Three world-class mountaineers were presumed dead on Thursday after an avalanche in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
Renowned Austrian climbers David Lama and Hansjörg Auer, and American alpinist Jess Roskelley had been missing since a series of avalanches in Alberta’s Banff national park earlier this week.
The Canadian government agency Parks Canada said the three men were attempting to climb the east face of Howse Peak on the Icefields Parkway on Wednesday. Officials on Thursday said recovery efforts are on hold because of a continued risk of avalanches.
Lama is renowned as among the very best, if not the best, of the world’s “super-light” mountaineers who ascend peaks amazingly quickly, with minimal equipment.
Auer has a huge reputation for a very bold style of mountaineering and winter climbing, and Roskelley climbed Mount Everest at the age of 20 in 2003.
A sponsor of all three men, the apparel company The North Face, said on Thursday that they were presumed dead.
Parks Canada said experts responded to the emergency by air and observed signs of multiple avalanches and debris containing climbing equipment.
Roskelley’s father, John Roskelley, was himself a world-renowned climber who had many notable ascents in Nepal and Pakistan, mostly in the 1970s. John Roskelley joined his son on the successful Everest expedition in 2003.
Jess Roskelley grew up in Spokane, Washington, where his father was a county commissioner. John Roskelley told the Spokesman-Review the route his son and the other climbers were attempting was first done in 2000.
“It’s just one of those routes where you have to have the right conditions or it turns into a nightmare. This is one of those trips where it turned into a nightmare,” John Roskelley said.
On Thursday he was preparing to go to Canada to gather Jess Roskelley’s belongings and see if he could get into the area.
“It’s in an area above a basin,” he said. “There must have been a lot of snow that came down and got them off the face.”
He added: “When you’re climbing mountains, danger is not too far away … It’s terrible for my wife and I. But it’s even worse for his wife.”
Lama is considered a star of the free climbing scene. He was born in Innsbruck in 1990. In 2012, he managed the first free ascent of the famous, or in some respects infamous, so-called “compressor route” on the Cerro Torre peak in Patagonia, which had been controversially bolted to aid an ascent several decades before. In 2018 he succeeded in the first ascent of the notoriously difficult Lunag Ri peak in Nepal over the west pillar.
Hansjörg Auer, born in 1984, was widely admired for his breakthrough, free solo ascent of the Marmolata south face in the Dolomites and other rope-less climbs.