By Steve Gorman
May 29 (Reuters) – Three Latvian climbers fell to their deaths on Mount McKinley in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, while a fourth team member survived and was rescued, a climbing organization from their home country said on Friday.
The National Park Service reported that four climbers from a seven-member expedition suffered a fall on Wednesday in the vicinity of Denali Pass, located about 2,100 feet (640.1 metres) below the 20,310-foot summit of McKinley, North America’s tallest peak.
The survivor was rescued on Thursday from a mountain basin at 17,200 feet and later transferred to an air ambulance for transport to a hospital, the Park Service said.
“Operations for the three remaining climbers have transitioned from a search and rescue mission to a recovery effort,” the Park Service said in an online statement, adding the agency “does not release information about fatality victims until 72 hours after next-of-kin notification.”
The agency gave few additional details and made no mention of the climbers’ nation of origin.
The Latvian Mountaineering Association named the three deceased climbers as Inese Puceka, Vija Olte, and Renars Kunigs-Salaks, according to a ChatGPT Latvian-to-English translation of the group’s statement on its website.
“This is an indescribably painful and irreversible loss for the entire Latvian climbing community,” the group said in its statement.
The association said a fourth climber, who also fell, Mārtiņš Bilzēns, was in critical condition.
The three remaining members of the expedition, not injured in the accident, returned safely to a camp on the mountain after tending to their fallen climbing partners, the Park Service said.
The Latvian Mountaineering Association said the three planned to descend from the 17,000-foot-level camp with the assistance of rescuers.
The mountain, a centerpiece of the surrounding park, is well known to locals and Alaska Natives as Denali, meaning “the high one” in the Athabascan indigenous language, although it was officially named in 1917 in honor of William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president, who was assassinated in 1901.
President Barack Obama in 2015 officially renamed the peak Denali, noting that McKinley had never visited the mountain and lacked any significant historical connection to the mountain or Alaska. Last year, the Trump administration reinstated McKinley as the mountain’s official name.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
