A rock climber died on Sunday evening after he fell from Devils Tower National Monument, a hulking rock formation in northeast Wyoming, park officials said.
The climber, Stewart Phillip Porter, 21, of Eau Claire, Wis., fell shortly before 8 p.m. while rappelling the second pitch of El Cracko Diablo, one of the hundreds of parallel cracks that divide the roughly 870-foot tower into large columns, the National Park Service said in a news release Monday. It did not say how far Mr. Porter fell, and calls and emails to the service on Tuesday were not immediately returned.
The authorities found Mr. Porter about 8:40 p.m., and paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene from “major injuries.” Around the same time, a search team found Mr. Porter’s climbing partner, who was stranded and needed to be rescued from the tower, officials said. The partner’s name was not released.
It was unclear what had led to Mr. Porter’s fall, but the park’s news release said that most climbing deaths and accidents at the tower happen when climbers descend.
Mr. Porter was the seventh recorded climbing death at Devils Tower, which has been a popular climbing destination for more than 100 years, park officials said.
He was also the fourth killed while descending the monument, according to the Park Service.
Each year, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 climbers scale the monument, which offers sweeping views of the hilly ranges that surround it, officials said.
“While climbing fatalities at Devils Tower are infrequent,” the Park Service said in its release, “it is still inherently dangerous.”
Mr. Porter was the latest person to die at a site managed by the Park Service.
Falls are among the leading causes of death in national parks, behind vehicle accidents and drownings, according to Park Service data from 2014 to 2019, the most recent period with verified death information.
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