The descent to Squirrel Point in good conditions for skiing/Wayne Pence photo

McKinley’s first death of the year

Brooklyn-born Alex Chiu fell in love with the mountains of the West, found himself lured north to Alaska by the biggest of them all, and tragically went home in a box.

Something as simple and as common as a fall while skiing killed him in a land where small risks often come attached to big consequences. Chiu was on skis near Squirrel Point, a landmark about 12,000-feet high on Mount McKinley, when he took that fall last Monday.

Had he been a few hundred feet higher near the crest of a ridge at a point climbers know as “Lunch Rocks,” he might be alive today. If he had been a few hundred feet lower at the top of Motorcycle Hill above Camp 2 at 11,200 feet, he almost certainly be alive today.

Unfortunately, he fell on a snowy, sometimes icy slope that drops away quickly to the edge of what is essentially a 3,000-foot cliff rising from the Peters Glacier a half mile below.

In the old Mt. McKinley Climber’s Handbook, Glenn Randall describes the terrain where the popular and relatively easy West Buttress turns northeast toward Lunch Rocks as a “headwall that climbs 500 feet to the crest of a ridge” and adds this:

“Views to the north down to Peters Glacier and out to the tundra are spectacular. Anything dropped off a sled or pack on this section will probably quit rolling 2,000 feet below.”

A pretty, dangerous spot

I have some personal experience with Squirrel Point. Years ago, while descending from Windy Corner after caching gear, I stepped in a crevasse there, tripped, tumbled and started sliding toward the precipice above the Peters.

I was, thankfully, carrying an ice ax, well conditioned as to how to use the tool instinctively if needed, and thus able to self-arrest after sliding only a short distance. Still, it was one of those experiences one never forgets.

Chiu, like most McKinley climbers, brought an ice ax with him to McKinley. It can be seen in a video he shot and posted to Instagram before he left New York for the mountain two weeks ago. 

And as a former climbing instructor for the Boeing Employees Alpine Society (Boealps) in Seattle, he appears to have had significant experience in how to use it.

Three years ago, he posted a photo of himself with a group of climbers on Washington state’s Mount Rainier and offered congratulations “to this year’s @boealps Basic Mountaineering Class.

“After a two-year hiatus, we were finally able to bring back the class and teach people how to climb glaciated peaks in a safe and fun manner. I always tell people I look at my life in two phases, BC and AC, before climbing and after climbing. This class changed my life. I was a Chinese kid from Brooklyn, and now I can climb the tallest peaks in North America.

“It’s wild. I’ve made lifelong friendships, created amazing memories, climbed tall thing(sic) all over the country and lived to tell about it. The reason I love the class is that you have people from all over the country, all walks of life, and for 4 months their entire focus is on learning how to climb mountains. 12 people who would probably never be friends in real life, now have to work together to keep each other safe.

“It is the greatest reality show I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing, to see people who never left the city sidewalk to now climbing a mountain. Maybe it is an ego thing that I love to teach, show, speak about how to do this, when students marvel at the mountain top, I just want to say, you see that!

“I’m your instructor. I can show you how to climb that! So, there is a selfish aspect to this but there is also (a)selfless aspect to it too, where I’ve found this great joy and all I want to do is to share it! The sound of kicking steps is like music to my ears, as we form this train to the mountain top. Whether we summit or not is irrelevant. What matters is (that) we can all experience the joy of being outside and the privilege of moving our bodies together.”

A software engineer and self-described “storyteller, world traveller, scuba diver, rock climber, alpinist, 26.2 (mile marathoner), snowboarder, skier, photographer,” Chiu later left the Seattle area and moved back to the Big Apple.

“By 2023, I had all but stopped climbing tall peaks and living to tell about it,” he wrote in an Instagram post on May 19. “I moved back home to Brooklyn, NY, to be closer to my family and to a new beginning. I had gone tired of pushing my body to the limit, knowing that the consequences could be high with my diminished skillset.”

But the lure of the mountains was still there.

“I spent the last year working my desk job, running to stay in shape, and after my long runs on Saturdays,” he wrote. “I always found myself going to the local outdoor retailers REI, The North Face, Arcteryx, I had nothing to buy I just wanted to see the pictures of what I used to do, who I used to be.”

Then came the chance to pursue the ultimate dream of many a North American climber,  a shot at the summit of the Alaska mountain of various names:  Deenaalee to the Koyukon of Central Alaska at the time of white contact. Dghelay Ka’a to the Dena’ina Athabascans of Cook Inlet. Bulshaia Gora to the Russians, the first Caucasians to occupy the territory. Densmore Mountain to the flood of gold rush prospectors who invaded the north at the end of the 19th Century and the start of the 20th.

Mount McKinley became the name not much later in honor of William McKinley, the President assassinated by an anarchist who in his handwritten confession said he did it because “I did not believe in presidents over us.” A later President over us, Barack Obama, changed the mountain’s name to Denali to mark his 2015 visit to the 49th state only to have the latest president over us, Donald Trump, change it back to McKinley in the stated belief that Obama’s order was an “affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice.

The mountain itself remains unchanged. It is today as it has been for thousands of years, a towering massif visible from much of the state and an attraction, a sometimes deadly attraction, that has drawn climbers from around the world since before 1910 when a group of Alaska gold miners dragged a 14-foot long spruce pole to the summit of the north peak and planted a flag there thinking they’d reached the highest point on the mountain.

They hadn’t. They were 850 feet low as the first climbers to reach the true summit to the south in 1913 could attest, having seen the flagpole on the lower summit. After that first successful ascent, the mountain would be attempted by only a handful of other climbers.

