explain why the former Hill House is now Wade’s House—a home to CANOE, the group that nurtured their son while he was at Carleton.

For years after Wade’s death, Susan would drive from her home in the Twin Cities to Carleton, have dinner with CANOE members (then at Chaney House, where Wade lived), and leave a small check. When she learned that CANOE no longer had its own interest house, Susan discussed with Bruce how they could help.

Now, standing inside Wade’s House—newly renovated thanks to contributions from the Johnsons—Bruce points out the space for meetings and equipment storage. This is a house for big gatherings, for sharing life experiences alongside the 16 CANOE members who live there during the school year. With its open design meant to encourage communal cooking, the kitchen is most heavily influenced by Wade’s presence as a former CANOE house manager.

“He loved to cook. Always had a big turnout, too,” Bruce says proudly. “Wade and I shot pheasant, elk, venison, all kinds of things that I’m told weren’t previously part of the CANOE menu, but that he brought to the table from his outdoors background. People knew when Wade cooked that they were getting something different. Something good.”

Cook. Filmmaker. Classical pianist. Ceramics artist. Mountain climber. Hunter. Fly fisherman. Chemist. An aspiring professor about to attend graduate school at the University of Washington, where his Carleton sweetheart, Erin Addison ’07, also studied.

If there’s one thing that defined Wade to those who knew him, it’s that one thing did not define him.

“Wade liked to do a lot of things and, whatever he did, he ended up being really good at it,” says Mark Dyson ’07, a CANOE member who lived with Wade at Carleton and later in Boulder. “I didn’t know the pianist side of him. I didn’t know the chemistry star side. I remember learning that he was into filmmaking and seeing some of his early work. I was like, ‘Man, this is pretty polished. This is another thing you’re good at?’”

Wade’s passion for climbing convinced Dyson to grab the wall at Carleton’s Rec Center. That’s how Wade operated, Dyson says. Though he exuded calm in his daily life, when Wade charged into hobbies like climbing or cooking, his enthusiasm spread like wildfire.

“That’s a good roommate, right?” says Dyson. “Not a lot of drama to his personality, but someone who adds excitement to all this studying we had to do. I mean, when he was making elk stew for the house, it was a big deal. Wade’s interests always kept things lively.”

A chemistry major at Carleton, Wade had his eye on graduate school and eventually planned to teach. When Bruce floated the idea of becoming a doctor, Wade made one thing clear: whatever career he pursued couldn’t swallow up all of his free time. He loved to be outdoors too much. Wade needed his summers free for climbing, fly-fishing, and canoeing.

Before committing to grad school, Wade contacted Sender, an outdoor adventure film company started by Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen in Boulder. Wade’s excitement struck again. He sent them an amateur climbing video from Minnesota—the joke being that if Wade could make the Midwest look good to hard-core Coloradans, well, then he must be talented, says Susan.

“We kind of called his bluff,” says Rosen. “We said, ‘Sure, pack your stuff and come to Colorado.’ Here’s this guy from Minnesota contacting us out of the blue. But we could tell that he had a lot of heart. We were a very small company at the time, so it fit our approach. If I’m not mistaken, he was our first employee. He joined at a really pivotal time in our company’s history.”

Wade’s talents as a producer and editor, coupled with his impressive climbing skills, made him a perfect partner for a free-spirited adventurer like Copp, who was then regarded as one of the best climbers in the world. The pair went on a few domestic expeditions before Wade got the call for his first overseas odyssey. The China trip was intended to be Wade’s last adventure before he headed to graduate school in the fall. It was the “apex of his time at Sender,” says Susan.

“Wade had a lot of varied interests, but he was not fly-by-night,” she continues. “He was very thoughtful in what he did and how he pulled all of those interests together. When it came to skiing or rock climbing or the outdoors, he was definitely more ‘seize the day.’ But really, he just loved exploring and testing his work ethic. Sender pushed him
on that level.”

Rosen was with the trio at base camp in China for two weeks before he left to work on another film. He remembers the palpable excitement the three men felt about the climb, which Wade was documenting for a National Geographic International series called First Ascent. Although Wade was almost 10 years younger than his climbing partners, Rosen was in awe of his young friend’s perspective on life: “I’d look at him and think, this guy has way more self-awareness and integrity than I do. I need to work on myself here.” The duo bonded on a supply run to the nearest town in China. Each clung tightly to the back of a Chinese motorcycle rider, zipping down narrow paths that cut into the breathtaking valleys of the uninhabited mountain.

“I remember turning to him and saying, ‘Now this is adventure. This is what you signed up for,’ ” Rosen says. “I was feeling it myself, a sense of, ‘It really doesn’t get any better than this.’ It was a special moment for him. Here he was, about to get a PhD in chemistry and move on from the company. So I was teasing him, too: ‘Hey, I hope you remember this moment when you’re stuck in a chemistry
lab a year from now.’ ”

“I remember turning to him and saying, ‘Now this is adventure. This is what you signed up for.’ ”

At the Sender office in Boulder, there’s a photo of Wade and company mascot Macho the dog on a shelf next to a camera. It’s Wade’s camera, the one on his body when he was found in early June 2009 by the search team, which included climbers from Boulder.  

Every night, Wade uploaded footage from the truncated China climb onto drives later recovered at base camp. His vision was there. With the blessing of all three families, Sender released the First Ascent episode “Point of No Return,” which chronicles the trio saying good-bye to their loved ones in Boulder, their impatient struggles at base camp, and Copp’s and Dash’s acute awareness that Mount Edgar would not forgive even the slightest miscalculation.

“I’ve been on a lot of expeditions with Jonny, and I’ve never heard him refer to something as being scary,” Dash says on camera in an eerie bit of foreshadowing. Eventually, reality sets in. Copp and Dash had escaped volatile situations before, but this wasn’t the time to earn bravery points. Edgar was too unstable—and they knew it. This was new terrain for Wade. Although he was a strong and reliable climber, Wade was nowhere near Copp’s and Dash’s level as experienced, risk-taking adventurers. He was always prepared to shoot the climbers from a safe distance once they began carving their route to the top, Rosen says.

“For me, that’s why it was harder to accept [Wade’s death], Rosen says. “I was devastated by Jonny and Micah, but those guys are cutting-edge alpinists. They accept [death] as an outcome. But Wade’s death was completely unacceptable. That’s not what he signed up for.”

It’s also not what the Johnsons—Susan, Bruce, and Wade’s older sister, Kara—signed up for. But they knew how Wade embraced life. He was always curious about the next adventure.

Bruce recalls a trip he and 12-year-old Wade took to the mecca of fly-fishing: Bighorn River in Montana. It was Wade’s first time there. At breakfast, he stayed well after the other fishermen had left to talk shop with the lodge’s owner.

“Everyone else was long gone, but Wade was still chatting. He wanted to know everything about the flies,” Bruce says. “Finally I said, ‘Wade, we gotta go. This lady has things to do.’ And she turned to us and said, ‘Oh, don’t go. I’ve never seen someone his age so interested in insects and entomology. Please, keep asking questions.’”

The Johnsons wondered: How could Wade’s passion for life continue to serve as an example and a guide for others? The answers were right where Wade had left them.

Susan has started climbing and she attended Rosen’s wedding earlier this summer. “She adopted our Boulder community,” says Rosen, choking up. “Susan made a conscious choice to respond to tragedy with warmth and love, and I thank her deeply for it every day, because it saved me, frankly.”

For Wade’s memorial service, Susan and Bruce hosted a cookout at Carleton. His obituary read: “The tents will be up, the grills will be hot, and the Frisbees will be flying.” The family bond with Carleton has only strengthened in the decade since Wade graduated. Wade’s House was established after Bruce and Susan had spent years talking with staff members and students about campus needs. Even in name, it’s not the Wade B. Johnson House or the Wade Johnson CANOE House. Way too formal, says Susan. Everyone is welcome at Wade’s House. 

Wade's House
Wade’s House

“The Johnsons are family,” says Wade’s House manager Aaron Schwab ’17 (third from right), speaking on behalf of all CANOE members. “From what I know of Wade, he inspired a lot of people. Bruce [above, center] and Susan are doing the same for us.”

Top photo courtesy of Mark Dyson ’07; Wade’s House photos by John Noltner

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