DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE — A Denali National Park and Preserve employee died when he was caught in an avalanche while skiing in the backcountry, not far from the park’s entrance, officials said Friday.<\/p>\n
Eric Walter, who provided radio-based safety support and dispatch services for National Park Service operations across Alaska, died in the Thursday avalanche, the park said in a prepared statement.<\/p>\n
An individual told the park’s kennel staff that they saw a skier trigger an avalanche on an unnamed north-facing slope about 10 miles (16 kilometers) into the park, near the sprawling park’s only road.<\/p>\n
Responding rangers found an unoccupied truck parked about a mile away from the avalanche site. A ranger used a spotting scope to look for survivors in the avalanche debris.<\/p>\n
The ranger saw two skis, one vertical and the other lying flat on the surface, the statement said.<\/p>\n
The park’s mountaineering team, based in nearby Talkeetna, flew to the site on a contracted helicopter. Two rangers determined the skier, later identified as Walter, had died.<\/p>\n
“Our thoughts are with Eric’s family in this challenging time,” Denali Superintendent Brooke Merrell said in the statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE — A Denali National Park and Preserve employee died when he was caught in an avalanche while skiing in the backcountry, not far from the park’s entrance, officials said Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":98689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[779,230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-98688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-denali-national-park","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98688"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=98688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}