Radcliff “Rad” Spencer’s thing was breakfast dates. A morning person, he loved the opportunity to catch up. Plus, he loved bottomless coffee at the Virginian.
So, early on Monday morning, the day after news broke that the 27-year-old had died in a fall in Apocalypse Couloir in Grand Teton National Park, his lifelong friend Spain Short and a few other high school buddies decided to go to the Virginian.
It was pretty packed.
Friends described Spencer as the “cautious one.” Though he might not have looked it based on his baggy dress pants, loose fitting coat, ball cap and shaggy hair cut, his friend and pastor at Fresh Life Church Kevin Guido said Spencer was “an adventure kid through and through.”COURTESY PHOTO
The Jackson Hole Lacrosse team had already taken up a number of tables, assembling in only a few hours to remember a coach who players thought of as a leader and friend. Later that night, and again with only a few hours’ notice, some 100 people gathered at The Bird to honor Spencer’s memory.
“Every single person there had a personal relationship with him. He just had the gift of making people feel good and laughing,” Short said. “Rad loved to hear about everybody.”
An Atlanta kid, Spencer first made his way out to the Tetons the summer before college, Short said. He started working on the alpine slide at Snow King Mountain and, after moving to the valley full time, became one of the youngest partners in Jackson Hole with the Neville, Asbell, Spencer team at Compass Real Estate.
“He wasn’t even old enough to rent a car but he was dealing with multi-million dollar contracts,” said Shawn Asbell, Spencer’s mentor, who remembered him doing as much when he was 24.
Friends remembered Spencer as a guy who was always down to dog- or house-sit, a skier who would go up Snow King in a Spider-Man costume, an unlikely devotee of hot yoga, and a person who loved to laugh. He wore a shirt with a “Darth Tater” logo, posted online a photo of a stormtrooper using a Brita filter in the ocean, and had a handful of sayings, one a cheesy play on “See you soon.”
“See you bassoon,” he’d instead tell friends.
“He’d start telling a joke and people would start laughing because he’d be cracking up himself,” his friend and ski partner George Ehlers said. “He was just somebody that shared laughter.”
But it was the mountains that really called Spencer, an involved member of the Fresh Life Church. Short said Spencer’s mother told him as much.
“Rad felt closest to God while he was in the mountains,” she told Short.
