The latest deaths came just days before Christmas, when two avid outdoorsmen ventured out separately in mild mid-December weather amid Boulder’s iconic Flatirons in the foothills of the Rockies.
Neither returned alive.
Keith Hayes, 42, was found on December 16 after a fatal ‘incident’ near the second Flatiron, Boulder officials announced.
The body of 27-year-old Henry Smith was recovered two days later after a laborious 8.5-hour effort by mountain rescue volunteers.
Smith’s sister had reported him missing when he failed to return from a climb the day before – but this wasn’t just any climb. According to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, he’d ‘been last known to be ‘scrambling’ near the Third Flatiron.’
That means navigating the Flatirons crags and rock faces without ropes and equipment using just hands and feet.
But while scrambling, often described as ‘the middle ground between hiking and climbing,’ has surged in popularity in recent years, particularly among outdoorsy youngsters, so too have injuries and fatalities.
‘This isn’t a Boulder problem; this is a statewide problem and issue in terms of rescue … even nationwide,’ Kelly Lucy, Boulder’s emergency services supervisor – who has spent more than four decades in mountain rescue – tells DailyMail.com.
Bailee Mulholland, 26, fell to her death in July 2023 in Rocky Mountain National Park. She was a member of a club called Satan’s Minions in Boulder dedicated to ‘scrambling’
The group, with some members pictured, was founded more than 20 years ago by climber, runner and professor Bill Wright
The man who tracks accidents for the American Alpine Club, also noted a marked increase in scrambling over the past ten to 15 years.
He attributes much of this to the proliferation of climbing gyms throughout the country – not only introducing the sport to tens of thousands more people but also enticing them to practice their newfound skills in the vastly different environment of the great outdoors.
‘Recently, we’ve just seen a spike and a surge of accidents happening where people are getting hurt really bad or killed,’ Pete Takeda, editor of Accidents in North American Climbing, tells DailyMail.com.
The Canadian Rockies endured a particularly tragic two-month stretch in the summer of 2018, when scrambling claimed the lives of four climbers aged between 27 and 65.
‘With good boots and proper equipment and a bit of education, an easy scramble might be really straightforward,’ Dave Stark, director of operations for Yamnuska Mountain Adventures, said at the time.
‘But the mountains are unforgiving. A slip or a fall can be devastating.’
The term ‘scrambling’ itself can be open to interpretation and take on different meanings, depending on an athlete’s level of skill.
Moderate scrambling essentially marks a level up from hiking, falling within Class 3 of climbing, Takeda says. This means it gets a bit steeper and you might use two hands and have to balance as you move up some terrain that’s usually at a fairly low angle.
‘Class 4 is where you’re actually using your hands most of the time – and it’s what … the lay person would usually start to [call] climbing … if you lose your balance, you will probably lose control and tumble down the hillside,’ he explains.
For experienced climbers, he says, ‘it is just scrambling around; it’s play.’
But that play is done without backup ropes and sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are. Just one foot out of place can be fatal.
Bailee Mulholland, an active, popular and accomplished 26-year-old member of a scrambling club in Boulder, died in July 2023 after falling 500 feet from a peak about 45 miles northwest of the city in Rocky Mountain National Park.
She had run cross-country in high school and won a vertical obstacle course in college, where the talented violinist studied music before switching to computer science.
That obstacle course victory seemed to fuel ‘the beginning embers of this whole scrambling thing,’ her broken-hearted father, Brent Mulholland, tells DailyMail.com.
Brent Mulholland, Bailee’s father, tells DailyMail.com: ‘She would tell me, “Don’t worry, Dad, nobody in Satan’s Minions has ever been hurt.’ And I would hear that, and it would make me nervous … that doesn’t mean statistically you’re safe.’
Bailee’s father describes scrambling as ‘kind of like Russian Roulette with a gun that has 5,000 chambers. ‘After the first 1,000, you think it’s not going to happen to you … they just get to the point where they think, “Okay, I’m good enough, and it hasn’t happened so far, so I’m probably going to be okay”’
Afraid of heights, he’d always worried when Mulholland joined Satan’s Minions, an amateur Boulder-based club of climbers and runners founded by a local engineer and college professor.
The community of ultra athletes holds race events and often factors speed into its scrambling in good-natured competition.
‘She would tell me, “Don’t worry, Dad, nobody in Satan’s Minions has ever been hurt,'” Mulholland says. ‘And I would hear that, and it would make me nervous … that doesn’t mean statistically you’re safe. Something going to happen to somebody.
‘And sure enough, it happened to her.’
He compares scrambling to ‘kind of like Russian Roulette with a gun that has 5,000 chambers.
‘After the first 1,000, you think it’s not going to happen to you … they just get to the point where they think, “Okay, I’m good enough, and it hasn’t happened so far, so I’m probably going to be okay.”’
Satan’s Minions founder Bill Wright knows all too well the risks of falling despite expertise.
The seeds for his future Boulder club had been sewn almost a quarter-century earlier while the seasoned climber was recovering from a broken back suffered in a roped incident.
Wright, now 63, was looking for ‘a cool challenge to motivate me to get back’ and, after healing, began combining some of the easier Flatirons climbs with his love of trail running.
