When Yosemite Search and Rescue Loses One of its Own, the Rescue Work Goes on for Years

The life and legacy of Niels Tietze

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(Photo: Gavin Feek)

At pitch 23, high up on The Nose (VI 5.9 C2; 3,000 feet), Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) member Scott Deputy put in a piece and sat back in his harness. He admitted to me later that he was bonking. And that if he’d allowed himself more to eat or drink that morning, he surely would have made a better decision. But Scott was in a hurry. He was attempting to rope solo The Nose in a day—or the NIAD as it’s known in the climbing community. This feat is a classic Yosemite test piece that almost every YOSAR member attempts at some point during their season, usually with another YOSAR member as a partner.

Scott was going for it alone, and making good time. It had only taken him 13 hours to get up 23 pitches. But then, just below the ramp to Camp 5, he sat back on his yellow Alien, and it ripped.

“I was in an awkward position, and I kind of fell through my loops,” Scott remembers. His ladder flipped him, and he fell, inverted, down the face of El Capitan. He furiously smacked at his Grigri in an attempt to catch his fall, but its release lever was tangled in his rope system. As he picked up speed, the rope uncoiled, burning through his pants and palms. Scott kept smacking, and right before he got to the end of his line, his Grigri caught his fall—which was a good thing, because in the interest of speed, Scott hadn’t tied a knot at the end of his rope.

Scott found himself swinging, bruised, and bloody, 2,000 feet up in the air. He remembers the shock of still being alive—and wanting to be on the ground. “But at that point,” he told me, “The quickest way down was up.”

Scott’s massive fall was spotted in the meadow by Tom Evans, a photographer and the creator of the El Cap Report, who’d had his camera set up on El Cap Bridge. Tom texted the SAR Site immediately after.

It was October 6, 2012, and I was one of the SAR Site’s resident dirtbags at the time. The SAR Site is a tiny village of tent cabins nestled between the boulders and pines in the back of Camp 4. In appearance, they’re not at all unlike the tent cabins around Curry Village—stretched white canvas over collapsible wood beams, wire beds, and little wood decks—but culturally, they reside in a different park entirely.

“SAR Siters” earn the privilege of living at the site by being medically trained and climbing harder than any personnel in the park. They must be willing to go up anywhere, at any time. They’re rope guns for rangers—an insurance policy to ensure that anyone in need can be reached on any park wall, ledge, or spire at any time. They do the backbreaking work of litter carry-outs for the injured—and for those not as lucky.

As volunteers, SAR Siters only get paid when beeped, so they carry around little archaic devices called “pagers.” Much of their time is time off, which is the real reason why they’re there. Time off to a SAR Siter is usually spent breaking speed records on El Cap or linking Yosemite’s longest routes in a push.

Traditionally, they’re an eclectic group. They carry with them the energy, spirit, and history of past SAR Siters like Werner Braun, Jim Bridwell, Beverly Johnson, John Long, and John Bachar. And for the climbing community, SAR Siters are the soul of Yosemite.

In 2012, the SAR Site had two guest camp spots right next to Scott Deputy’s tent cabin. Having recently finished my season with the Yosemite Wildlife’s Bear Team, I had pitched a tent in one of them. With climbing routes to tick off, I wasn’t quite ready to leave the Valley yet.

A few minutes after 4 a.m., I woke to the muffled clanging of somebody attempting to quietly make food. Scott’s lonely breakfast is familiar to the solo climbers of the world: Breaking bread alone in the pre-dawn hours prior to a self-imposed sufferfest.

Later that evening, after his fall, Scott jugged back up to his high point and continued his climb. Two pitches from the top, he realized he was still on track to make the solo NIAD. It was a feat that maybe 20 people had accomplished at the time. He pulled it off.

But that’s not what this story is about. It’s about the guy who was waiting up there for him.

**

His name was Niels Tietze (rhymes with “pizza”). After Tom Evans had reported to the SAR Site that Scott had taken a bad fall, SAR Siter Niels Tietze and I split off for El Cap Meadow to have a look. Scott looked slow, but fine.

