A 41-year-old Seattle man died this week after falling 3,000 feet while ski mountaineering on Alaska's Denali, aka Mount McKinley. The National Park Service reports that Alex Chiu was unroped on Monday when he fell from the West Buttress route onto the Peters Glacier. Two members of his party witnessed the fall and descended for help after the incident, per the Anchorage Daily News. "We still don't know whether they were attempting to summit, whether they did summit," a spokesperson for Denali National Park & Preserve tells Alaska Public Media. "All we know is that he was on his descent."
Efforts to recover Chiu's body were held up by poor weather on Tuesday, but conditions improved enough on Wednesday for two rangers to reach the site and retrieve Chiu's remains. His body was turned over to the State Medical Examiner's Office. Park officials describe the area where Chiu fell—known as Squirrel Point—as an exposed, rocky 3,000-foot face covered in glacial ice. The New York Times reports that Chiu, an aviation engineer for the FAA, was active in outdoor sports such as scuba diving, rock climbing, and snowboarding, and that he'd started alpine climbing to boost his confidence.
"When I am in the mountains, I realize I was at my best," he noted on his Instagram account last month before heading to Alaska. "I was smart, witty, passionate, and bold. ... I fell in love with the process of alpine climbing more then the climb itself, which means the decision one makes navigating the mountains." The NPS notes the similarity to a 2010 accident, in which an unroped French mountaineer died after falling from the same stretch of North America's highest mountain. His body has never been recovered.
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