It wouldn’t become a big Alaska attraction until after 1951 when the late Bradford Washburn, a member of the Harvard Mountaineering Club who had already established a reputation as a true Alaska hard man, led a team of climbers that pioneered the now popular and comparatively easy West Buttress route to the summit. 

Close to 24,000 climbers have now reached the summit, and approximately 125 are reported to have died trying to get there. Chiu, who found himself on the mountain at the end of May with two old climbing friends from the West Coast, is the latest, but not the first to take a deadly plunge from Squirrel Point to the Peters Glacier.

What happened?

Where Chiu’s ice ax was when he fell is unknown. It was not with his body when it was recovered, but it could easily have been lost during the fall. It was also possible that he was skiing with whippet ski poles, which are not nearly as good as an ice ax for stopping a slide after a fall but a lot better than nothing.

But no one involved in the search for Chiu knows if he had those sort of poles. The National Park Service has, however, reported that he had a loaded sled in tow coming down to Squirrel Point, which makes skiing harder, and that his group had been passed by another group of climbers on skis.

That other are skiing the slope might minimize the danger of a fall in one’s mind,  and the danger of a fall in this area is, for a good skier, fairly small. The big problem is that the consequences of a fall in this area are that if you do fall, you might well die.

Wholly unknown is how much skiing Chiu had been doing while living in New York and exactly what the snow conditions, which can change hour by hour, near Squirrel Point when he fell. Ski skills are like bike skills.

You never forget how to ride a bike, but how well you ride a bike does have a bit to do with when you last rode one, how much riding you’ve been doing, and in what terrain.

As for the snow in the Alaska mountains, it can be very forgiving, very unforgiving or anywhere between. Ask anyone who has done much spring skiing on the black-diamond South Face at the Alyeska Resort in the Chugach Mountains just down the Seward Highway from Anchorage.

I used to descend that slope with ease on telemark skis in the right conditions, but once hit the slope too early in the day with the snow still ice hard, lost an edge, and went on a long slide almost to the bottom while trying to self-arrest with the tip of a ski pole, a hope-and-pray technique that is better than nothing but not much better.

That said, the technique once slowed me down enough to save me on a slope with a long runout, which is more than I can say for an ice ax that happened to have a protective sheath covering the pick when I needed the point. Fortunately, the slide on rock-hard snow with that unworking ax was relatively short and the point on ax had begun to cut through the guard just before I hit the rocks at the bottom of the snowfield.

I ended up well bruised but with no bones broken. I was largely lucky, but it wasn’t all luck. I started across that snowfield knowing the risks of a slip were relatively low, but also aware that the consequences of a slip were unlikely to prove deadly.

If the snowfield had been bigger with the potential for a much longer slide, I would have been much more cautious about crossing the top of it, and as a result would have had the ax ready for use rather than ready to be packed in airplane as it had been only hours before on a flight into the mountains.

These are the sort of little decisions that can get you in trouble in Alaska, and the sort of things that can, in the worst case, kill you.

Chiu either made a mistake in overrating his skiing skills after months of city life or in failing to recognize the danger of hard snow at Squirrel Point. Fresh deep snow there might have saved him.

Some friends and I pretty much ran down the North Couloir of the nearly 5,000-foot Ptarmigan Peak outside of Anchorage in fresh deep snow one winter. Years later, a student climber from the University of Alaska Anchorage slipped while climbing on hard snow in the same col and set off a chain reaction that took out four teams of roped climbers.

Fourteen people then slid 1,500 feet into the rocks below.  Two of them died. The 12 others were all injured, some of them seriously. More would likely have died if not for a large and speedy rescue.

I had once skied the same couloir in better snow conditions, and not long after the deadly fall, I grabbed an ice ax and climbed up it in trail running shoes with no thought to descending it in that gear. The snow was hard enough that the shoes would have been sketchy for kicking steps while downclimbing. Trail running shoes aren’t the best for that.

I remember standing in the middle of the col on that day, looking back down, and thinking that the pitch was steep enough and the snow hard enough that if I slipped and fell, I might have a hard time stopping myself with the ax that was then driven head deep into the snow to provide a solid handhold.

When I pulled it out, I slammed it into the snow above again, and kicked a couple more steps upward with shoes just barely up to the task. By the top of the slope, I was reminded just how slim the margins can be in the Alaska mountains.

In a lifetime in Alaska, I’ve written too many stories about those who died here, and I’ve known too many who came perilously close to death but got lucky. Sometimes they took big risks, and the risks caught up with them.

Too often, they took small risks without considering the size of the potential consequences. Mountain guide Terrence “Mugs” Stump, an Alaska climbing legend, was one of those. He was in 1992 descending McKinley’s South Buttress with a pair of clients when he decided to go ahead of them to check the route across a glacial crevasse.

He underestimated the consequences if the bridge over that crevasse collapsed. It did and Stump, who’d left way too much slack in the rock connecting him to his clients, fell deep into the crevasse only to be buried by the ice and snow that came thundering down after him.

He was buried so deep, the clients couldn’t dig him out. His body remains on the mountain to this day.  The Park Service recovered Chiu’s body on the Peters Glacier. Friends in New York and Seattle will now surely try to rationalize his death with the belief that he died doing what he loved.

And it’s pretty clear he came to love the mountains.  But only those interested in life’s last great adventures, which begins with death, want to die doing what they love. For most, it’s a lot more fun to live doing what they love so they can do it again.

Knock on wood.

Editor’s note: This is a revised version of an earlier story. It was edited to note that Chiu was towing a sled and that a separate group of skiers had passed his party on the way down to Squirrel Point.