Daniel Marsh’s alarm was set for 3:50 in the morning, but he was already awake. He had been lying in the dark of his sister’s guest room in Auburn, Washington, for nearly an hour, waiting for the day he had planned for months. He was thirty-four, lean, with fifteen years of climbing behind him and eleven summits across four countries. On the refrigerator downstairs was a drawing his niece Meline had made: a stick figure before a triangular mountain, captioned, “Uncle Dan goes up the big mountain.
” He had folded it carefully and placed it in the top pocket of his pack. By 4:31 he was on the road in his Honda CRV, heading east toward Mount Rainier. His destination was Liberty Ridge, a route the National Park Service described plainly as the hardest and most dangerous regularly climbed line on the mountain. It rises over 11,500 vertical feet from the Carbon Glacier, a narrow spine of snow and ice between the sheer faces of Willis Wall and Liberty Wall, ending at Liberty Cap at 14,110 feet.
In 2014, an avalanche had swept six climbers to their deaths. Daniel had climbed it once before, in 2021. This time he was going alone. He had filed his permit on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 11th, listing his expected return date as Saturday, June 14th.
The ranger who processed his paperwork gave him a laminated route card. On the back, in bold print, it read: “Liberty Ridge has claimed more lives than any other route on this mountain. Turn around before you need to. ” He pocketed the card and left.
The weather was excellent. A high-pressure system had settled over the Pacific Northwest, with no meaningful disturbance predicted for ninety-six hours. He arrived at the White River Campground at 5:44 in the morning and began walking. By 12:15 in the afternoon, he made camp on Curtis Ridge at roughly 7,800 feet.
He sent a text to his sister: Camp 1, Curtis Ridge, good conditions, summit day Sunday if all holds. He was in his tent by 7:15 that evening, reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, and asleep by 8:40. The last confirmed signal from his satellite communicator came at 6:47 the following morning, Friday, June 13th, from a point on the lower section of Liberty Ridge between 9,200 and 9,400 feet. After that, nothing.
Clare Marsh DeVoe had expected to hear from her brother by Friday afternoon at the latest. When the messages stopped, she told herself the device had failed. By five in the morning, she had run out of benign explanations. At six, she called the Mount Rainier National Park emergency line.
A search team assembled by 8:45 the next morning under lead climbing ranger Marcus Holt. A six-person ground team began the ascent while a contract helicopter conducted aerial sweeps. On the third pass, the flight technician spotted a debris field on the east aspect of the lower ridge at approximately 9,400 feet: an aluminum picket stamped with his initials, a first aid kit, an emergency bivvy bag, and a single glove. There was no blood.
There was no body. The pattern suggested a brief, violent, uncontrolled passage, and the terrain below the debris field dropped four to five hundred feet to the Carbon Glacier. The team searched the glacier surface and found nothing. On June 18th, the NPS suspended the search.
The case file, marked 2025-M0614-m, was transferred to cold status on June 23rd. Clare did not leave Auburn. She stayed at the kitchen table and researched, contacted private search coordinators, and distributed printed information sheets with Daniel’s photograph to climbing permit stations and ranger stations throughout the area. Her seven-year-old niece Meline had made another drawing on the sixth day: the mountain, with the stick figure on a ledge and a speech bubble that said, “I am okay.
” She placed it on the refrigerator. Nobody moved it. Greg Holloway, Daniel’s longtime climbing partner, came to sit with Clare and told her the truth as he saw it: the cliff face was four hundred feet, and nobody survives a fall like that onto glacier ice. She answered that they had not found him, that they could not see all the ledges, that she had read the flight report.
She held to that. Kevin Marshand, a climbing gym owner from Portland, organized a private team of six experienced climbers to reconnoiter the cliff band in the third week of June. They rappelled as far as they safely could and found nothing. Clare thanked them with the flatness of someone who had prepared for news and received only the continuation of silence.
The mountain held its silence for twenty-two days. On the morning of July 4th, Troy Bassett, a twenty-eight-year-old electrical engineering student at the University of Washington, launched a drone from the White River campground. He was there for a geology project, documenting glacier recession along the cliff band between 10,200 and 10,800 feet. His drone was modified with a thermal imaging payload.
At 11:31 in the morning, while surveying from below the main overhang, he saw a human form on a ledge at roughly 10,800 feet. The ledge was about three meters wide and recessed under an overhang, invisible from above, which explained why the helicopter surveys had missed it. The thermal unit showed a minimal, diffuse heat signature, barely above ambient rock temperature, but present. The figure was not moving.