Niels left to gather some supplies for Scott when he topped out. Later that evening, he crept up behind me at the campfire and tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m gonna go fetch him,” he said quietly, never one to attract attention to himself when it came to these matters.

“I’ll go with you,” I replied.

“Not a good idea. I’m moving fast,” he said. He was right. Very few people in this world could keep up with Niels in any facet, but certainly not when he was moving uphill. Hiking to the top of El Capitan—via East Ledges—included fourth and fifth class terrain and jugging multiple fixed lines of unknown origin (though Niels always knew their condition). He disappeared behind the campfire shadows.

Scott topped out and touched the tree. Then he heard laughing, “It was a laugh mixed with relief and joy,” Scott later told me. “It was Niels.”

After making sure Scott was okay, Niels passed over some curry that Scott’s girlfriend had made and homemade bread that he’d baked himself. Then Niels tossed him into one of his ratty old sleeping bags to rest. “He carried all my gear away and said he’d see me later. I guess he had somewhere to be. But that was so Niels. He didn’t just bring me crap from the Village Store. He brought me food made by the people who loved me.”

**

I’d met Niels earlier that year. He was the final SAR Siter of eight to arrive for the 2012 season, his second on YOSAR. He’d ridden his motorcycle from Salt Lake City to Yosemite with his haul bag strapped to the back, showing up at Camp 4 a week overdue.

Things had been lazy for me. I had only arrived a few weeks prior and was getting ready for my High Sierra season to begin. I’d spent my days ticking off Valley moderates, bouldering, and getting acquainted with the new crop of Valley monkeys. I thought I’d met all the SAR Siters until Niels rode in.

“Who’s that?” I nodded over towards Niels as he rolled into camp. Niels popped his helmet off, and brown curls fell onto his face. He had sideburns that crawled past his ears and disappeared underneath a dirty bandana he’d tied over a tremendous grin. He was 25 years old then.

“That’s Niels, the famous missing SAR Siter,” somebody replied. I still consider it the best description of him.

Niels pulled a bottle out of his haul bag that first night in camp, and we all celebrated his arrival. He had bizarre stories stuffed inside the alcohol-soaked bandana around his neck. I kept maneuvering myself around him, so I could listen and take note of what the man was saying.

I learned that Niels had recently found his older brother, Kyle, dead in his family’s Salt Lake City home. He had entered Kyle’s room to wake him up, but Kyle had passed in his sleep. The reasons for his passing are still unknown. “We think he may have had an undiagnosed heart issue,” Niels later told me. “It would skip around sometimes.”

As the night progressed, Kyle’s name would continue to slip out randomly in the middle of Niels’s thoughts, like a failing clutch losing its gear. Niels finally crawled up into the boulders behind Camp 4, vomited, and went to sleep. He woke up and went climbing the next morning. I ran into him on his way back from The Moratorium (4 pitches, 5.11d).

“Hey!” I said, “It was great to meet you last night.” Niels smiled awkwardly and laughed. He had no idea who I was. We forged a friendship after that, founded upon books, poetry, and the mountains.

**

Later that season, I was working up in the Yosemite High Country when I heard Niels’s other brother had died. I had been returning a call to a climbing partner in Camp 4 on a tall rock that we called the phone booth.

“Niels’s brother died? Yeah, I know,” I’d said. “No,” my partner urged over the phone. “Not Kyle. His other brother, Eric … just fell in the Tetons.”

On July 12, 2012, Eric Tietze, the oldest of the three Tietze boys, was climbing the Cathedral Traverse in the Grand Tetons with friends when he fell to his death. He was alone when he fell, as he’d moved ahead of his party. His body was located by Grand Teton Search and Rescue the following day.

“When Niels arrived for his first season with YOSAR [2011], he was hurting from his first brother Kyle’s death,” SAR Siter Everett Philips told me. “And when it seemed like he might be able to start moving past it, Eric dies.”

