Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who led search-and-rescue missions and became a prominent voice within the L.G.B.T.Q. climbing community, died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska on Thursday. She was 52.
Her death was confirmed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where she worked for 25 years.
Ms. Mecus, who worked mostly in the Adirondacks, searched for and rescued lost and injured climbers facing hypothermia and other threats in the wilderness. This month, she helped rescue a frostbitten hiker who was lost in the Adirondack Mountains overnight.
At age 44, she came out as transgender, she said in a 2019 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History project. She then worked to foster a supportive community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning climbers in the North Country of New York.
“I want people to see that trans people can do amazing things,” she said in an interview for a climbing website, goEast, in 2022. “I think it helps when young trans people see other trans people accomplishing things. I think it lets them know that their life doesn’t have to be full of negativity and it can actually be really rad.”
Basil Seggos, former commissioner of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, called Ms. Mecus a “pillar of strength” and a tremendous leader for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, noting she was “always there” for the most difficult rescues and crises.
“I feel fortunate to have known her,” he said on social media. “Rest in peace, Ranger.”
Ms. Mecus was born in New York City in October 1971 and grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a Catholic, working-class family with her parents and an older brother and older sister.
“Growing up in New York City, I always knew that I was a mountain girl,” she said in the 2019 interview. She recalled cutting up pictures of forests and mountains and tacking them to her wall.
She got involved in the New York climbing community, and in 2008 met Carolyn Riccardi, who said they bonded over their shared experiences growing up in Brooklyn and their love of heavy metal music.
“The climbing community has some diversity to it, but you don’t meet a lot of blue collar kids from Brooklyn, and you don’t meet a lot of kids that are into heavy metal,” Ms. Riccardi said on Sunday.
Ms. Mecus had said she identified as female since she was very young, though she struggled to come to terms with her identity for decades. She married a woman, and they had a child together.
After finding a community online where she felt she had an outlet to express herself, she came out as transgender. She became a leader of the L.G.B.T.Q. climbing community, eager to share her own experiences and be a model to others.
“Fifteen years ago, there was no L.G.B.T. climbing community,” Ms. Riccardi said. “When I came out, there wasn’t any community like that. But Robbi helped build it.”
Ms. Mecus died while ascending Mount Johnson, an 8,400-foot peak, along a route known as the Escalator, a steep and technical alpine climb on the peak’s southeast face. The 5,000-foot route involves navigating steep rock, ice and snow.
Another climber who was roped to Ms. Mecus, a 30-year-old woman from California whose name was not released, was seriously injured in the fall.
“These are the climbs that she truly loved,” Ms. Riccardi said of Ms. Mecus. “This was her special thing. She loved these kind of mix climbs that had a lot of complexity.”
Her survivors include her daughter.
In the interview with New York City Trans Oral History project, Ms. Mecus described her struggle to develop an identity beyond the stereotypes of who she thought she had to be.
But after coming out, she said, she developed her own definition of her gender, her “own version of femininity.”
“I thought that in order to be accepted as a woman, that I would have to model myself after all the other women I see,” she said. “And I think one of the big lessons I’ve learned in the past three years is that I don’t have to model myself after anybody, except me.”
