91´ÎÔª

MISSOULA – Before 91´ÎÔª student Justin Willis ever stepped foot on campus, he was a professional mountain climber. A Billings native, he grew up finding rocks to conquer in the nearby Beartooth Mountains. His father, also a climber, took him winter camping as a toddler, and he tried ice climbing for the first time at age 6.

When the Steepworld climbing gym opened in Billings, Willis was member 001. By age 13, he was traveling to ice climbing championships. He went on to compete in close to 20 ice climbing world cups and national championships. His parents grudgingly allowed him to drop out of high school at age 16 to pursue his climbing dreams. Willis once spent an entire winter living in an unheated van in Hyalite Canyon near Bozeman to be near premier ice climbing.

“At the height of my career, I was probably an F-list celebrity,” he admitted. “I became well known within this small group of dedicated alpine climbers.”

Willis became fixated on alpine climbing – a form of highly technical mountain climbing in which all gear is carried by the climber in one continuous push to the summit. Willis sought out routes never climbed before. It was inherently dangerous.

“That was all before my prefrontal cortex was fully formed, and I started to realize I’m not invincible,” he said with a rueful smile. “I used to seek out risk. But I’ve had several close calls, and I’ve had friends die.”

Now a wise-beyond-his-years 30, Willis is soft-spoken, with a slight, wiry frame still capable of one-handed pullups. Years of climbing have given him big, long-fingered hands. At UM he majors in Central and Southwest Asian Studies with a minor in Russian. He is a member of UM’s Davidson Honors College and landed a highly competitive U.S. Foreign Service Internship that sent him to Kazakhstan. He will graduate this December with dreams of a career abroad.

Willis is in a good place, but it almost never happened. Because six years ago, he was somewhere far worse – the cave – convinced he was living his last moments. The cave gave him a moment of clarity that changed the trajectory of his life.

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The cave in question is 4,000 feet above the valley floor in Glacier National Park. It’s located on Mount Gould, high up a sheer cliff face rife with loose rock glued together by ice. No human being had ever climbed the southeast face of Mount Gould before, or reached the cave.

Willis and his climbing partner, Matt Cornell, were there to try. It was April 2019, and they biked 10 miles to Many Glacier Hotel – only housing two winter caretakers at that time – and then skied five miles to the base of the mountain, where they tented overnight before attempting the ascent.

“For me, a climb like that is much more about a sense of exploration than competition with others,” Willis said. “Starting at the bottom of a mountain and going to the top, it’s problem-solving the whole way. Can I trust my ability and knowledge and experience to figure this out? That’s what I lived for, more than any sort of recognition.”

The climbers set out in decent weather and made good progress for several hours, rising thousands of feet despite several harrowing challenges. But snowflakes started drifting down, and when they were only 400 vertical feet from the summit, snow began dumping. Willis said the forecast had suggested a five-day winter storm would arrive the next day. But the high country in Glacier sometimes makes its own rules in regards to weather.

They started getting hit by spindrifts – fine snow whirlwinds cascading down – as well as mini-avalanches. One almost dislodged Willis’ feet. The climbers decided to make for a shallow cave they had spotted 50 feet to the right of their route.

Moisture had invaded their waterproof layers, and they were getting cold. When they clambered out of the snow into the scant shelter of the cliff-face cave, the pair draped their single sleeping bag over their legs. They soon realized it was soaked. During their 45 minutes in the cave, they watched in disbelief as an avalanche rumbled down a gulley where they had climbed less than an hour before. More rumbles followed.

There was no cell service; no hope of rescue. They were trapped in an unbelievably remote place. Staying would risk freezing to death. Willis and Cornell realized they had lost control of the situation. Suffocating fear settled in. They talked about how they could die.

“I was basically so sure that I wasn’t going to live that I had almost surpassed fear,” Willis said, his voice thick with emotion. “The fear was so great, I had moved to the other side. It was almost like acceptance. The only thing that kept us going really was a sense of responsibility to at least try to get down.”

When they went, the duo timed the next avalanche to “whooooshhh” past before they started to hurriedly rappel downward in the midst of a blizzard. Willis spoke of actually swimming through avalanches. At one point the rope above them dislodged a microwave-sized rock, which fell directly onto Cornell, striking his helmet and breaking his shoulder. Somehow, he didn’t fall.

From then on, Willis had to lead the rappels. They continued their desperate climb downward. Then their rope snagged above them.

