Parks Officials Try To Figure Out How Two Killed Minnesotan, New Yorker Fell To Deaths Climbing To Aid Of Injured Californian

Through 40-mph winds, driving snow and subfreezing temperatures, two summer rescue workers crept up the treacherously slick, fresh ice atop Mount Rainier’s Emmons Glacier.

By late Saturday night, they were nearing their goal, a climber who had broken his ankle while descending from the mountain’s 14,411-foot summit.

At about 13,200 feet, 200 feet below the climber, they slipped and fell 1,400 feet to their deaths, the first to die in a mountain-climbing rescue mission in the 96-year history of Mount Rainier National Park.

The only clues they left were an ice ax, a piece of crampon and scuff marks in the ice, chief naturalist Bill Dengler and assistant chief ranger William A. Larson said Monday.

Crampons, standard mountaineering gear, are spiky iron plates that can be attached to boots for better traction in ice and hard-packed snow. Ice axes are used to stop a slide or fall.

“The big question is, ‘OK, did my crampon come apart, we stopped to repair it and something went wrong during that time and we slipped? Or did the crampon break and that’s what threw us off balance? Or were we thrown off balance and then the crampon broke?’

“We don’t know what the situation was then,” Dengler said.

“I don’t think we ever will,” said Larson, an 18-year park veteran.

Flags flew at half-staff throughout the park Monday, the day after the bodies of the 23-year-old summer climbing ranger from Minnesota and a 22-year-old student conservation assistant from New York were recovered from the upper reaches of the glacier. Their names were being withheld.

The summer ranger had just finished college and was paid $9.49 an hour. The conservation assistant got $50 a week plus housing.

The climber they were trying to save, John Graver, 40, of Santa Cruz, Calif., was found by another rescue team Sunday and taken by helicopter to a hospital, where he was treated for a broken ankle and released.