Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
Eugene (Zhenya) Vahin, 33, died while ice climbing at the Junkyards, in Bow Valley, Alberta. Vahin, who posted videos on Instagram under the handle @take_a_course, had recently immigrated to Canada from Ukraine. He began ice climbing roughly nine weeks ago.
The Junkyards was their “home waterfall,” Vahin’s wife, Ekaterina Shurko, told Climbing. She said her husband had climbed there over 20 times, and the crag was just 10 minutes from their house. “It seems to me that it was precisely the idea of this waterfall as ‘home’ and the easiest of all [the places] he climbed, that resulted in his fatal mistake,” she said.
Shurko became concerned for her husband’s well-being on January 23, after he didn’t make a scheduled check-in call at 4:00 p.m. “When at 5 o’clock in the evening came, and he did not come home and did not answer the calls, I went to look for him,” she said. Shurko found her husband’s car parked at the trailhead, and immediately knew something had gone wrong. “I took our mountain first aid kit and bandages, and ran to the place where we usually climb.”
Hiking in the dark, using a flashlight, Shurko reached the waterfall, but nearly injured herself trying to find her husband. “There was a lot of ice and the slope was very steep,” she said. “My crampons [slipped] and I fell off the slope and slid about [50 feet], managed to catch on a tree and stopped.” Shurko quickly realized she was in over her head, and called emergency services.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Kananaskis Mountain Rescue arrived on the scene and discovered Vahin’s body later that evening. Rescuers said it was unclear how far the man had fallen. The fall was not captured on his GoPro camera. Shurko said that her husband was unroped, and likely had just finished filming a video near the top of a route when he slipped. “The last video [he made] stopped at 3:44 p.m. From it you can see that he is standing on the edge of the ice, a meter away from him there is earth and grass. I suppose that this gave a false impression of safety.”
“I still don’t know what exactly happened there, my husband simply stumbled, or his crampon bounced off, because there was no [strap] on one of the crampons when they were returned to me,” she added. The medical examiners told her Vahin likely died from a combination of severe head injury and internal bleeding.
Vahin was known on social media for espousing a devil-may-care attitude towards safety. His posts show him taking lead falls, often climbing alone, placing inadequate protection, or otherwise making poor decisions in various aspects of anchor building and climbing technique. He often rebuffed commenters who questioned his technique and skill level. Even his account name @take_a_course appears to be a subtle jab at commenters urging him to receive proper training. One commenter asked if Vahin had read Will Gadd’s blogs about how to lead ice. “No, but if I survive I will write my own book about how to lead [WI6] without a guide 🤣🤘,” Vahin responded.
Shurko said her husband had recently been fired from his job as a maintenance worker at a nearby hotel, a role he’d held since his arrival in Canada. This firing left her husband in “a bad psychological state,” she said, “and I think it played a significant role in this tragedy. It was a difficult time for our family, and complete uncertainty with work and housing really put pressure on the psyche.”
She added that she recognized the extreme risk in what her husband was doing, but had been lulled into a sense of comfort, at least with regards to the Junkyards, by the fact that Vahin climbed there so often. “I knew and understood that my husband was doing really dangerous things and sooner or later, I imagined that this could happen. But not on that day and not in that place,” she said.
At the time of his death, Vahin was attempting to make his living through online content creation. Judging from his Instagram and the posts he chose to “pin” to the top of his profile, it appears he felt compelled to post seemingly risky or controversial content to increase his engagement, a technique colloquially known as “rage baiting.”
Shurko all but confirmed this in her discussion with Climbing. “His Instagram videos and his real life were two different lives,” she said. “As a rule, in order to increase views and reach of your page, you need to do something that attracts strong public attention and causes heated discussions … People love to discuss failures and love to teach, thereby increasing views. He loved his haters … However, we always appreciated comments from professionals who didn’t just write that [he was] climbing incorrectly, but offered help.”
Vahin was a regular volunteer with the nonprofit Canmore Food Recovery Barn, who called him a “spark of light” and a “very kind soul” in a tribute post. A friend of Shurko’s has created a GoFundMe to support the young widow.
“Zhenya loved life very much,” his wife said. “He loved risk, he loved extreme sports. We often went hiking in the mountains. Sometimes we had to walk along an avalanche-prone slope, and he always told me, ‘Katya, I’m so afraid that you will be buried under the snow, and I will remain alive. How can I live then? What should I do?’ I always joked and answered, ‘It won’t happen, don’t be afraid.’”
“Now I ask myself this question every day, ‘Zhenya, how can I live now?’”