The late Robin Pendery/Alpine Ascents International

And a lot of questions

A news analysis

On a mountain where skis have, over the years, increasingly replaced snowshoes as the tool of choice for glacier travel, a National Park Service ranger reportedly on skis has died in a crevasse fall.

The Park Service has said little about what happened.

A seven-paragraph statement posted online Friday, 24 hours after the incident, revealed only that “Robin Pendery of Enumclaw, Wash.; a seasonal mountaineering ranger assigned to Denali National Park and Preserve,” had died ” near 14,000 Foot Camp on Mount McKinley.”

Then officials disappeared for the weekend.

The statement said Pendery’s death was “under investigation, and additional details are not available at this time.”

The standard information that would be, and classically has been, in every other statement issued about a climbing fatality on the mountain was missing, starting with Pendery’s age. But there was more:

Where was she on the mountain?

Was she traveling alone or with others?

And if she was with others, was she roped?

These are not difficult questions requiring an “investigation.” They are simple questions, the answers to which would be known to everyone on the scene at or after the time of the fall.

The headline on the Park Service post described the ranger’s death as taking place “during  (a) mountaineering patrol.”

If that was the case, she would have been traveling from one of the mountain camps to somewhere, but the statement didn’t say where she was going. And it being the weekend, there were no Park Service officials around to answer questions about a statement that mainly tried to direct attention to the agency’s concern about “supporting the employee’s family, friends and colleagues during this difficult time.”

Denali Park Superintendent Brooke Merrell was quoted feeling “heartbroken by the loss of a member of our Denali family. Our mountaineering rangers dedicate themselves to serving visitors and helping others in one of the most challenging environments in the world. Today, we mourn the loss of a valued colleague, friend and teammate. Our thoughts are with Robin’s family and loved ones.”

The statement made it look like the Park Service wanted to treat Pendery’s death as nothing but a tragic accident, and though there is no doubt her death was tragic, there are big questions to be asked about whether the death was an accident.

Booby-trapped mountain

Crevasse falls of one sort or another can almost be described as “normal” on North America’s tallest peak. Most of the popular West Buttress route from the 7,200-foot McKinley basecamp on the Kahiltna Glacier to the summit winds it ways up glaciers.

It is not unusual for a climber on this route to punch through a snowbridge over a crevasse. Often it is no more than a foot or leg going through, but sometimes an entire snowbridge collapses, and someone falls deep into the glacial crack.

This is why it is standard practice for climbers to travel roped on the mountain’s glaciers. Park Service regulations for “Guided Mountaineering” stipulate that  “when traveling on glaciers or in other hazardous terrain, guides and clients must travel roped up to a partner.

“Guides and clients may un-rope at camps or rest areas on glaciers once the guide has designated a safe area.”

“Safe areas” on the mountain are those that have been ‘probed’ by guides, climbers or rangers to ensure that there are no hidden crevasses covered by dangerously thin snowbridges that could collapse.  Mountain Trip, a long-established Denali guide operation, warns it clients that “often, crevasses may give no hints to their location, and it might be necessary to probe the surface of the snow to find them.

“This is especially the case when establishing a camp on a glacier. It’s important for every member of a roped team to be on high alert in this scenario, at the ready to arrest in case any member falls.

The Park Service statement after Pendery’s death left open the possibility that she was walking around near the now busy 14,000-foot camp when she fell into a crevasse, but reports coming back from other climbers on the mountain were that she may have been skiing from the 14,000 camp to the based of the fixed lines that protect climbers on the steep grunt up the 800-foot Headwall on the last pitch to high camp at 17,200 feet. 

The approach to the Headwall is one of the places where climbers on skis are sometimes seen traveling unroped. Whether that was the case here is at this time unknown.

There are also other rumors as to whether Pendery was on patrol when the fall happened or out enjoying a day on skis. Being a temporary ranger for the Park Service is not a high-paying job, but it does come with potential perks some rangers have been known to enjoy.

A 33-year-old trained as an avalanche forecaster with knowledge of the slopes of McKinley from at least a couple of years of temporary service on the mountain, Pendery might have felt it safe to travel unroped from the 14,000-foot camp to the fixed lines just for the chance to get out of camp and spend some quality time alone on the mountain.

Experienced people make these sorts of decisions. As the outdoor editor for the Anchorage Daily News in the 1980s through the 2000s, I made more than a few decisions to engage in wilderness travel in ways that might have been judged by others to be unsafe.

But safety is a moving target, and it is unclear what restrictions the Park Service imposes on rangers skiing. The policies for staff, as opposed to the policies for concessionaires, are unclear. The agency’s “Denali Dispatches” from last year appear to show skiing rangers traveling both roped and unroped. 

A Park Service ski patrol at Windy Corner last year/NPS, Taylor Guetschow

Skiing roped isn’t that bad going uphill with sticky-bottomed “climbing skins’‘ on the skis, but it isn’t all that much fun going downhill.

“There’s something very enticing about the idea of skiing on Denali,” the American Alpine Institute says on its blog. “You’re on a high mountain. There’s beautiful, cold snow. And the turns go on forever.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t really how it plays out on the mountain. It is possible to use skis up there, but it isn’t easy. Indeed, many expert skiers find it to be incredibly frustrating.”

The blog goes on to list a whole lost of issues with skiing roped. Among them:

• Keeping a rope properly tensioned on skis is difficult, increasing crevasse hazard.
• Skiing downhill while roped is awkward; in several sections you may end up carrying skis and losing the floatation advantage entirely.
• Mixed teams of skiers and snowshoers rarely move in sync, which slows progress and causes constant stops and starts.
• In a crevasse fall, a skier may be pulled off-balance much faster and may struggle to arrest because turning skis sideways in a deep bootpack is extremely hard.
• Falling into a crevasse with skis on makes getting out much harder.
• Falls are more common with a large pack and sled.
• A sled (with gear) may pull from the front, yank from the side, or slam into your heels from behind, all of which make control difficult.

For these reasons, skiers often end up skiing unroped.  Brooklyn-born Alex Chiu, who honed his skiing skills in the Pacific Northwest, was on a ski descent just below Windy Corner last year when he fell, found himself unable to arrest his slide downhill toward a 3,000-foot drop to the Peters Glaicer, and went over the edge.

He tragically died as a result of the injuries suffered in that fall.

Seasonal ranger Pendery, 33, was reported to be an expert skier. The Crystal Mountain Resort, high on the slopes of Washington state’s Mount Rainier, described her as a long-time member of the resort’s ski patrol who moved on to work as “a forecaster for the Northwest Avalanche Center and a guide for Alpine Ascents International.”

In a Q-and-A on the Alpine Ascents webpage that asked her “what’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not guiding,” she answered “Skiing! Powder, corn, trap crust, mash potatoes, I love it all.”

Sadly, the things you love in the mountains are also the things that can get you killed in Alaska.

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