Daryl Miller at his prime in 1995 at the start of an epic, 45-day circumnavigation of the Denali Massif with partner Mark Stasik/Roger Robinson photo
Goodby Daryl
A U.S. Marine who emerged from the jungles of Vietnam to become a legend for saving lives as a National Park Service ranger on Mount McKilney has seen his last Alaska sunrise.
Daryl Miller died Tuesday at home among friends and family. He was 82 years old, and he went out the way he wanted to go out.
He abhorred the idea of lives lost in the wilderness only to be rationalized as the deaths of people doing what they loved. The goal of wilderness adventure, in Miller’s mind, was to survive to go back for the next adventure. And he survived lots of adventures.
He always made it home until there was no chance to make it anywhere.
All that really needs to be said about Miller’s stature in the 49th state was well summarized by notable, veteran Alaska climber Charlie Sassarra in four words yesterday:
“He saved us all.”
Some he saved in person. In his decades on the slopes of North America’s tallest peak, he was involved in at least 80 rescues. The mountain guides of Italy in 1997 recognized his efforts to save lives, some of them Italian, with the International Alpine ‘Taga D’Argento Solidarity Award, an honor never before awarded to an American.
But Miller saved more by preaching the gospel of safety. He believed that wilderness survival was the responsibility of everyone who ventured into the wild in the north. A year ago, as a man who had by then been hobbled by Parkinson’s disease for years, he wrote a commentary for the webpage of Denali National Park and Preserve titled “Survival is Your Own Responsibility.”
“Many times, I have tried to warn climbers and backpackers of nature’s cold and harsh realities,” he wrote there. “The Alaska environment can be extremely unfriendly to humans. It is indifferent and unforgiving. On top of that, the scale of Alaska is easily underestimated. Most people set unrealistic expectations. Ten miles cross-country in Alaska is not like 10 miles on trail systems in the lower 48, but more like 30 or 40 trail miles.
“Arrogance about the outdoors blinds people to these things. Unfamiliarity with Alaska’s arctic and sub-arctic conditions and a sometimes total disregard for elementary principles of safety simply compound the problems.
I have seen this firsthand too many times. It is a sad and painful task to tell family and friends when someone is lost or dead in the mountains.”
Difficult job
Too many times, Miller had to deliver that last message to families and friends. It weighed on him, and he was no wimpy wallflower.
The son of a Washington state logger, Miller was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for helping friends steal a sign off the second story of the historic Walla Walla State Prison nd relocating it to the side of their school, a pretty harmless prank by today’s standards.
As a result, his father, a strict disciplinarian, kicked him out of the house, and without many options for survival, Miller enlisted in the Marines before he was old enough to vote.
He shipped off to Vietnam a few years later for the first of three tours. Miller went back not because he loved war, but because he believed he could help save other young, innocent Marines sent into combat. This sort of thinking was destined to run through what was a very interesting life long before Miller arrived intAlaska.
He left the Marines to go on a cage-fighting tour of the U.S, but not of the sort anyone thinks of when cage fighting is mentioned these days. This one involved trained chimpanzees who never lost a bout.
“It was unbelievable,” Miller said. His boss enticed “the town toughs, the bullies,” into the cage with promises of a big payday if they could best a chimp. They got pummeled. And Miller and boss Bob Noell moved on.
“If you were macho or stupid enough, you would do it. Mae (Bob’s wife) estimates that chimps such as Snookie and, later, Joe the Boxer and Kongo, met approximately 50,000 human beings in pugilistic encounters. After 31 years, the score was chimps 50,000, humans zero.”
For his part, Miller got tired of watching chimps beat up people and moved on pretty quickly, ending up next as a ranch hand in Montana. He quickly worked his way up to foreman, developed an interest in rodeo, and during a roping event got asked to help out as a clown for a kid’s rodeo.
Next thing he knew, he was being recruited as a full-time rodeo clown and subsequently went off to “bull-fighting” school, where clowns are taught to distract the bulls while still staying alive. His first bull at school hooked him by his suspenders and tossed him over a 10-foot fence.
