New York ranger Robbi Mecus died while ice climbing Mount Johnson

A longtime New York ranger and trans advocate was killed Thursday night after falling more than 1,000 feet while trying to scale a steep cliff in Alaska, officials said.

Robbi Mecus, 52, of Keene Valley and his climbing partner both fell while ice climbing a particularly dangerous portion of Mount Johnson in Denali National Park, known as “the escalator,” according to the National Park Service.

Mecus, a transgender woman, died in the fall. His climbing partner, a 30-year-old California woman, survived with “severe traumatic injuries.”

Another climbing group witnessed the tragic fall and called for help around 10:45 p.m., but it took until 7 a.m. the next morning for the survivor to be airlifted to a hospital.

Mecus’ body was not found until Saturday morning, following deteriorating weather conditions the previous evening.

The avid outdoorsman has been a park ranger for the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Adirondack region for 25 years, having joined the company in 1999 at age 27, the agency said.

“I join the Department of Environmental Conservation family in mourning the sudden and tragic passing of Ranger Robbi Mecus,” DEC Acting Commissioner Sean Mahar said in a statement Saturday.

Mahar said Mecus “exemplifies the high level of professional excellence of the Forest Rangers,” emphasizing its rescue efforts, its work on complex searches and its deployments on wildfire response missions to the outside the state.

The acting commissioner also praised Mecus’ work to “advance LGBTQ diversity, inclusion and belonging across the agency.”

Mecus was also a leader in the Adirondack queer community, NCPR reported.

She told the outlet in 2021 that she struggled throughout her teenage years accepting her gender identity. She finally waited until her forties to make the transition: “I was scared and I didn’t know how I was going to live my life. »

This difficult time is when she discovered her love for rock climbing and ice climbing and opened herself up to a community that didn’t include many queer people, which gave her the opportunity to become a leader .

“There are many reasons why I didn’t come out until I was 44, but one of them was that I didn’t see anyone else doing the things I wanted always do and I didn’t think I could do them,” Mecus said in 2021. “I haven’t seen any queer rangers. I didn’t see any trans climbers.

According to her social media, Mecus had traveled to Alaska several times for expeditions over the years.

She even managed to create “the Escalator” last year.

It’s unclear what exactly went wrong on his latest climb, but park officials warn that the path to the summit of 8,400-foot Mount Johnson is among the most dangerous.

“The approximately 5,000-foot course involves navigating a mix of steep rocks, ice and snow,” the National Park Service said.

Mecus is survived by his daughter and his former wife, who live in the Keene Valley community.

Denali National Park and Preserve is about 240 miles north of Anchorage.