At 25 years old, Niels was in what you might call his prime in Yosemite, positioned to make his mark in the climbing world. When it came to climbing, many considered him the alpha of the SAR Site. That doesn’t make you the best climber in the world, but it’s as good a first step as you can take toward being one of the world’s elite mountaineers.

“Eric was not only a horrible step back personally,” Everett continued, “as a brother and a human being, which of course it was, but it was also a huge step back to becoming the climber he’d wanted to be.”

When it came to climbing, Niels had his horse shot out from under him. Sometimes he’d demonstrate extreme caution. Then suddenly, a switch would flip, and he would feel the need to exercise his right to live by riding his motorcycle at 100 mph or driving the Valley loop backward.

“He was lost and scared,” Everett told me. “Which is not something we associate with Niels.”

A month after Eric’s passing, Niels decided it was important for him to finish his brother’s climb, and Everett wouldn’t let him do it alone. They left the Valley for the Tetons and wouldn’t make it back to the SAR Site for a month.

“The day on the Cathedral Traverse with Niels was a really long, emotional day,” Everett recalls. “Niels was putting on an Olympic demonstration of strength, and I did my best to keep up … he actually went down and found one of his brother’s ice axes and his glasses. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. That was the level that Niels was at in terms of his mountain sense. He’d go up there to remember his brother and figure out where his brother probably fell.”

Everett and Niels spent time with Eric’s community in the Tetons, then headed to the Tietze house in Salt Lake City. After a few weeks with Niels’s parents, they returned to the Valley.

“He was this force,” Everett says. “The first thing he did when we got back was jump on The Shield (VI, 5.8 A3; 2,900 feet) and try to solo it without a ledge. And he didn’t bring nearly enough gear to do that,” Everett remembers. “It was another one of those times where he showed what an incredible mountaineer he was to bail from up there.”

The Shield headwall of Yosemite is a vertical, sheer granite desert and may just be the worst spot to bail on El Capitan. Niels spent the night there, without a portaledge, spinning inside of his haul bag with all his gear clipped to the outside. He swung around in the open air, wrestling with ghosts and rope systems unimaginable. The next morning, he began a series of long and difficult rappels, somehow swinging himself back onto the headwall when necessary to clip in.

Everett and SAR Siter Zach Miller met Niels at the bottom and helped him carry his loads back to the Site. In the YOSAR community, helping out another climber is called fetching. The YOSAR fetching tradition goes way back to the days of Royal Robbins and Warren Harding.

Robbins and Harding were bitter enemies, of course, but the first helicopter rescue in Yosemite was actually Robbins retrieving Harding off the south face of Half Dome. It was one of those instances when the climbers were paying attention, but the Park Service was not. Robbins notified the Park Service that Harding and Galen Rowell were on the south face of Half Dome, freezing to death in a winter storm. They got a helicopter and rope together and flew Robbins up there to pluck them off.

And in 2016, when former Yosemite Mountaineering School guide Greg Coit and Everett climbed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, Everett strictly instructed Greg: “If we get into trouble, don’t call 911. Call Niels. He’ll be faster.”

Niels was wired that way—as if there was a buzzing wire throughout his body that connected his physical tissues to those in distress. There are so many examples of Niels’s extracurricular Yosemite missions that I’m not sure how he found time for YOSAR duty.

For Niels, fetching a climber in need was instinctual, and fetching a SAR Siter was automatic. During the 2012 season, I remember going to fetch a SAR Siter named Bud Miller, who was soloing the West Face of Leaning Tower (V 5.7 C2; 1,000 feet). Bud was a strong climber and should have bagged it well under the 24-hour mark. But 24 hours were coming up, and no one had seen him. Niels, Scott Deputy, and I drove over to Bridalveil Parking, stopping to grab Bud a breakfast burrito on the way.

We parked and got out of the van and there was Bud, hiking into the parking lot with his middle finger bent up in the air. I thought he was giving us the bird until he got closer.

“I would have finished a lot sooner, but I broke my finger,” Bud said as he threw his gear onto the ground and snatched the burrito from Niels.

On the YOSAR side, Niels was their best. More often than not, if you called 911 hanging off a Yosemite wall between 2010 and 2014, it was Niels’s fuzzy face that popped up at you first from below.

