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.

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 Alaska Range with Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake with Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus) in the fall, Denali National Park, Alaska. (Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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.