Navigating the Abyss: Lessons from a Crevasse Rescue on Mount McKinley with Daniel Shaw and David Staley

By Daniel Shaw Published June 3 2026

Daniel Shaw, Alaska

The wind had been a steady whisper across the glacier when Daniel Shaw and his partner Dave Staley picked their way across the East Fork Kahiltna Glacier, roped and clipped with the proper glacier-travel gear. They were on their way to begin the West Rib route of Denali and in one of the most dangerous valleys in the National Park.

Crossing a smooth white expanse, they moved along an unseen crevasse while paying attention to an avalanche that descended 400 meters in front of them.  Daniel broke through into a hidden crevasse and dropped sixty feet before the rope stopped him. The shock of the fall, the sudden silence, and the sight of Daniel suspended in a shaft of cold air were followed by the immediate, raw scramble of rescue.  Dave was immediately slammed to the ground and dragged toward the man-sized hole where Daniel disappeared.  He managed to drive an ice axe into the snow and swung around to a halt just feet before he plummeted after Daniel.  He quickly removed a stake from his pack while holding the entire weight of Daniel and his 100+ pounds of gear and tried to drive a stake into the snow, but it went right through and he realized he was over the same crevasse (they had been moving along it not across it like he suspected).   He managed to worm to the side until he was no longer over the chasm and proceeded to set some protection in the snow so that he could remove the weight off himself.  Meanwhile, Daniel locking off prusiks, and committing every bit of training and calm he had to arrest the fall and keep both from plunging in together.  The crevasse was monstrous and gear and the sled Daniel was dragging disappeared into oblivion.  After assessing that he hadn’t been seriously injured in the fall, Daniel Tied off his backpack and lowered it to a ledge and then began to think about how to get out of the silent hole.

What followed was three hours of tense, methodical work to prussik and haul Daniel up and get them both back on solid ground. They lost a considerable amount of their gear in the fall and narrowly avoided a second disaster when Dave almost fell into the same hole. During the entire rescue, the two climbers could not communicate with each other as the wind was howling above and silence filled the insulated cave below.  For the first hour Dave didn’t even know if he was securing a dead body or trying to rescue his living friend.  Subsequent terror came later, when they dug themselves out, retraced the route, and set a camp below; within forty-eight hours two meters of snow buried that section of glacier. The thought that they could have been entombed under sudden deep snow, with no one to mark their last position, made the narrow escape feel even more miraculous.

That evening and the long night that followed turned into a clear lesson in humility and preparedness. Proper rope teams, redundant anchors, and calm, practiced responses saved Daniel and Dave; the outcome could easily have been fatal if one link had failed. They left the mountain with fewer pieces of gear but a renewed respect for route-finding, conservative decision-making in whiteout-prone alpine terrain, and the unforgiving power of a glacier’s hidden crevasses.

Daniel Shaw and David Staley