Niels and I once went up the West Face of Leaning Tower. I say went up because he was teaching me to aid climb and led every pitch. Once we got to Ahwahnee Ledge, I belayed him so he could work out the second and third pitches free. I didn’t get much “climbing” in for myself, but hanging around with him up there was one of my favorite days in the mountains.

A few months later, off that same route, Niels rescued a climber who’d fallen onto Ahwahnee Ledge and injured his back. Niels short-fixed and free-climbed the first four pitches with SAR Site medic Todd Bartlow and reached the injured climber in under two hours. The climber made a full recovery.

Notes on Niels

Niels and I were good friends during this phase of his life. I filled two journals in two seasons with what I called my Notes on Niels. He never kept track of what he was doing—not with a camera, not on social media. He barely even mentioned it when he led The Phoenix (5.13a), broke Peter Croft’s record on the Evolution Traverse (VI 5.9; 12,000 feet), or free soloed The Rostrum (5.11c; 700 feet) alone, at night. So, I kept track for him.

Friends would jokingly post climbing photos of him on social media and tag #Nielslovesinstagram, but he never really knew or cared. The legend of Niels grew organically by word of mouth. “Where’s Niels?” was a popular campfire question. And whoever had the wildest answer was usually right.

SAR Siter and Patagonia photographer Drew Smith remembers that when he first showed up to the SAR Site, everyone talked about Niels all the time. “Then when I finally met him I was like holy shit, this is the legend,” Drew recalls. “I’m a photographer but I never took photos of him because I knew he wasn’t on Instagram … and I wanted to respect that. He’s in the background of a few of my rescue photos, but I don’t have any others. He just continues to be a legend.”

Through interviewing friends about Niels, I pieced together one day of Niels’s life in the fall of 2016.

It started when climbers Mason Earle and Nik Berry brought Niels along to help them find a free variation of Never Never Land (5.13+) on El Capitan. “There was this one pitch that was the crown jewel of the route—like 50 meters of 13+ horrible stemming,” Mason told me over tea in Reno.

“We’d been working on it for days,” Mason remembered. “Nik and I finally climbed the whole pitch clean. And then Niels does it clean right after us. He hadn’t even been working it with us … and we’re like, ‘What the fuck? How did he just do that?’ He was such a good climber. He never trained or anything.”

“Come to think of it,” I said, “I’ve never seen him in a gym. Have you?”

Mason had to think about it, but the answer was no.

At some point during that day with Mason and Nik, Niels received a distress text from SAR Siter Alix Morris, who was climbing Free Rider only a few hundred feet from them. Morris and her partner Bronwyn Hodgins had run out of food and water. “Lo and behold, the next morning, Niels saved us!” Alix recalls. “We just saw his butt rapping in from the headwall. He lowered a rope with sandwiches, Gatorade, and bars and then disappeared.”

Drew Smith also ran into Niels that day. He’d hiked up to the top of El Capitan to camp out in the cave that night because he had climbers to photograph in the morning. “All of a sudden, Niels comes storming into the cave,” Drew says, “and I was like, ‘Whoa, where the fuck did you just come from?’”

Niels told Drew that he had just jugged up Never Never Land, which he had been working with Mason and Nik. They went down, but he had to scramble some food for Alix. When Drew ran into Niels later in the Valley, he realized that in that single day, Niels had sent Never Never Land, jugged a huge pack up, slept for an hour in a cave, lowered down to fuel up Alix, and then climbed the headwall clean. “That guy was such a legend,” Drew says.

**

Niels was everywhere and nowhere. He was everywhere, not just on the walls, but like some type of dirtbag Batman, he would pop up wherever people emotionally needed him most. The mourning of loved ones was his signal, and he was exactly perfect when it came time to comfort those who might be grieving—which, unfortunately, could be far too often for those who live their lives in the mountains.

When Niels fell, it cracked the Valley open wider. A stream of salt ran down from Fifi Buttress and into Fern Spring, which broke its banks and merged with the Merced. But the SAR Site stayed open.

