Grand County rescuers end risky recovery mission as climbers set speed records on remote peak above deceased climber
In the weeks before Vincent Pane fell to his death, teams rescued one runner and recovered two bodies in the same area
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Rescuers in Grand County agonized over their decision earlier this month to end the work to recover the body of a hiker who fell down the remote and dangerous Arikaree Peak in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
“It’s extremely difficult to leave somebody on the mountain. It’s not what we want to ever do,” said Dale Atkins with the Alpine Rescue Team who worked with Grand County Search and Rescue on a plan to recover the hiker’s body on a steep talus field below the 13,164-foot Arikaree Peak.
Atkins has worked as a backcountry rescuer in Colorado since 1974. There have been rare instances when rescuers decide to leave a body on a mountain for a period of time before conditions improve and teams can reach the person.
“But this is the first one I’ve been involved in where, as rescuers, we had to say no,” he said.
As rescuers crafted a complicated and risky plan to reach the body of Vincent Pane, a 31-year-old adventurer, artist and scientist from Longmont, fast-and-light alpine runners scrambled across Arikaree Peak, setting fastest-known-time records on a route known as the L.A. Freeway, which stretches 38 miles across 19 summits from Long’s Peak to the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
In the weeks before Pane’s fall on Aug. 28, rescuers from Grand and Boulder counties had rescued one stranded peak runner and recovered the bodies of two light-and-quick runners below peaks on the L.A. Freeway route.
“The traverse that just begs to be completed”
Arikaree Peak is one of seven 13,000-foot peaks in the 73,400-acre Indian Peaks Wilderness straddling the Continental Divide. While the Indian Peaks Wilderness is one of the most popular wilderness areas in Colorado, with an estimated 150,000 visitors every summer, Arikaree Peak is rarely traversed. The city of Boulder, which began buying land in the lake-dappled peaks along the Continental Divide in the early 1900s, restricts public access to Arikaree Peak, which is among several summits inside the city’s Silver Lake watershed where hiking and climbing are not allowed.
But with the popularity of speedy high-alpine scrambling by light-and-quick athletes, the remote summits of the Indian Peaks Wilderness are seeing increased traffic.
Three days after Pane’s fall, Boulder’s legendary mountain runner Anton Krupicka raced across Arikaree Peak, setting a fastest-known-time record for the L.A. Freeway traverse from Longs Peak to South Arapaho Peak. The professional endurance athlete raced across 19 summits, covering 35 miles and 21,000 vertical feet, in 13 hours, 20 minutes and 48 seconds.
“Living in Boulder, when you look west to the Continental Divide skyline, LAF is the traverse that just begs to be completed,” Krupicka wrote in his trip report of his record-setting run on fastestknowntime.com. “Pretty proud of this run. One of my better efforts ever, tbh.”
On Aug. 17, Estes Park climber Steph Abegg set the female self-supported fastest-known-time record for L.A. Freeway, finishing the route in 39 hours and 45 minutes. (Per the FKT rules, an unsupported record like Krupicka’s means he carried everything he needed while Abegg’s self-supported traverse included water stashed at two locations.)
On Sept. 7, Abegg returned to the route with two other athletes and set the female FKT for supported racing, at 29 hours, 51 minutes.
On July 24, Grand County rescuers helped recover the body an alpine trail runner near Lone Eagle Peak who had planned a swift push up and over two technical summits in the Indians Peaks Wilderness.
On Aug. 31, the day of Krupicka’s speedy traverse, a stranded hiker on the L.A. Freeway route atop Mount Toll needed helicopter rescue by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. A few days earlier the Boulder rescue group recovered the body of a missing hiker near the L.A. Freeway’s Shoshoni Peak.
Rescuers “are risk takers but we are not risk seekers”
Pane and a running partner were not on the L.A. Freeway route when he fell several hundred feet down a ridgeline leading to the summit of Arikaree Peak. Rescuers responded that day and spotted the climber’s body below a steep couloir on a field of loose talus. A doctor on a helicopter concluded Pane did not survive the fall and gusting winds, as well as the treacherous location, prevented rescuers from reaching the body.
