One climber died and another was seriously injured after they fell about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska late on Thursday, officials said.
The roped climbers were 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, the National Park Service said in a statement. It typically draws between five and 10 climbing teams each year.
Another climbing party witnessed the fall and alerted the Alaska Region Communication Center around 10:45 p.m. on Thursday. The climbers descended to the victims and confirmed that one climber had died.
“The responders dug a snow cave and attended to the surviving climber’s injuries throughout the night,” the statement said
A park high-altitude rescue helicopter and two mountaineering rangers from Talkeetna, a village at the base of Denali, responded early on Friday.
One of the rangers and the injured climber were flown to a flat glacier staging area, and then onto Talkeetna, where the patient was taken by a medical helicopter to Anchorage for further care.
The injured climber’s condition was not immediately known on Saturday, and neither climber has been publicly identified.
The rescue helicopter pilot returned to the site but was unable to recover the body of the climber who was killed because of poor weather conditions, the Park Service said. Rangers were attempting the recovery on Saturday morning.
Winter weather on North America’s tallest mountain stretches from mid-September to mid-May, during which facilities and services in the park are limited.
The weather was warm and sunny when the accident happened, Paul Ollig, a spokesman for the park, said in an email.
“Conditions can deteriorate during the heat of the day, and the danger of overhead rockfall danger increases,” he said.
In one other recorded death on Mount Johnson, a climber died in 2000 in an avalanche at the base of the East Buttress.
In 2012, four Japanese climbers were killed in an avalanche while descending Mount Denali, which at the time was known as Mount McKinley.