It was Friday, November 17, 2017, and Scott Deputy was calling me. I had missed calls from SAR Siters Libby Sauter and Amanda Smith, too. I was in LA, and Niels and Scott had been to my house recently, but I hadn’t talked to Amanda or Libby in a while. I stared at Scott’s incoming call and knew horrible news was coming.

Scott did his best to relay the details while in the middle of his own sickening grief, but I couldn’t hear anything past Niels died. I started crying and hung up.

Niels died on November 13—the anniversary of his brother Kyle’s death—while working on a free variation of an older aid line on Fifi Buttress. His body was found four days later. It was late, he was alone, and he’d had some type of rappelling accident. Unbelievable. There’s no way that Niels could have fallen while rappelling. Not only had I watched him run up and down the walls of Yosemite like he was walking in the park, but I had climbed with him. He was safe.

After getting over the initial shock, my thoughts immediately went to his family—his parents and his sister Jo. They’d now lost all three Tietze boys, brothers and sons, in seven years.

In the winter of 2012, I drove to Lander, Wyoming, to get my Wilderness EMT certification from NOLS. On my way back to Yosemite, I stopped in Salt Lake City to visit Niels and stay the night at the Tietze house. I was worried about meeting his parents, Chris and Becky, for the first time after they’d suffered the loss of two sons. Would they want me there? 

When I arrived, Niels bear hugged/crushed me and introduced me to his mom and dad. We got some beer, made food, and hung around the kitchen telling stories. SAR Siter Bud Miller showed up as well.

Niels took us down to the wax room in his basement, where the family waxed up skis and stored gear. We sorted through his brothers’ pieces and organized ropes. The dull burnt orange shag carpet had the odor of a backroom ski chalet: warm wax, feet, and mountain dust from adventures past. Somehow, a room could be haunted and still feel like Christmas morning. Maybe I was tired, but I could have curled up and fallen asleep there.

When it was time to crash, Niels put Bud in Eric’s old room, and I took Kyle’s. It was windy and cold out, and a window rattled all night under a painting that Kyle had made.  On our way out in the morning, Chris was drinking coffee and reading the paper in the dining room by the front door. Bud and I thanked him and said goodbye. He looked at us and said, “Take care of him, please.”

I tried to reassure his father that Niels was the best and strongest in the Valley and that he had nothing to worry about—Niels rescued everybody else. Bud put his hand on my shoulder to gently shut me up and said, “We will.” It was immediately clear that was all Chris needed. Bud knew exactly how to respond to him. It didn’t occur to me until later why. Bud was a SAR Siter, of course.

**

Neither Bud nor I were in the Valley the night that Niels fell, but Drew Smith and Alix Morris were.

The day before, Drew got called on an El Cap rescue. It was November, so not many SAR Siters were around. Niels was helping out, and Drew and Niels got to chatting and made climbing plans for the next morning. “He said it would be a late night for him,” Drew told me, “He was going to jug his ropes on Fifi and pull them because a storm was coming, and he was getting out of there.”

The next morning, Niels didn’t show. He didn’t reply to any texts or calls either. Then the storm blew through. It had been about four days since anyone had heard from him when Drew drove by the Bridalveil Fall Parking Area and saw that his truck was still there. “I immediately felt like I was going to vomit. Just from being on search and rescue, I knew that feeling, and it was not good,” Drew says. Along with Alix and another friend, Drew hiked up and found him at the base of Fifi Buttress.

It’s hard to know what happened. From what Drew and Alix could see, all the ropes had been pulled from the wall. The prior season, Niels had jugged up and stashed his ropes on top of Fifi, so they think maybe he’d done the same thing and was rappelling down with a single rope. “He fell from a really long way,” Drew says. “It’s tough to tell if he got hit by a rockfall and it interrupted his rappel or if he was distracted and leaned back early. I just don’t know.”

Drew and Alix communicated with Valley SAR and helped with the recovery. Niels’s family and close friends were notified.

