MISSING COOMBS: Memorial service shows impact, influence Coombs had on community

An impact. Isn’t that what we’d all like to make in life? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your career, your lifestyle, just the way you went about your everyday existence, empowered those around you and left them feeling better for having met you? If there was one message that came through repeatedly at the DOUG COOMBS memorial service—held Sunday afternoon at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort— it’s that Coombs affected almost every person he met in a profoundly positive way.

“As you’ve heard everyone express here today,” said Mike Hattrup, friend, fellow K2 athlete, and the final speaker of the day, “The influence of Doug Coombs extends far beyond skiing.”

A couple hundred people, included many of the biggest names in skiing and ski mountaineering, from Andrew Mclean to Scot Schmidt, gathered under sunny Wyoming skies and listened as speaker after speaker—friends, family members, fellow guides—came to the podium and shared his or her thoughts on DOUG COOMBS, who died in a ski accident in La Grave, France on April 3. Emcee Jack Tackle, a longtime employee of Exum Mountain Guides, where Coombs also worked, compared Coombs to climbing legend Alex Lowe, who also died in an accident in the mountains.

“It’s impossible not to see the parallels,” Tackle said.

A few storm clouds rolled in momentarily, causing speaker Marc Newcomb to point out: “Right about now, Doug would say, ‘Don’t worry, those clouds aren’t gonna last.” And they didn’t. Though obviously sad at times, it was a surprisingly upbeat and lighthearted ceremony, which of course is just as Coombs would have wanted it, complete with potluck dinner and beer gardens. Outfits ranged from suit and tie to flip-flops and surf shorts, with the requisite labs roaming about the grass.

Some of the more lighthearted commentary came from family members themselves, such as sister Nancy Coombs, who shared a story about how Doug used to shine a flashlight from his bedroom when she came home from a date, yelling down to her unsuspecting suitor: “Are you going to kiss her!?”

But there were also those moments you knew each speaker had inside them—the broken speech, the pause, the choking up. And these moments came across as especially poignant when they befell the mouths of strong, seemingly invincible mountaineers like Hans Johnstone, who couldn’t quite get through his final two sentences: “I miss you, Doug. It’s going to be hard to ski without you.”