It scared him badly and made him want to drop the bull fighting, but he hung in and spent three years running from bulls when he wasn’t injured. The injuries took their toll, and he decided the wise thing to do was to go back to school on the GI Bill.
He ended up studying outdoor recreation at Northern Montana College. That led to connections with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in nearby Wyoming and set the stage for Miller’s first contact with Alaska, a contact which looked to be his last.
Alaska sucks
Miller came north with a NOLS group to climb McKinley in 1981 via the little-used Pioneer Route from the north and got his ass kicked.
The climbers ended up pinned down for nine days at 17,000 feet in a hellacious July storm and almost didn’t make it off the mountain. Miller later credited NOLS instructor Lucy Smith, now a retired and revered member of the NOLS family, with holding the group together to get everyone safely down.
Afterward, Miller swore he’d never go back to Alaska. Five years on, as a then-outdoor education instructor for Colorado State University, he changed his mind when asked to lead a group of students up the mountain. They didn’t make the summit, but they had a good time.
And Miller met young Denali climbing ranger Roger Robinson from Talkeetna. A friendship formed that would last a lifetime.
Miller invited Robinson to Fort Collins to do a McKinley slide show in 1988. Robinson invited Miller north to join a ranger patrol in 1989. The rest is history.
A stint as a guide on Mount McKinley followed not long after. It was a job that Miller didn’t particularly enjoy. But when the Park Service offered him a McKinley ranger job in 1991, with the promise he’d be spending his time in the field and not in an office, he jumped at the opportunity.
“He was such a great friend!!” Robinson messaged on Tuesday. “We worked together as friends and rangers for over 30 years. It was tough, joyous, and sad at times, but he always had my back during all these years.
“We miss him so very much.”
Roberts sent along the photo from the start of the unprecedented and yet-to-be repeated, 350-mile circumnavigation of the Denali Massif that several times almost cost Miller and partner Mark Stastik their lives, but didn’t.
Because the primary objective in Miller’s mind was always to come back alive.
Editor’s note: The author would normally be able to go on at length here, but finds himself unable to do so for probably the first time in his life. Anyone interested in more of this story might want to go back and read the We Alaskans story that can be found here: https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/article/alaska-life-lived-large/2009/02/08/
It’s a good read. But Miller’s death, despite the fact that it has been on horizon since his Parkinson’s was diagnosed, hit hard on a personal level.
As a working journalist of the old school, it was a rule that you tried hard to avoid making friends in the bureaucracy, because friendships, more than anything, make objectivity hard. Sometimes near impossible.
Miller, a naturally gregarious guy, nonetheless became a friend, more so after his retirement than before. Probably because we shared similar views on how people should behave in the wilderness. But he was also one of the investigators who backed up my initial reporting about a deadly fall on Chugach State Parks’ Ptarmigan Peak that killed two students enrolled in a University of Alaska climbing class.
The university originally argued that sticking ice axes in soft snow was enough to save roped teams of climbers from falling to their deaths on sheer slopes. As a matter of physics, the position was a joke. An ice ax stuck in soft snow doesn’t offer much more support than a nail in nothing but sheet rock.
The class instructors, Miller and NOLS Executive Director Jim Ratz would write after investigating that fall that left two dead and 13 injured, some badly, had “mistakenly thought that the combination of the students being roped together, their newly learned ability to plunge step and self-arrest, and the ‘anchoring’ technique described earlier represented a redundant system. In fact, with no fixed protection, each roped team was dependent upon every person to perform flawlessly. Thus any uncontrolled fall could have resulted in an uncontrolled descent of the entire roped team. Considering the minimal experience the students had, they should not have been relied upon as a critical component of a ‘safety system.'”
When it came to wilderness safety and responsible wilderness behavior, Daryl was not a guy willing to ignore realities. The goal when you go out there is to have fun and return, not to come back in a body bag, leaving your friends and family to lament how you died doing what you loved.
It’s sad Daryl won’t be around to continue preaching that gospel. The world could use more such preachers. They might save some people’s lives.
