Perspective: When people perish in national parks

May 11, 6:27 PMNational Parks Recreation ExaminerRandi Minetor

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Mt. McKinley rises above Denali National Park.

We see the news stories and we shake our heads:  Someone has died by accident in a national park. Surely that person must have done something foolish, we tell ourselves.  Certainly he or she didn’t understand that the natural world can be a dangerous place.

Last summer, a climber fell 800 feet in Grand Teton National Park—a man with considerable climbing experience, who could not break his rapid fall with his ice axe. This spring, a 67-year-old California resident fell while climbing the Great Burrito in Joshua Tree National Park, sustaining fatal head injuries. We hear these stories and we think that these people probably took unnecessary risks; perhaps it was hubris to make such a climb in the first place.

I may have thought such things when strangers were involved. But this past weekend, 61-year-old Bill Hearne collapsed and died at 13,500 feet while participating in an expedition on Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. Bill was physically fit, an experienced climber and the founder of a running club in Fairport, NY—a suburb of Rochester, my hometown. My husband, Nic, and I knew Bill through his volunteer role as treasurer for Mercury Opera in Rochester, for which Nic is the lighting designer.

Bill had no reason to believe that he could not complete the climb to the top of Denali; he had considerable climbing experience, and he was with an expedition led by professionals. An avid runner, cyclist and hiker with at least several marathons to his credit, he served as a spin class instructor at the downtown YMCA in Rochester and organized a running club in Fairport, often running more than ten miles at a stretch.  In 2008, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, the highest peak in Africa at 15,100 feet.

“In the two weeks before he left, he was looking so fit that I commented to him how good he looked,” said Lynn Zicari, a staff member at Mercury Opera.  “I had never seen him so fit.  He told me that in addition to the six spin classes per week he taught and his regular runs, he was weight lifting three times a week.  To prepare himself for the heavy loads he would have to carry, he was hiking Bristol Mountain [a 2200-foot peak in New York’s Finger Lakes region] with a 60-pound pack and a loaded sled attached to a harness he was wearing…He was physically fit before he started to get in shape for this trip, and he was experienced in hiking in higher elevations. How it affected him physically was no secret to him.”

It will be some time before we know—if we ever do—what exactly made Bill collapse on his way between camps at 11,200 feet and 14,000 feet, as he and other climbers ferried supplies up the 20,320-foot mountain. The Anchorage Daily News reports that two National Park Service mountaineering rangers worked with the expedition guides to administer CPR, but they could not revive him—and his body has been secured on the mountain until it can be evacuated by helicopter.

I can’t help but think about the risks so many of us take in national parks—trekking through the desert with limited supplies of water, hiking to elevations higher than those to which our bodies are accustomed, tracking into wilderness with nothing but a topographical map and a compass…and scaling the highest mountain on the continent.  We do these things because we believe we can; we take the precautions we believe to be adequate while standing at the trailhead, perhaps not fully realizing what may lay ahead. We do the best that we can do to ensure our safe return from our journeys into the wild—and in the vast majority of cases, we arrive home intact, with a little more trail savvy than we had when we started.

The fact is, however, that we face the natural world with only our own bodies and a handful of supplies—and sometimes, much to our own wonder, the danger turns out to be hidden inside, not out in the wild.

My thoughts and prayers go to Bill Hearne’s family and close friends for their untimely and tragic loss.