Three Climbers Fell Together Near Denali's Summit. Only One Walked Away.

On the afternoon of May 27, 2026, four members of a seven-person Latvian expedition fell together near Denali Pass, the narrow, wind-scoured shoulder at 18,200 feet that every climber on North America's tallest mountain has to cross twice — once straining upward, once exhausted and coming down. Three of them died on the mountain. The fourth, Martins Bilzens, spent roughly ten hours alone and injured above 17,000 feet before a helicopter could reach him.

The thousand feet that decide who comes home

Denali tops out at 20,310 feet, the highest point in North America, and the West Buttress the Latvian team was climbing is the mountain's standard route — not technically extreme, which is exactly why it kills people. The danger sits in one specific stretch: the traverse between 17,200-foot High Camp and Denali Pass at 18,200 feet, a slope of hard, wind-polished snow and ice with little to arrest a slip, crossed by climbers who are already short of oxygen, cold, and — on the way down — running on empty. The National Park Service has long pointed to this exact section as the source of most of the mountain's serious falls and deaths, and it is where the four Latvian climbers came off the route.

Ten hours above 17,000 feet

Rangers reached the accident site the day after the fall and confirmed three of the climbers had died. Bilzens was alive but unable to move on his own, and the slope was too exposed and steep for a helicopter to land, so a National Park Service contract aircraft used a long-line — lowering a rescuer and litter on a cable while the helicopter held a hover — to lift him clear roughly ten hours after the accident. It is the same technique Himalayan rescue pilots use to pull injured climbers off the Khumbu Icefall and the upper slopes of Ama Dablam, for the same reason: there is nowhere flat enough, at that altitude, to simply put the aircraft down. The three remaining members of the seven-person expedition spent those hours helping with the rescue effort on the mountain, then began showing their own signs of exhaustion and cold; park crews flew them out the following day as a precaution. ‘It's immensely easy for something to happen and turn an otherwise straightforward trip into an epic,’ Denali climber Clint Helander, who has summited the mountain multiple times, told reporters after the accident — a line that fits most Denali accidents, not only this one.

What this means if a big mountain is on your list

Source: Anchorage Daily News, with additional reporting from US News and World Report, May 29, 2026.

Cover photo: AlaskaNPS via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).