“Mountain rescue is a complicated, not often obvious business.” Everett later told me. “It becomes about survivors. Was it Scott who notified you?”

“Amanda tried me first, then Libby, then Scott’s the one who finally got a hold of me.”

“Yeah, all SAR Siters. That was rescue work.”

The rescue work continued for the SAR Siters as they unpacked what had happened to one of their own.

“Being on search and rescue, I’d dealt with a lot of death and body recoveries, but never someone that I knew,” Drew told me. “I think it brought up a lot of shit that I hadn’t dealt with over the years. After Niels’s accident, it all hit me pretty hard. I’m up and down. I think about it every day.”

“This One Hurts”

There’s a cycle of loss that winds its way around the Valley loop, dipping itself into Camp 4 all too frequently as it passes by. A tourist falls, or a coworker, a relative, a friend. Or it’s a suicide—like the one where the guy who jumped off El Cap taped the cuffs of his Gore-Tex over his wrists and wrote a note about how he’d hoped it would make things less messy for the rangers at the bottom. It didn’t.

Every time a climber dies, some well-intentioned person in the climbing community says: This one hurts. It always makes my soul cringe because they’ve settled for a lazy cliche over the recognition of a singular spirit. This one hurts exists in the climbing community because climber deaths are all too common. In Yosemite, the SAR Site feels them first.

On October 15, 2024—the last day of the season—the Tuolumne SAR Site was packing up and heading home. SAR Siter Chris Gay decided he was going to take another solo lap on Hobbit Book, a Tuolumne classic that snakes up a left-facing dihedral and exits onto an exposed face with barley-colored jugs. Chris had free-soloed it before many times. It was well below his grade and comfort level. But he never returned to pack up his tent that evening.

Chris had been a Valley SAR Siter for many seasons, but had moved upstairs to Tuolumne that year due to his obsession with Lord of the Rings. Many of the routes in Tuolumne are named for J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, and Chris’s mission was to climb them all. He had achieved his mission, but climbers kept putting up new first ascents with Lord of the Rings-inspired names … maybe to keep Chris busy. Hobbit Book was one of his favorites.

In December 2024, I caught up with one of Chris’s friends, Valley SAR Siter Katy Stockton. She had just come down from fixing the first five pitches of The Dihedral Wall (VI 5.8 C3; 3,000 feet) and spoke to me from the boulders high above Camp 4: “The Valley Site had known Chris had gone missing that night … so we all stayed up. At about 7:30 a.m. the next morning, we learned Tuolumne SAR had found his body. We were sitting around a picnic table when the call came in.”

Katy met Chris three years earlier during her first season in Yosemite. When she first met him, she was intimidated. “You hear all these things about Valley SAR and what you have to be and how hard you have to climb, which I now know isn’t true,” Katy says. “It’s just a community, and often, people do cool stuff, but it’s not this big ego that I was picturing.”

Chris showed Katy around the site and found her a place to crash. They struck up a friendship, and Katy decided she liked Chris right away. He had many interests, from literature to instruments. In the mornings, he would climb up into the rocks above Camp 4 and play the shakuhachi.

“The thing to really know about Chris Gay is that he was deeply intentional in everything he did,” Katy remembers. From his role in the community, to his climbing and free soloing, to his morning traditions, Katy says “everything he did was purposeful.”

The morning that Chris’s body was found, a long shadow was cast over the SAR community and beyond. The Valley SAR Site—as it has before—became a gathering place for the grieving. Friends of Chris’s from all over crowded around the campfire to talk and listen to stories.

It took a while for Katy to return to climbing after Chris’s fall.

“I even backed off the first climb I tried to do, which was really simple: Munginella, an easy 5.6 that Chris would solo all the time,” Katy recalls. “As soon as I put in any effort, there was such a surge of emotion that I got scared. I thought about Chris.”

“Were you soloing?” I asked her.

“I was roped up. Yeah, that’s just where I was at the time.”

That fall, most of the SAR community switched to bouldering. Then Katy went to Joshua Tree and started climbing again. “A lot of the routes in Yosemite had too many memories with Chris,” Katy says. “Getting out of the Valley really helped with that.”

