National Park Service contract pilot Andy Hermansky, the man who has saved many in and around Mount Denali/NPS photo courtesy Ron Gile

The deadly season has begun again in Alaska with a climber dead in Denali National Park and Preserve and a group of glacier-crossing skiers saved in Kenai Fjords National Park thanks to a determined rescue staged by the Alaska Air National Guard.

Next to come, if this year is like others, is the bear attack that leaves someone dead or badly mauled, and then the spring drownings as winter ice weakens.

This is the Alaska outside the comfort of the state’s few cities come April and May when snow and ice still make wilderness adventure easy until Mother Nature decides to bite back.

Possibly the now most unfortunately famous Alaska adventurer in modern Alaska history – a nobody by the name of Chris McCandless, AKA “Alexander Supertramp” made famous by a book full of conjectures –  crossed the still-frozen Teklinika River north of Denali in late April 1992 on a trek “Into the Wild.”

The snow and ice were then the Alaska Sirens summoning him to his death. They would melt away, or so the story goes, to leave him “trapped” in the wild.

It is a moving story, like those of Greek mythology, if one ignores the facts that McCandless had a map and that the Denali Park Road was only a day’s hike south of where he camped out in a deserted bus until he was found starved to death in late summer.

The conjecture is that he once hiked back to the Teklinka during the snow-free months, found the river too high to cross, and returned to the bus to await his inevitable end. Those more experienced or smarter might have gone for the park road even if they’d had to crawl most of the way, but McCandless didn’t and paid the price with his life.

This is the price the wilderness sometimes charges. Had McCandless chosen to live homeless in Portland instead of holed up inside abandoned Fairbanks Bus 142 a long way from nowhere, he’d probably be alive today.

Instead he died, because the wilds of Alaska show no mercy for the unlucky, the incompetent, or the mentally challenged, and he became a legend because a writer who knew more about the wilderness of Alaska penned a tale that painted McCandless as a mythical character searching for the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is that there is no real meaning. You make of it what you want or fate makes of you what it wants; you live the hand you created or the one fate dealt; and then you die.

Living the life

Many of those who die in the Alaska wilderness this time of year are living lives they created to be more exciting than getting up every morning to go to work and coming home later in the day to sit staring at a computer or TV – those “screens” now reported to eat up about four hours of the average American’s non-working hours every day, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Fifty-two-year-old Robbi Mecus from Keene Valley, New York, was looking for adventure when she headed for 8,460-foot Mount Johnson in the Alaska Range this year.  A vastly experienced Adirondack Mountain forest ranger who’d spent decades rescuing others, she was planned personally big adventure in Alaska.

A well-experienced rock and ice climber, she and climbing partner Melissa Orzechowski, 30, who’d only recently moved from the Adirondacks to California, were on a route up Johnson called “The Escalator,” a tricky, 4,000-foot line pioneered by Salt Lake City climbers Tim Wagner and Seth Shaw in 2000, when disaster struck.

Wagner in 2001 described the route as a “mostly moderate snow and ice climb” above the Ruth Glacier, writing that “we did it in a 31-hour round- trip, but were pinned down for a while in the middle of the night during a short snowstorm while spindrift avalanches poured down the route. The descent from the summit took about 12 hours down the large gully to the south. Unfortunately, Seth was killed about a week later by serac (ice) fall.”

Wind, blowing snow, spindrift avalanches and falling ice are the sorts of dangers one can expect here.

One veteran Alaska climber described Johnson as “a beast,” adding that “I still have a scar on my face from getting nailed by an avalanche of falling ice while belaying at the base of the east ridge.”

What happened that led to Mecus’s death on the route is unclear. A spokeswoman for Denali said no one knows “what triggered the fall….Two climbers who were also on the route did not see the onset of the fall. They only witnessed the team as they fell past them.  Perhaps someday our rangers will talk to the surviving climber (Orzechowski) in the event she has more details, but they haven’t spoken with her yet.”

The two climbers who witnessed the 1,000-foot fall were able to descend and keep Orzechowski, who’d amazingly survived the long drop, alive until she could be rescued by a Park Service helicopter. She is in critical condition in an Anchorage hospital, but hopes are that she will survive.

Thankfully rescued

The skiers on the Harding Icefield fared better thanks to the never-say-die efforts of the Alaska Air National Guard’s 210th and 212th Rescue Squadrons.  After a day of flying over the icefield looking for a break in the weather, the 210th was finally able to land an HH-60G Pave Hawk on the glacier and dispatch two pararescuemen (PJs) from the 212th to comfort the group pinned down by bad weather.

The Guard reported the PJs were offloaded “in the vicinity of the group’s location. After linking up with the six skiers, the PJs safely led them back to the helicopter, which airlifted them to an area hospital for evaluation.”

Alaska authorities have been strangely silent as to who was in the group rescued, but at least one of them is reported to have been a member of the large Kilcher family from Homer made famous by the reality TV show “Alaska, The Last Frontier,” which aired on the Discovery channel for 11 seasons. 

The series ended in 2022 and the group on the glacier was apparently not accompanied by a film crew or the guides that typically oversee reality TV filming in Alaska. An acquaintance of one of those involved said they called for help when it got very wet and uncomfortable in a snow cave they’d dug for shelter.

