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A Seattle man died after falling 3,000 feet from a climbing route at Denali National Park in Alaska, the National Park Service said Wednesday.
According to a statement from the agency, Alex Chiu, 41, was climbing the West Buttress route of Mount McKinley without using a rope on Monday, June 2. This is one of the most popular paths in the park.
He was engaged in ski mountaineering, an activity that requires both climbing and descending a mountain with skis. Accompanying him on this journey to scale North America’s tallest mountain were two other individuals.
Witnesses reported that two people saw his fall onto the rock-strewn, icy surface. They attempted to rappel down as much as they could to search for him, but after the incident, they were neither able to see nor hear him, as per officials.
The pandemic put the brakes on his alpine climbs, but he dreamed of heading back to the climb.
“So tomorrow I am getting on an airplane to Alaska,” he wrote in an Instagram post on May 19, “in an attempt to climb the third-highest peak in the world because I don’t want to know what happens to a dream deferred.”
The Alaska Range with Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake with Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus) in the fall, Denali National Park, Alaska. (Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The busiest season on the mountain lasts from mid-May to mid-June; there were about 500 climbers on it Wednesday, the agency said. Chiu is one of several people who have died while climbing Mount McKinley or other areas of Denali National Park.
In April 2024, 52-year-old Robbi Mecus, of Keene Valley, New York, fell to his death while climbing an estimated 1,000 feet off Mount Johnson in the national park.
The NPS said that a similar accident happened in 2010, in a similar location. That incident involved an unroped French mountaineer, who fell to his death on the Peters Glacier. His body was never recovered.