**

I quit climbing after Niels fell. It wasn’t hard. I had already left the Valley years earlier for a new career in LA and wasn’t living anywhere near the people or routes that I loved. My girlfriend and I had gotten married and started a family—Niels had even flown out to perform the ceremony. He surprised us with theatrics and poetry, and our guests told us it was the most unique wedding they’d ever attended. We had a baby, and new careers and climbing was already getting pushed aside. The loss of Niels only finalized it.

Last year, my daughter Willa and I were scrolling through movies to stream, and an image of The Dawn Wall popped up. “Hey, Dad, it’s Yosemite. Let’s watch that!” she proclaimed, already in love with the park she’d visited with us multiple times.

As Willa watched the movie in awe, she couldn’t help but notice my own excitement when I talked about Tommy Caldwell and El Capitan. She wanted to see more, so we watched Free Solo and The Devil’s Climb. She fell in love with Tommy and Alex and, finally, climbing. She read Lynn Hill’s biography and asked me how come I didn’t climb anymore.

Last fall, we joined a climbing gym together. For an eight-year-old who has bucked every sport we’ve tried to get her into, it was incredible to watch her fearlessly run up gym routes while I belayed her. She refused to hangdog or be lowered until she touched the chains. One day, I found drawings in her backpack of El Cap, with the meadow below and climbers on ledges under the roof.

This past Thanksgiving, we traveled to Yosemite. After Thanksgiving dinner with friends and old SAR Siters, some of whom now had small children like us, a friend proposed a crag day at Pat and Jack Pinnacle for the kids. Willa heard the invitation, and there was zero chance of us not joining them.

My friends dropped top ropes for Pat and Jack’s easiest routes, and Willa tied herself in and triple-checked her systems as we had practiced.

I belayed her while she climbed up 30 feet on a 5.9 before she had trouble reaching the move that would get her through to the next section. After 20 minutes of reaching, I shouted up that it was time to lower down. Once she got to the ground, she got the closest she’s ever come to a panic attack. She untied her knot and jogged away to the top of a boulder, where she sat crying and shouting at me.

Embarrassed by the scene, I carried her off to the base of the pinnacle farther down. When she’d finally calmed down enough to hear what I had to say, I told her that her next move was out of reach and that it wasn’t her fault. She only needed to give herself a chance to grow a little. I often give her the opportunity to hit a reset button and start the day over. I told her we could “hit it now and get out of here.” To which she said no—she wanted to get to the anchors.

When we returned to our friends, everyone was psyched to see her. I felt grateful for this community that we’d made our way back to. My daughter crawled back up the 30 feet and started trying to work her way through the section.

My friend Garrett watched her. “Hey, give me your phone,” he said. “I can solo up the next route over and grab a shot of her from the side—with the sun coming through the trees in the background. Her first Yosemite climb.”

He noticed my hesitancy and corrected himself: “Not solo—it’s a scramble, really.”

Garrett climbed up and got the shot while I looked high above her at all the impossible places ahead.

**

November 13, 2024, marked the seventh anniversary of Niels’s death. He would have been 38, his brother Kyle would have been 40, and his brother Eric would have been 44. Niels always described his brother Kyle as a “monk,” a peaceful soul who quite literally got along with everyone. Their oldest brother, Eric, was a Renaissance man, showing interest in everything and unbeatable in the mountains. Eric spent 10 seasons with the Bridger-Teton trail crew and was a beloved member of the tight-knit Grand Tetons community.

The Tietze family home sits at the base of Mount Olympus in Salt Lake City, where the boys grew up chasing each other to the top. In April 2024, I drove up from LA to visit his parents Chris and Becky.

As we walked around their home, Chris and Becky told stories. We looked at a guitar that Niels had built, fossils and rocks that he had brought home, paintings and writings on their walls, literal boulders that the boys had rolled into different positions in the yard, and stumps that they had stacked up. A large fulgurite that Niels had brought home once from the desert stood by the front door.