A member of Pane’s family did not respond to requests for an interview.
On Sept. 6, Grand County Search and Rescue and members of the Alpine Rescue Team planned a recovery mission with a crew flown to a high point near the peak and a team in a helicopter. The plan called for a technical team to climb down the peak about 500 feet to reach the body of the hiker, package him for transport and move to a location where the helicopter could long-line the body off the mountain. The ground crew would then climb up the couloir and return to the ridge for helicopter pick up.
It was a complex and dangerous plan and both the ground crew and the team in the helicopter had the ability to cancel the mission if risks spiked.
Atkins said the couloir below the peak was “exceptionally rugged” with “horrendously loose” rock.
“This mountain is just crisscrossed with deep couloirs with towering fins of rocks and pinnacles and it’s all wanting to fall down. There were a lot of very experienced rescuers who looked at this challenge and we all came away with the same feeling that, technically, it was doable,” Atkins said. “But the level of risk was exceptional; beyond what is reasonable for rescuers. And we as rescuers are risk takers but we are not risk seekers.”
The golden rule of search and rescue is to never make an incident worse. The safety of volunteer rescuers is paramount in all missions.
In August 2021, a 32-year-old Wisconsin man fell to his death on Capitol Peak in the Elk Mountains near Aspen, one of the most challenging and dangerous 14ers in the state. Three members of Mountain Rescue Aspen were injured trying to reach Kelly McDermott’s body about 500 feet below the ridge called Knife Edge, with sheer drops on both sides. In September 2021, Mountain Rescue Aspen said McDermott’s body would remain on the 14,130-foot peak.
Grand County Search and Rescue veteran Greg Foley said rescuers could get within 300 feet of Pane’s body on Sept. 6 “but the problem was what were we going to do when we got there.”
Ideally rescuers would need 8 to 12 people to safely move a body down a steep mountain and that was not possible on Arikaree Peak, Foley said.
“This was a tough one,” Foley said.
Growing concern over light-and-fast mountain runners
Foley is the field director for Grand County Search and Rescue and the state coordinator for the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, which is involved in most helicopter-assisted hoist rescues in the state. He started working in search and rescue with Atkins at Alpine Rescue in 1979 and moved to the Grand County team in 1984. He has participated in more than 1,000 rescue missions in Colorado’s backcountry and he’s troubled by the light-and-quick trend on remote peaks.
When hikers are on a trail, they are relatively easy to access, Foley said. But these speedy adventurers are pushing well beyond trails — often without a lot of safety equipment as they move quickly through challenging alpine terrain that does not have cellphone access — “they are giving us some issues,” Foley said.
Last year, Grand County rescuers were part of a multiteam effort in a five-day search in Rocky Mountain National Park for a missing trail runner who was planning a 28-mile route across the Continental Divide. On Oct. 9, 2023, rescuers suspended the search for 49-year-old Chad Pallansch, who remains missing.
“This group is requiring more search and rescues than their numbers support. There are not many of them but they are requiring a lot of search and rescue effort. An inordinate amount, in my opinion,” Foley said. “Even something as simple as twisting an ankle can be life threatening to these guys. And they don’t appear to be carrying basic survival stuff so that if something happens, you can take care of yourself. They rarely have shelter or extra clothes or extra food or water.”
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Foley’s issues mirror those raised by rescuers in southern Colorado in 2022 after two technical mountaineering runners went missing in remote mountainous terrain. The rescuers around Durango joined running groups in calling for increased education around technical trail running, citing a growing list of rescue missions involving speed-focused endurance runners in steep alpine terrain.
It’s not that the ultra runners are making mistakes. It’s that they are in areas where a tiny misstep can be disastrous and they often have little more than a water bottle with them.
“I suspect a lot of these people truly love being in the mountains and they are super skilled and they are a bit of thrill-seekers,” Atkins said. “But when a rock breaks from under your foot or in your hand, it does not matter how good you are. You are at the mercy of nature.”