Bassett held his drone in position for forty-one minutes while NPS operations were alerted. The helicopter reached the cliff band at 1:08 in the afternoon. Ranger Yuki Tanaka, who had stood at the top of that cliff band in the dark on the night of June 14th, was lowered on a 150-foot line to the ledge at 3:22 in the afternoon. Daniel Marsh was alive.
He was severely dehydrated, hypothermic, with a core temperature around 28 degrees Celsius, a pulse of 42, and a respiratory rate of six breaths per minute. His right leg had a spiral fracture of the tibia. He had been on that ledge the entire time, alive the entire time. The fall had happened at 6:51 on the morning of June 13th, four minutes after his last satellite ping.
He had been traversing a section of hard alpine snow when a small wind slab released under his left crampon. It was a minor failure, perhaps two meters wide and forty centimeters deep, but on a forty-five-degree slope above a cliff band, it was enough. He went down, attempted a self-arrest, and both axes failed to hold. The cliff band was not a uniform four-hundred-foot drop, as initial assessments had implied, but a series of stacked ledges and overhangs.
The upper section dropped only forty feet to the first major ledge. That ledge arrested his fall. He did not lose consciousness. He assessed his injuries, established that his pack was within reach, and that the ledge was survivable.
It was three meters wide, angled slightly upward, and sheltered by the overhang above. His satellite communicator had been damaged on impact, severing the antenna. He had no signal, and he could not climb back up with a fractured tibia. He chose to survive.
His account of the twenty-two days that followed was methodical and relentlessly rational. He had six days of food at 3,500 calories per day, so he reduced to 800 calories per day, calculating that the math would carry him twenty-six days. He needed twenty-two. He melted snow with a backpacking stove, rationing fuel carefully, using it only during the warmest part of each day.
The cold was the primary threat; on the coldest nights, the ledge temperature dropped to about minus fifteen degrees Celsius, but his sleeping bag was rated to minus twenty. He wrapped his injured leg in the emergency bivvy bag and cut sections from his foam pad to insulate the ledge surface. He wrote in a notebook every day, documenting conditions, calorie counts, fuel levels, and observations. On day 19, the fuel was nearly gone, and he accepted the cost of eating snow rather than melted water.
On day 21, he wrote: “Weather excellent today, clear sky, warm, something may fly over. ”
On day 22, he heard the drone. It came from below, across the cliff face, a different approach entirely. When the camera pivoted to face him, his only coherent thought, before his capacity for processing failed under the weight of three weeks of semi-starvation and pain, was: It found me.
He raised his left arm a few inches. Troy Bassett, watching the live feed, saw the movement and called 911. Daniel Marsh arrived at St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor at 5:19 in the afternoon of July 4th.
He weighed 116 pounds, 58 pounds below his pre-climb weight. The notebook recovered from his pocket contained one final entry, written that morning in shaky handwriting: Day 22. Meline’s drawing is still in my pocket. Figured if they found me this way, I wanted them to find both of us.
The drawing says I am okay. Optimistic. Let’s find out. The formal incident review, completed on August 15th, found that the initial search had been conducted according to all applicable protocols.
No individual decision had been unreasonable given the information available. But it also found a critical systemic failure: the NPS had no drone operation protocol integrated into cliff band searches. A manned helicopter could not achieve the approach angles necessary to see the ledge at 10,800 feet. A drone could have.
The review led, within eight months, to a revised NPS protocol requiring that any cliff band search on Liberty Ridge include a UAV survey capable of flying below overhangs, along with dedicated funding for two search-and-rescue configured drones. Daniel Marsh spent seventeen days in intensive care. His tibial fracture required surgical fixation, and the orthopedic surgeon noted that the improvised immobilization Daniel had constructed on the ledge had prevented secondary displacement. His core temperature took four days to normalize.
His cardiac rhythm was irregular for six days. His cognitive function recovered gradually over three weeks. He completed outpatient physical therapy in October 2025, was cleared for hiking in November, and for technical climbing in March 2026. As of the time of the account, he has not returned to Mount Rainier.
Troy Bassett finished his geology paper, which was published in the spring of 2026. Ranger Yuki Tanaka was promoted to lead climbing ranger for the Liberty Ridge corridor and tested the newly acquired drone on an inspection exercise. It found an empty ledge at approximately 10,800 feet. The NPS case file was formally closed on July 25th, 2025.
The final entry read: “Subject recovered alive. July 4th, 2025. Recovery attributed to UAV reconnaissance conducted by civilian operator. Case closed.
”
Daniel Marsh once read a draft article about his survival and made twelve marginal notes, all corrections of small factual details. Next to the paragraph describing his discovery by the drone, he wrote: “It came from below. That’s the part that keeps surprising me. Everything I know about that mountain, I know from above.
Everything that saved me came from below. “