Niels loved his older brothers. As the youngest Tietze boy, he was kind like Kyle and strong like Eric. He grew up chasing them around the Wasatch Range. Chris told me about a time up in the mountains when Niels was young. They went snowshoeing, but the smallest snowshoes were much too large for Niels.

“I’m sorry, Niels,” Chris told him, “But you’re going to have to wait with Mom. It will be too much of a struggle for you to try and keep up in those.”

The thought of his brothers adventuring in the mountains without him was too much, and young Niels declared, “But I want to struggle!” Niels was then known by his brothers as “Wants to Struggle” for the rest of the winter.

Whenever the boys were too loud, Becky would kick them out onto the mountain. If she hadn’t seen them for a while, she would step out on the deck and shout into the clouds for them to come home for dinner. They would come back with their ropes, crampons, skis, and sleds. All gear was stored in the wax room in the basement.

“Niels once found an owl cooked on that power line there,” Becky pointed to an electrical line that ran down the cul-de-sac in front of their home.

“It was dead when he found it, but he was hurt that he couldn’t save it,” she remembers. “Even as a young boy, he couldn’t help but notice the symbolism of a wild animal dying at the hands of human progress.” Niels climbed the pole, got the owl’s body down, and hiked it to the top of Mt. Olympus, where he gave it a proper burial.

Niels hadn’t become who he was because of his immeasurable loss. He’d become who he was because of what he’d had: his parents, his brothers, and his sister Jo. And the life they’d built together under the reflected light off their mountain above.

At some point during the evening, I made my way downstairs to look into the wax room again, but the door was closed. I have a theory about basements—that the weight of a house and its people sits on them, and all the love and energy that makes up a family sinks into its bowels, where it gets trapped. And time stands still.

As I walked back upstairs, it wasn’t lost on me that the halls of the Tietze house deserved to be so full of boys and wives and grandkids by now—full of food, gross jokes, and dirt. Niels’s sister Jo was not around while I was there. She had moved away some time ago. Her parents said she was doing as best as she could, and that they saw her every chance they got.

I woke up the next morning and had orange cranberry bread and tea with Niels’s parents. We walked in the yard, and Becky pointed out all of the cracks and chimneys on Mount Olympus that the boys liked to climb. She pointed out a boulder, high above, that Niels used to sit and play didgeridoo on. His guttural sounds would echo off the mountain and down into the suburban streets below, where neighbors thought a UFO might be descending—or that Niels was home.

I gathered my things and thanked the Tietze family for their hospitality and stories. And for the permission to write about Niels. Chris was sitting in the same spot he was several years before, when Bud and I were leaving, and he offered another parting thought:

“I’ll tell you this. Niels was like a movie star in a sports car, driving away into the sunset. I knew something bad was going to happen, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

They gave me big hugs, offered some of Becky’s orange cranberry bread for the road, and sent me on my way. I was anxious about seeing them again. It had been a little while, and who could blame them if they just didn’t want to receive anyone?

As I drove south through Utah on I-15, Everett’s talk of rescue work echoed in my ears. I don’t know if I did any rescue work, but I know that checking in on Niels’s parents is something that Niels would have done. Chris and Becky told me to return soon and to bring my family next time. The Tietzes continue to be the strongest people I know.

**

There’s a river that flows from Salt Lake City, down through Utah and across the Great Basin. It runs up over Tahoe and the White Mountains, and into the Sierra Nevadas, where it washes down into Yosemite Valley. Niels swam up and down that river, often stopping to climb in Canyonlands and Indian Creek. His brothers were with him when he washed into Yosemite Valley, and he carried them throughout his time there. We all felt their weight, but no one, of course, as much as he did. They were with him when he fell, and they are all there now.

I feel my loss, the Valley’s loss, every time I hike up an approach trail, drink from Fern Spring, or ride my bike across Hanging Bridge, now with my children in tow. I think of all the Valley places and people Niels touched and how his fingerprints are smudged across Camp 4, El Cap Meadow, and the railings of the El Cap Bridge. And the SAR Site, where a man of impossible circumstances found a perfect home.