Climber Nick Vizzini/Facebook

What you don’t know can kill you

Twenty-nine-year-old Nick Vizzini had a passion for skiing.

“I ski a lot,” he wrote on the Facebook page of the Four Wheel Camper Project M in February while searching for a solution to a condensation problem in his van when winter camping in the Cascade Mountains of Washington and the Sierra Nevadas of California.

He brought his ski passion north to Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, and it killed him.

On Tuesday, Vizzini became the second person to die on McKinley this year. Both of the dead men were skiers whose fascination with big mountain skiing flourished in the Pacific Northwest.

A software engineer, 41-year-old, Brooklyn-born Alex Chiu was the first to die on June 4. He’d gravitated to the Seattle area to work for Boeing, and then fell in love with the mountains of the West.

He died on McKinley while descending on skis toward the 11,000-foot camp with a loaded sled behind. A fall near Squirrel Point ending with his sliding off the West Buttress toward the Peters Glacier. No one has ever survived the drop from there to the river of ice 3,000 feet below.

Vizzini died in the early evening six days later after being caught up in what the National Park Service described as “soft slab avalanche” in the so-called Rescue Gully above the 14,000-foot camp on the same West Buttress.

Such avalanches make for great videos if a skier or snowboarder can stay atop them like Red Bull snowboarder Travis Rice did or outrun them as a Mount Washington snowboarder did.

Vizzini was not so lucky. The McKinley avalanche knocked him down, and he suffered fatal injuries as he was pounded down the slope to where the avalanche ended.

Two McKinley mountaineering rangers who witnessed the snow thundering down the gully for roughly 1,600 feet spotted the skier in the avalanche rubble after the snowslide stopped, but could do nothing to save him.

Vizzini was “found to be mostly buried in the debris,” the park service reported.  “The rangers immediately began digging to establish an airway. CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) was initiated but discontinued after 40 minutes due to traumatic injuries and no pulse.”

Vizzini was with an unidentified climbing partner, a snowboarder, when they triggered the avalanche. His partner was reported to have suffered only minor injuries.

The avalanche rubble in the Rescue Gully after Vizzini’s fall/NPS photo

The Rescue Gully has, in modern times, become a McKinley feature somewhat regularly used by both skiers and snowboarders. Mountain Trip, a well-known guide service, pioneered extreme skiing expeditions to the mountain in 2022. 

“The team is really making the best of having skis up on Denali!” a guide on one of those trips later reported. “They climbed up the Rescue Gully, one of those couloirs or chutes I was describing, to High Camp at 17,200 feet, and then skied 3,000 feet back down to Camp 3 at 14,200 feet.

“Sounds like a lot of fun, and I bet a lot of teams on snowshoes in Camp 3 are green with envy! What a treat. It is most likely in June to find good ski conditions on Denali. At Camp 3, earlier in the season (or anytime) it can be all blue ice and not skiable. It sounds like the team has found ideal conditions. They did not report (a) plan for today, but we will find out when they call in this evening.”

As reported there by Mountain Trip, the snow conditions in the Rescue Gully can be ideal. They can also be the opposite or anywhere between ideal and awful with considerable variation from day to day and month to month.

“When we looked up at the Messner Couloir, Orient Express, and Rescue Gully, all we saw was blue ice and wind-hammered snow. Lovely,” Sam Chaneles, a now Snowqualimie, Wash.-based mechanical engineer, wrote after returning from a McKinley climb in 2021. 

Extreme skier Kit DesLauriers described what she found in the gully in 2004 as “steep, bulletproof ice” leading to “the first time I’d ever skied down with an ice axe in my uphill hand.”

Obviously, there was new snow covering any ice and wind-hammered snow when Vizzini and his unidentified climbing companion jumped into the gully. Equally obvious is that the snow had not bonded well to whatever was beneath.

The duo’s training and experience in judging potential avalanche conditions is unknown.

Unlike Chiu, who lived much of his life online, Vizzini has a very small profile there. His Facebook page claimed he lived in Paradise, Washington, but there is no such community. There is only the well-known place called Paradise on the south side of Mount Rainier National Park 60 miles southeast of Seattle. 

Vizzini appears to have been a graduate of the University of Washington and a member of the UW Climbing Club, but that has been hard to confirm. Calls to the club, apparent friends of Vizzini and his apparent employer have all gone unreturned.

On Facebook, however, Vizzini had described Stevens Pass, Wash., as his close-to-home ski area, and most who ski or snowboarder in that area – whether in the backcountry or at the Stevens Pass Resort – have some knowledge of avalanches.

The resort itself warns skiers and boarders of avalanche dangers in the area and offers an avalanche safety course to help people “learn the skills necessary to help keep you and your partners safe when traveling in avalanche terrain. Successful completion of our three-day introduction course to the avalanche phenomena” will, it said, give students a  results in “a good grounding in how to prepare for and carry out a backcountry trip, understand basic decision making while in the field and the concepts of a companion rescue.”

It is unknown whether Vizzini took the class, but it appeared he had been preparing well for his McKinley climb.

In November, he went to the Facebook page of San Francisco Backcountry Skiers to ask for help in finding good areas for aerobic training on skis in the Lake Tahoe area.

“Curious if there’s a particular route folks do in South Lake Tahoe for fitness ski touring laps?” he asked there. “Open to anything; more elevation the better; no concerns about the quality of skiing down. Will be spending a bit of my winter down here and gotta get in that aerobic work.”

Aerobic fitness is vital to climbing McKinley’s West Buttress, which is an uphill grunt that involves pulling sleds heavily loaded with gear up the Kahiltna Glacier to the 14,000-foot camp where the real climbing to the summit begins.

Vizzini appeared to be both getting shape for that task and adjusting to altitude.

On May 8, he turned to the Facebook page of Colorado 14ers to ask for help with altitude acclimatization.

“My buddy and I will be out in Leadville for 2 weeks for the back half of May acclimatizing for an attempt at climbing/skiing Denali,” he wrote there. “Is it possible to access Mt Sherman via county route 2b at the moment or in the very near future (May 16)….We’re looking for the easiest ways to get at or above 14 (14,000 feet) before we head out to Alaska. Am open to any other contenders that won’t take too much out of us as we taper into the trip.”

Sadly, all that planning ended with his death. The mountains of Alaska are very unforgiving of mistakes in judgment, and judging avalanche potential is never an easy task. Snow, by its nature, accumulates in layers, like a layer cake.

The strength of the “filling,” for lack of a better word, between the layers is hard to tell without digging pits to examine the pack, and even then, the composition of the snowpack in one area might be significantly different from that not far away.

And with so many things in Alaska, the real danger is often tied to something you don’t know might kill you.