Experienced climber dies after 3,000-foot plummet from North America's highest peak

A Seattle man died after falling 3,000 feet from a climbing route at Denali National Park in Alaska, the National Park Service said Wednesday.

Alex Chiu, 41, was ascending the West Buttress route of Mount McKinley on Monday, June 2, one of the park’s most frequently climbed routes, while not attached to a rope, the agency said in a statement. 

He was ski mountaineering, which involves ascending and descending the route with skis. He was joined by two others in his expedition to conquer North America's highest peak.

Two others witnessed his fall onto the rocky face covered in jagged ice, and lowered themselves over the edge as far as they could, but they could not see or hear him after the fall, officials said.

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The mountaineers descended the route to ask for assistance at Camp 1, which is located around 7,800 feet up the mountain. 

Due to high winds and snow, ground and air search teams were unable to quickly reach the area where he had fallen on Monday. On Wednesday, clear weather allowed two rangers to depart Talkeetna, a village south of the mountain, in a helicopter search for Chiu.

When his body was found, it was transferred to the state medical examiner, the agency said. Fox News Digital has reached out to the Alaska State Medical Examiner's Office for Chiu's official cause of death.

Chiu was an aerospace engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration and, before that, a software engineer at Boeing, according to his LinkedIn profile. On his social media accounts, he described himself as a storyteller, traveler, scuba diver, rock climber, alpinist and marathon runner.

He wrote on his Instagram account about how living in Seattle allowed him to take his ice-climbing tools to the mountains every weekend. He shared that following the daily grind of his 9-to-5, he would pack up his gear and head to the mountains.

"I had become so good at what I did that I started teaching others how to do it, and that was even more fun to teach others how to experience the joy you have in these wild places," he wrote in an Instagram post. "When I am in the mountains, I realize I was at my best. I was smart, witty, passionate, and bold."

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The pandemic put the brakes on his alpine climbs, but he dreamed of heading back to the climb.

"So tomorrow I am getting on an airplane to Alaska," he wrote in an Instagram post on May 19, "in an attempt to climb the third-highest peak in the world because I don’t want to know what happens to a dream deferred."

The busiest season on the mountain lasts from mid-May to mid-June; there were about 500 climbers on it Wednesday, the agency said. Chiu is one of several people who have died while climbing Mount McKinley or other areas of Denali National Park.

In April 2024, 52-year-old Robbi Mecus, of Keene Valley, New York, fell to his death while climbing an estimated 1,000 feet off Mount Johnson in the national park. 

The NPS said that a similar accident happened in 2010, in a similar location. That incident involved an unroped French mountaineer, who fell to his death on the Peters Glacier. His body was never recovered.