THE DEADLY BELLS

Climber Found Dead at 13,200 Feet on Notorious Killer Mountain

A specialist helicopter has been used to recover the hiker’s body after a six-day operation.

The body of a missing climber has been recovered at around 13,200 feet on Colorado’s treacherous Maroon Bells. The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office began searching on September 2 after finding notes in the person’s rental car that indicated plans to climb Maroon Peak or North Maroon Peak, two 14,000-foot summits in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. An aerial search the next morning found the climber “deceased and tentatively identified in very technical and difficult terrain to access,” the sheriff’s office said. The conditions delayed the recovery from the east face of the Bells until September 8. A helicopter equipped for a long-line extraction was brought in from Utah and lifted the victim to T Lazy 7 Ranch, where the county coroner was waiting. The hiker, whose identity has not been released, was found in an area long known as the “Deadly Bells”. The peaks are made of fragile mudstone, with loose rock and sudden fractures making climbs particularly hazardous. A Forest Service warning says the terrain can “kill without warning.” The nickname became firmly established after a deadly 1965 climbing season, when five accidents claimed eight lives. Between 2010 and 2017, the peaks recorded nine deaths, tying them with Longs Peak for the highest number of fatalities among Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains.