Dedicated Climber and Forest Ranger Robbi Mecus Killed in Alaska

Climber and New York state forest ranger Robbi Mecus, 52, was killed in a fall on Alaska’s Mt. Johnson.

According to a statement from Denali National Park, at approximately 10:45 p.m. on April 25 a separate climbing party saw a two-person team fall 1,000 feet from The Escalator (III 5.5 AI 3; 4,400 ft) on the mountain’s Southeast Face. That group was able to descend to the fallen climbers, where they confirmed that one of the pair—since identified as Mecus—had died. The second climber, Melissa Orzechowski, survived with serious injuries. Orzechowski was cared for by the responding group, who dug a snow cave and administered basic first aid, until a helicopter arrived for an evacuation early the next morning.

Robbi Mecus was a fixture in the Adirondacks, where she worked as a forest ranger for 25 years. Along with being a respected and prolific rescuer of stranded hikers and climbers, described by her colleagues as one of the best rangers in the state, she was also a well-known advocate for greater inclusion in the outdoors.

“She was an incredible climber,” says Katie Ives, the former editor of Alpinist magazine. Ives edited Mecus at the magazine and also climbed with her several times in the Adirondacks and the Gunks. “She was also really encouraging—she’d take people climbing of all ability levels, she was very encouraging of other women, and it was very much about making people feel comfortable in vertical wild places.”

Mecus came out as trans at 44 years old. A couple of years later, she described her reception, as a climber who was now also an out trans woman, in a 2019 Alpinist story called “Perspective.”

“Prior to transition, I didn’t think I could continue to climb if I came out,” she wrote. “The onslaught of seemingly innocuous sexual jokes and vague references to women’s weakness convinced me that I would be an object of ridicule. Everyone says that we shouldn’t care what other people think of us. Yet it was hard to let go of a lifetime of feeling shame and guilt about being trans, about being something that our society so casually mocks. I felt my confidence would shatter the moment I exposed the truth of myself – and confidence was the key trait I needed to climb with joy and happiness. Recently, however, a friend took a picture of me leading a route. For the first time, I saw nothing more than what the picture showed: a woman moving over the rock, absorbed in the moment, and at peace with herself.”

Ives, the editor on that story, remembers Mecus as one of her favourite writers to work with. “Everything she did, she brought this incredible sense of integrity to it,” Ives says. “This attention to detail, this desire to create something that’s as powerful and meaningful and helpful as possible.”

Trans climber and climbing photographer Nikki Smith built a friendship with Mecus after Smith came out publicly in 2018. “She was the first trans woman that I ever got to climb with,” Smith says. “Just having someone else who’d gone through the same experiences I did, a little earlier than I did – I got to ask questions that I wasn’t able to get answers from anyone else: on how her life had gone, how had the climbing community been, how had hormones and transition affected her body, and what did that mean to her climbing?”

Mecus was determined to reduce the isolation experienced by so many queer and trans climbers. “There are many reasons I didn’t come out until I was 44,” she told NPR in 2021, “but one of them was because I didn’t see anybody else doing the things that I still wanted to do and I didn’t think I could do them… I didn’t see any queer rangers. I didn’t see any trans climbers.”

Beyond reaching out to individuals like Smith, Mecus worked on larger-scale community building, too. Alongside Orzechowski and fellow climber Nol Huther, Mecus co-founded Adirondack Queer Ice Fest, a no-cost annual festival that launched in 2022, aiming to create space for queer and trans people to explore and enjoy ice climbing. Their third event, this past February, drew more than 100 participants.

Mecus also kept pulling lost hikers out of harm’s way. Just two weeks before her death in Alaska, she was featured in a New York Times story about a gruelling all-night winter rescue effort that ended when she found the man she’d been searching for. He was hypothermic and frostbitten, but alive.

Most of the time, she told the Times, “it’s hard to say with certainty I saved somebody’s life today. It’s hard to say if that person would not have gotten out on their own.” But this time, she knew: “This person would not have.”

Separate fundraisers have been launched to support Robbi Mecus’s family and Melissa Orzechowski’s medical costs and recovery.

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