Without a Trace

From our March 2008 issue: Last Labor Day, Steve Fossett—the investment wizard turned record-setting adventurer—took off in a plane from a remote Nevada airfield. He hasn't been seen since. Our reporter retraces the search for Fossett, while examining the theories behind his disappearance—and behind his frequent attempts to defy death

By Bryan Smith

(page 4 of 8)

Fossett's balloon crosses Australia during his 2002 circumnavigation of the globe.

Irony underscored more than Fossett's disappearance. It defined his life. I say this having met him many years ago while working as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. At the time, Fossett was preparing for his fourth attempt to fly solo around the world in a balloon, and I had traveled to Beaver Creek, Colorado, where he had a winter home, and where he had stashed his capsule. More than any of the other adventures Fossett had pursued, the balloon quest awakened a worldwide sense of wonder. The romance of the adventure was irresistible.

In researching Fossett's long résumé of risky achievement, I expected a dashing, perhaps swashbuckling figure. Instead, I encountered the same bearing that so many would come to describe as enigmatic. Guarded, almost taciturn, Fossett was a middle-aged man who looked far better suited for hammock snoozes than death-defying adventures. He was stocky and soft looking, with cherub cheeks that made him appear to be faintly smiling at all times, which he was not.

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So unimposing was Fossett that on first meeting Richard Branson—the Virgin Atlantic entrepreneur who competed against and eventually teamed with Fossett—the pair chatted for several moments before Fossett famously had to tell Branson who he was. "When I look back at my friendship with Steve," Branson recently recalled for Time magazine, "I realize we were very different people, but there were many things that we had in common. Steve put it best when he told me, 'People often assume I am a thrill seeker, but I am not. I do not enjoy roller coasters, and you won't find me bungee-jumping.... It is a disadvantage that my pursuits are inherently dangerous. A large part of my effort is to reduce the risk.'"

In his 2006 autobiography, Chasing the Wind, Fossett seemed to revel in the disparity between his appearance and his accomplishments. "My appearance is strictly average, my athletic ability is mediocre, and there is nothing dramatic about my speech or demeanor," he wrote. "I am bemused when people are surprised that I am such a low-key person because it adds to their curiosity."

Stories of the real Fossett only stoked that curiosity—such as the time Fossett bit the ear of his lead dog in the Iditarod sled race to "show him who the alpha male really was."

"Here's a guy who was a little roly-poly and looked a little out of shape, but could go from sea level in California to the mountains in Colorado and climb a 14,000-foot peak the first day he was there," says Levine, who first met Fossett while covering his balloon quest. "I remember asking him once how he did it. We were climbing a mountain together, and I was huffing and puffing, and he said, 'Here is what you have to do: You have to set a pace you can maintain, and then just maintain it.' And you know something? I think that was true in life with him. He found the pace that he could maintain and then he just maintained it."

Adding to the enigma, Fossett showed only the slightest interest in the particulars of what drove him. He spoke of no demons, no childhood slight or deep-seated psychological wound he was out to heal. The only hints can be found in his autobiography. There Fossett remembers that, while in college, he happened upon The Royal Road to Romance, the 1925 book that recounts the postcollege globetrotting of Richard Halliburton (another adventurer who went missing—in 1939—and was never found). "I think from that point forward," recalled Fossett, "my focus in my early adventuring years was to do things that many people would like to do, but never get around to doing."

Later in the autobiography, he drops another clue when describing his reaction to his mother's death in 1996. "She was my biggest fan," Fossett wrote. "Standing at her graveside watching the sunlight begin to slowly recede from the winter sky ... I made a promise to myself that day. I would continue to make my mother proud of me." Interviewers always asked Fossett what drove him, of course. But whether out of humility or a simple disdain for introspection, he refused to gild the lily of his extraordinary adventuring with some contrived motivation for the benefit of a journalist looking for Deeper Meanings. When asked, he would simply shrug. "I don't have to jump up and down to tell everyone how thrilled I am," Fossett told me a decade ago during our interview. "Achieving those goals is enough."

Photograph: Trevor Collens/UPI/Newscom