ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – A Washington state skier was killed Tuesday after sliding about 1,600 feet in an avalanche on a slope of Alaska’s tallest mountain.
The skier — identified as 29-year-old Nicholas Vizzini by officials with Denali National Park and Preserve — was skiing down a slope high up on Mt. McKinley around 6:15 p.m. Tuesday with a climbing partner who was snowboarding when the two triggered a slide below the mountain’s West Buttress, a popular climbing route for mountaineers.
Park officials wrote in a release that Vizzini and his partner triggered the soft slab avalanche in an area known as Rescue Gully, with its highest point at about 17,200 feet elevation.
The park said two mountaineering rangers responded to the area within minutes and found the snowboarder on top of the avalanche slide debris field, but had to use a locating beacon to find the buried skier…