This used to be something Alaska adventurers were forced to endure, but modern technology has changed all that.

For better or worse, thanks to satellite communications, it is now possible to summon help from almost anywhere in the 49th state. This technological advance helped save Orzechowski’s life.

She fell at 10:45 p.m. on April 25, according to the Park Service, but thanks to the climbers who came to her aid and the benefit of satellite communication, the rescue helicopter the Park Service bases in Talkeetna during the Mount Denali climbing season was on scene by 7 a.m., the next day and the injured climber was being treated in an Anchorage hospital not long after.

If McCandless had possessed an InReach (satellite) Messenger and a solar panel to keep it charged, he would surely have survived his Alaska adventure as well.

Times have changed. The Alaska wilderness remains dangerous, but it is not as dangerous as it once was. Help now is often just a text message away though rescue for those who falter in the wilds is by no means guaranteed given the vagaries of Alaska weather.

No guarantees

Veteran climber Anna Pfaff knows this too well. Bad weather swirling around Denali in April 2022 cost her all the toes on her right foot and one on her left. 

She and climbing partner Priti Wright successfully reached the summit of Mount Huntington that year and returned to the Denali base camp where Pfaff first noticed that her “right foot was swollen and whitish in color.”

“I knew I needed to warm my feet so I kept them protected in my minus-40 degree sleeping bag,” she later observed. “We made some dinner and rehydrated ourselves and I felt my feet improving slightly. That night was one of the coldest nights as was the next day.”

By morning, her toes were in worse shape, and the climbers called for an aircraft pickup. Unfortunately, weather had moved in making it impossible to fly.

“The following night was even colder and when I woke up in the morning I looked at my feet and the sight almost made me vomit,” Pfaff later wrote. “I called to (Wright) to come check them out, and I could see the shock on her face as we looked at the purple-colored toes and blisters that had formed.”

By the time a plane finally arrived, Pfaff was in bad shape, and her toes paid the price. As with many others, she learned the hard way that this is the time of year in Alaska when despite the fabled Midnight Sun shining brightly for 18 hours or more,  the weather in the moountains can still turn dangerously cold and snowy, which increases the risk no matter what one is doing in the wild.

Park service contract pilot Andy Hermansky, a man many times decorated for his heroic efforts to save lives in Alaska, once recalled that his most memorable rescue involved a 32-hour period when he couldn’t fly while Irish climber Jerry O’Sullivan, who’d broken his leg in a fall at 19,600 feet on Denali, suffered in the cold and wind in a bivvy sack wondering if he would live.

“Winds gusted to 120 mph throughout the day, and the helicopter was unable to safely fly above 14,200 feet,” the Park Service’s  Maureen Gualtieri would later write. “The rescue team feared the worst considering O’Sullivan’s summit day was now 32 hours long, 19 of which were spent alone at 19,600 feet – injured, unable to move, and with minimal protection from the brutal winds and frigid early season temperatures.

“However, that evening the winds ‘subsided’ to 60 mph, gusting to 80 mph, and (Hermansky) made an initial reconnaissance flight up to the Football Field.  The wind was still blowing strong, ‘but it was a good wind’ according to Hermansky.  He first flew alone to the site, verified the location, and then to the tearful delight of everyone listening, he announced over the radio that the climber was alive and waving to him.”

Hermansky was eventually able to get O’Sullivan into a basket dangling beneath the helicopter and sling-load the injured climber off the mountain.

“O’Sullivan’s injuries were extensive,” Gualtieri noted. “In addition to his broken leg, he suffered severe frostbite on all extremities that would ultimately result in amputation. But he was alive to tell the tale. Immediately after dropping O’Sullivan off at base camp, Hermansky returned to the upper mountain for what turned out to be a short-haul body recovery; one of O’Sullivan’s fellow rope mates never made it down to high camp, having succumbed to altitude-related illness at Denali Pass.”

O’Sullivan himself would six years later describe his memories of what happened on the website of Irish explorer Tom Crean.

“At 7 p.m., 19 hours after the fall, the helicopter returned and as before hovered overhead,” O’Sullivan wrote there. “Again I waved and waited but nothing happened. I hoped he would not take off again.

“Then I noticed a metal rescue basket sitting on the snow a few feet away from where I was. I didn’t see it arriving and I was fairly sure it wasn’t there before now. So I slid my way over to it as fast as I could in case it would leave without me. I threw my left leg in and pulled in the right one.

“As I did my right mitten fell off. I looked at it lying on the ground. I wanted to pick it up, it was only a few feet away but I was afraid if I got out of the basket I’d be left behind. So I thought to hell with it, sure I only have one anyway. The helicopter took off with me hanging from some 150 feet of rope in the basket below. I remember looking at a carabiner attached to the inside of the basket thinking I should clip in to it. I don’t know if I did.

“I don’t remember any more of my journey. As it turned out, the rescue equaled the highest helicopter rescue ever in North America. Unknown to myself I was right on the limit.

“At base camp, I was transferred to a fixed-wing aircraft and flown to Anchorage. There I spent one month in hospital before being flown home to Cork for another three months in Cork University Hospital. I was severely frostbitten, had several amputations but thankfully lived to tell the tale.”

O’Sullivan ended up losing a leg and now climbs with a prosthesis, but lived to tell the tale which is always a great outcome for any Alaska adventure.