‘I could do a lot of [the climbs] without a rope, just because I was a good enough climber and confident enough … I sort of discovered the joy of moving on more technical terrain and getting to wild places,’ he tells DailyMail.com.
For him, scrambling means ‘low enough angle where I have almost all my weight on my feet almost all of the time – you use your hands a lot to go faster and stuff and just balance yourself maybe, but I can stand there almost anywhere in a scramble for a very long time … okay, I might be in a tough spot if it rained or snowed; I’d be in a very dangerous position.
‘If I fell, I would die, but I can be up there for a very long time, versus a rock climb , where my arms could get tired – I would free-fall.’
Wright began to appreciate scrambling ‘as a separate thing from regular roped rock climbing … and a separate thing from hiking, too – sort of this unique little niche that not many people could do or would do.’
He began inviting a few friends on his demanding early-morning Flatirons trips that involved headlamps, five miles of hiking, five miles of running, climbing and 2,500 vertical feet.
A friend of a friend, upon hearing the itinerary, said Wright sounded like ‘one of Satan’s Minions’. The name stuck, the group grew and its membership now numbers around 200.
The requirements to join the group – which doesn’t advertise – have tightened over the years. Prospective members must have done all the top ten Flatirons climbs and be familiar with roped rock climbing. There is also a speed requirement and an ‘interview scramble’ where Wright observes hopefuls’ skills and techniques.
Still, Wright says, ‘whenever I hear of an accident on the Flatirons, I worry that it’s one of my group … because we’re so experienced, we’re much, much less likely to have an accident – but we scramble much, much more than everyone else … we’re not immune to mistakes.’
Brent Mulholland, pictured with his daughter as a baby, says: ‘These are individuals who are going to do what they’re going to do. You can’t really talk them into not doing this stuff, they’re adults. They’re just people looking for life at its fullest, and I have a hard time giving them a hard time about it’
Wright, who broke his back in a climbing fall before starting the club, says: ‘Whenever I hear of an accident on the Flatirons, I worry that it’s one of my group … because we’re so experienced, we’re much, much less likely to have an accident – but we scramble much, much more than everyone else … we’re not immune to mistakes’
That’s a point that is continually hammered home to Satan’s Minions. One vastly experienced member died in May 2018 on a roped climb of Yosemite’s famed El Capitan. Bailee tragically fell to her death five years later.
The community was further rocked before Christmas, when Keith Hayes – who wasn’t technically in the group but ‘adjacent’ and well-known – died on a route ‘discovered’ and publicized by another member, Wright says.
‘That one’s quite steep,’ he tells DailyMail.com, labelling the route ‘really just a solo’.
A holiday ugly sweater party was repurposed in December as a memorial for Hayes, featuring a screening of a short film released last year about the ultra-runner and climber.
Clubs like the Minions, even when bulked up by ultra athletes, should err on the side of caution, experts say.
‘I have reservations any time one has to make an individual risk assessment yet has this kind of a social, cultural impetus to just go out and do certain things,’ Takeda tells DailyMail.com.
‘If you have 100 people, one can easily get carried along by the momentum that’s generated by those who might be more cavalier, more willing to take certain risks.
‘And if you start applying people writing their times down – I did this dangerous climb unroped in 30 minutes – that creates this subcurrent of competition. And the minute you add time into something that is as dangerous as climbing, you will see some people unfortunately get hurt or killed.’
However, scrambling is far from limited to the athletic elite, and the rise of its popularity amongst amateurs is just as concerning, if not more.
Lucy, of Boulder emergency services, says there are two different groups of people who scramble.
In addition to experienced climbers, he says, ‘there [is] another class of people who are hiking and look up at a rock and say ‘that’d be really cool to climb.
‘They have never climbed a rock before, go up and either get stuck or have some type of an accident.’
He urges everyone to ‘recreate within your own abilities.’
‘If you take a person who is less experienced, or maybe even a hiker who witnesses people basically climbing fourth and fifth class without a rope on, they’re going to see that and go, “Oh, this doesn’t look that bad,”’ he says.
Wright says he will sometimes dissuade amateurs from trying to emulate the activities of the Minions if he spots them eyeing their scrambles.
‘The last ten or 15 years, if I see anybody watching us too closely, I’ll say something like, “Oh, we have special shoes” or something like that,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘I know we make it look so simple.’
The message from all sides is: Do not overestimate your abilities, and do not take unnecessary chances.
For the experienced scramblers, says grieving father Brent Mulholland, ‘there are two things that make this riskier than almost anything in my mind: You can get into a situation where you probably should turn back, but they always think, “I’m probably going to make it,” so they keep going – [that’s] number one.
‘Number two, they’re so good at this stuff, and they do it so much, that they in some situations probably should be using ropes, but it’s so much faster and easier if they don’t.’
He urges caution, but he’s also aware that, for many adventurers like his daughter, the challenge and enjoyment of scrambling may still outweigh the risks.
‘These are individuals who are going to do what they’re going to do,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘You can’t really talk them into not doing this stuff, they’re adults.
‘They’re just people looking for life at its fullest, and I have a hard time giving them a hard time about it.’