“Every single part of me wanted to go down – needed to go down,” he said. “But obviously you can’t get down without ropes, right? So I had to climb back up the rope, essentially through a small avalanche. Yeah, it was super-counter to every instinct I had. You are trying to be rational within chaos, and you can’t rush it. I was extremely uncomfortable and hypothermic. I had to slow down and take it one micro-step at a time, because one mistake in that situation could end both our lives.”

In the end, he freed the rope. And against all odds, even after the daylight failed and they rappelled endlessly in the dark, both made it down. Cold and freezing, they arrived back to their tent, which was flooded by rain.

As he shivered away the night in his soaked sleeping bag, Willis thought of his parents and how they almost had a dead son. That climb to the cave had frozen away much of the romanticism he felt about risk-taking in the high country.

“I realized climbing was totally self-centered for me, and that I wasn’t giving back to the world in any way,” Willis said. “And my mom, especially, has really instilled in me that giving back and reciprocity is important. And what I really felt that day was a sense of shame that I had focused my whole life on my own experiences and hadn’t found a way to give back somehow.

“So I changed directions after that.”

(Willis wrote a full account of that day for Climbing magazine in 2021. The article is titled “.”)

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Willis’ nonlinear path eventually led him to UM. He had become interested in diplomacy, and people in that field encouraged him to focus on a specific study area of the world instead of a more wide-ranging international relations major. He was fascinated by Central Asia – with its hundreds of diverse ethnic groups, languages and traditions – and UM’s Central Asian studies program seemed an ideal fit.

“I think a lot of Western powers have historically undervalued that part of the world,” he said, “and I hopefully could be part of changing that in some capacity.”

He said Ona Renner-Fahey, his UM professor of Russian, provided a highlight to his UM career when she got him invited to a lunch with diplomat Marie Yovanovitch, a former U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and – from 2016 to 2019 – Ukraine. Yovanovitch was on campus as a Mansfield Dialogue speaker.

“(Renner-Fahey) totally went to bat for me and got me in that room,” he said. “And that is the thing that set me on the path that I’m on now. You have to have someone who has your back like that and lifts you up. And Professor Renner did that for me.”

Willis applied for a two-year U.S. Foreign Service Internship. He was one of 30 students nationally selected out of 10,000 applicants. The first year was in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the State Department and focused on socioeconomic development among at-risk populations in Central Asia.

Then this past summer, intern Willis was posted to the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He described it as an amazing experience in which he created a comprehensive list of all programming done by the United States, other nations and non-governmental organizations in that region.

“I basically made a spreadsheet detailing every single thing I could find out about every program that operates in that sphere of Central Asia,” he said. “I got to lead meetings with our counterparts in Germany and Canada and NGOs, and then all our consulates abroad in five Central Asian nations. It was pretty wild.”

His favorite memory from the summer was taking a slow train across Kazakhstan.

“They’re old Soviet trains with a max speed of like 30 mph,” he said. “So you’re going for days on these in cramped conditions with no air conditioning. You get to know everyone in your cabin very well. I got a lot better at Russian, and the hospitality I was shown is, honestly, pretty rare here in the U.S. I was given gifts, I gave gifts, and it was the most incredible experience of seeing the real Kazakhstan.”

As he nears graduation, Willis said he found UM to be the perfect size for him – big enough to provide unique opportunities, but small enough to easily forge personal relationships.

“It feels very open and welcoming to curiosity,” he said. “At a school this size, the professors are here because they want to be here and because they’re passionate about what they are teaching. I’ve felt that in pretty much all the classes I’ve taken. I feel like my passion has been nurtured here and expanded, and that’s a really good thing. I feel so fortunate I was allowed to follow my own curiosity at UM. It just opened so many doors.”

After he graduates, Willis will use a fellowship from an East Coast university to study the feasibility of growing tourism in southern Tajikistan. Then he dreams of launching his own business in Central Asia – maybe something in sustainable tourism.

“Without doubt, Justin is one of the most fascinating students we’ve ever had in our program,” said Renner-Fahey, who leads UM’s Russian program. “I’m delighted UM was such a perfect fit for him and cannot wait to see where he’ll take his life from here.”

Willis still enjoys the outdoor adventures offered by climbing and skiing, but the extreme risk-taking of first ascents he leaves to others. He made it out of the cave and knows better than anyone that every day is precious. Experience and education have shown him a new route forward – one that may make a difference.

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