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 5 of 8)

Fossett with his wife, Peggy

Still, myths persisted about Fossett—in particular, the notion that he came to adventuring late in life—that he was little more than a bored rich guy with nothing better to do than spend money glorifying himself. The truth is, a love of adventure defined his life from the start.

Born J. Stephen Fossett in 1944 in Jackson, Tennessee, the adventurer credited his father, Richard—a soap production manager for Procter & Gamble—for instilling in him a passion for the outdoors. In his autobiography, Fossett recalls his father choosing campsites on the basis of available mountains to climb. Thus, when Fossett was a boy working to become an Eagle Scout, he and his father scaled Mount Kaweah in the Sierra Nevada region of California, a 13,802-foot peak in the center of Sequoia National Park. Over the next decade, father and son summited about 30 peaks in Southern California, much to the puzzlement of his older brother, Richard III, his younger sister, Linda, and his mother, Charalee, none of whom shared their ardor.

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If his father was his mentor, danger was his teacher. Just after high school, Fossett decided to climb Mount Lassen in northern California alone. He had neglected, however, to check the weather forecast and found himself caught near the top in a major winter storm. Winds shredded his tent and his food supply was exhausted. Whiteout conditions left him unable to find his base camp. He escaped only when he found some mountaineering skis he had stashed and was able to maneuver down the mountain through four feet of powder snowdrifts. After that, he vowed never to be unprepared again.

Accordingly, while in college at Stanford, he swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge only after carefully consulting tidal charts. He also made sure to prepare when later, as part of a fraternity prank, he braved eight hours in the frigid waters and strong tides of San Francisco Bay to swim back from Alcatraz to show that he could have escaped the "unescapable" island.

After graduating from Stanford in 1966, Fossett earned his MBA at Washington University in St. Louis. He also met his wife-to-be, Peggy Viehland, at a mixer. Fittingly, their second date was a trip to an air show—one in which Fossett was a participant. "For some crazy reason, I asked her to fly with me," Fossett recalled. "She simply said, 'OK.'" Within a few months the couple had married.

They moved to New York, where Fossett worked for IBM for a time, then Detroit, where he held a management job at Deloitte & Touche (then known as Touche-Ross). The couple eventually landed in Chicago, where Fossett found his career calling as a trader on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and Peggy made her own mark as a portfolio manager in the trust department of the First National Bank of Chicago.

Throughout, Peggy supported her husband's adventures, including a brief foray into racecar driving. Aside from the air-show date, however, she did not participate. It turned out she was a white-knuckle flier who preferred the lodge to the ski slopes. On a camping trip in Ontario, Canada, Fossett recalled in his autobiography, "[she] couldn't sleep at night. Every foreign noise made her jump. In the morning when a squirrel darted across the top of our tent ... it was clear to me that she had had enough of camping for a lifetime."

She provided a stable counterpart to her husband's go-for-broke business career, however. Although Fossett made millions on the exchange, he also went bust several times. At one point he found himself a systems analyst for Marshall Field's. His nadir came while driving a taxi for Chicago Yellow Cab.

Eventually tiring of the boom-and-bust cycle of the financial markets, he turned over management of his company, Lakota Trading, to his friend Bob Kirkland in 1990. He still traded occasionally, but left the high risk and rewards to the hungry young employees he had hired to work under him. Meanwhile, he sold his two seats on the board for eight figures. His fortune now safe, he began his pursuit of adventures in earnest.

The results were astonishing. Fossett would set 115 records in five different areas of adventure: balloons, airplanes, sailboats, gliders, and airships. About the only goal that eluded him was reaching the summit of Mount Everest. He launched two attempts, but fell short both times.

Photograph: David Dyson