Joe Bohlig
On February 15, 2010, our friend and expedition member, Joe Bohlig, 52, fell from the crater wall on the top of Mount St. Helens. When he and his friend got to the top, Joe stepped back to pose for his 69th summit photo. Suddenly the cornice broke beneath him and he plunged 1,500 feet into the crater.
Joe's accident brings to mind a similar fatal misstep. Babu Chiri Sherpa climbed to the summit of Everest ten times and in 1999 became the first person to spend the night on the summit without using supplemental oxygen. Then on April 29, 2001, while on Camp 2 on Everest, he stepped out, apparently to take a photograph, when the ground beneath him broke and he fell to his death in a crevasse.
Mount St. Helens is not known as a difficult mountain to hike and deaths are rare. Camp 2 on the south side of Everest is so large and expansive that it almost resembles base camp. That these places seem safe makes them much more dangerous. These tragic accidents remind us to be on alert and keep up our guard always.
When I met Joe on Aconcagua in 2006, he talked incessantly about his love of climbing Mount St. Helens. Mountaineering was clearly a sport he enjoyed and Aconcagua was the start of higher and more international climbs for him. On and off the mountain, his eyes literally sparkled and I don't think he ever stopped smiling.
In an Oregon Live article, I read this about Joe:
Bohlig's sister, Catherine Munden of Lewiston, Idaho, said Tuesday evening that her brother, who worked for Weyerhaeuser, "was my best friend."
"He was just a great guy," she said.
She said Bohlig was an avid and experienced mountain climber who had just returned from scaling three mountains in Ecuador earlier this month. He also has climbed Argentina's Cerro Aconcagua, one of the tallest mountains in the Americas, without oxygen.
Bohlig had lost a son, Michael, who was 18 at the time, in an auto accident in Germany 14 years ago, but Munden said her brother "was always very positive. ..." "If he had to go, I mean, he went doing what he loved," she said. "He always knew that was a possibility. I think that we're all just grateful that it happened near home, not somewhere in a foreign country."*
