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LOS ANGELES: A popular Alaskan climber fell to his death from Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, marking the third death in the park this summer.
Balin Miller, 23, died in a climbing accident Wednesday, his mother Jeanine Girard-Moorman confirmed.
“He’s been climbing since he was a young boy,” she said. “His heart and soul was truly to just climb. He loved to climb and it was never about money and fame.”
The death comes on the first day of the federal government shutdown, which left national parks “generally” open, with limited operations and closed visitors centers, according to the National Park Service. The park service said in a statement that they are investigating the incident and “park rangers and emergency personnel responded immediately.”
El Capitan is one of the most striking features of Yosemite National Park, an enormous sheer granite rock face of approximately 3,000 feet (915 meters) that entices big-wall rock climbers from all over the world. Alex Honnold completed the first free solo climb of El Capitan in 2017 for the documentary “Free Solo.”

Many posted tributes to Miller on social media, saying they had watched him climb on a TikTok livestream for two days before his death and referring to him as “orange tent guy” because of his distinctive camp setup.
Earlier this year, an 18-year-old from Texas died in the park while free-soloing, or climbing without a rope, on a different formation. In August, a 29-year-old woman died after being struck in the head by a large tree branch while hiking.
While it’s still unclear exactly what happened, his older brother, Dylan Miller, said Balin was lead rope soloing — a way to climb alone while still protected by a rope — on a 2,400-foot (730-meter) route named Sea of Dreams. He had already finished the climb and was hauling up his last bit of gear when he likely rappelled off the end of his rope, Dylan said.
Miller was an accomplished alpinist who had already gained international attention for claiming the first solo ascent of Mount McKinley’s Slovak Direct, a technically difficult route that took him 56 hours to complete, he posted on his Instagram in June.
He grew up climbing in Alaska with his brother and their father, who was also a climber. While Dylan took a little more time to fall in love with the sport, it stuck with his younger sibling instantly.
“He said he felt most alive when he was climbing,” Dylan Miller said. “I’m his bigger brother but he was my mentor.”

This year, Balin Miller had also spent weeks solo climbing in Patagonia and the Canadian Rockies, ticking off a notoriously difficult ice climb called Reality Bath, which had been unrepeated for 37 years, according to Climbing magazine.
“He’s had probably one of the most impressive last six months of climbing of anyone that I can think of,” Clint Helander, an Alaska alpinist, told the Anchorage Daily News.
But this most recent trip to Yosemite wasn’t supposed to be hard climbing. Miller had just arrived two weeks early to climb and enjoy the park’s beauty and solitude before the rest of his family, who planned to meet up there.
More than just a climber, he loved animals and was fun, kind and full of life, his mother said.
He often climbed with a stripe of glitter freckles across his cheekbones, describing it in a Climbing magazine interview like “a warrior putting makeup on before going into battle.”
“He has inspired so many people to do things that are perhaps unthinkable, including myself. I can’t imagine climbing ever again without him,” his brother said.

WASHINGTON: British primatologist Jane Goodall, who transformed the study of chimpanzees and became one of the world’s most revered wildlife advocates, has died at the age of 91, her institute announced Wednesday.
Goodall “died peacefully in her sleep while in Los Angeles” on a speaking tour of the United States, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a statement on Instagram.
In a final video posted before her death, Goodall, clad in her trademark green, told an audience: “Some of us could say ‘Bonjour,’ some of us could say ‘Guten Morgen,’ and so on, but I can say, ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! That’s ‘good morning’ in chimpanzee.’”
Tributes poured in from conservationists, politicians and entertainers.
“I’m deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Jane Goodall, our dear Messenger of Peace,” said UN chief Antonio Guterres. “She is leaving an extraordinary legacy for humanity & our planet.”
“Renowned zoologist, primatologist, researcher and a friend of Tanzania, Dr. Goodall’s pioneering work at Gombe National Park transformed wildlife conservation, and placed our country at the heart of global efforts to protect chimpanzees and nature,” said Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan.
“I think the best way we can honor her life is to treat the earth and all its beings like our family, with love and respect,” said actress Jane Fonda, herself an environmental activist. “I loved her very much.”
Transformative discoveries
Born in London on April 3, 1934, Goodall grew fascinated with animals in her early childhood, when her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee that she kept for life. She devoured Tarzan books, about a boy raised by apes who falls in love with a woman named Jane.
In 1957 she traveled to Kenya at a friend’s invitation and began working for the renowned palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who dispatched her to study chimpanzees in Tanzania. She became the first of three women he chose to study great apes in the wild, alongside American Dian Fossey and Canadian Birute Galdikas.
Goodall’s most famous finding was that chimpanzees use grass stalks and twigs as tools to fish termites from their mounds.
Leakey urged her to pursue a doctorate at Cambridge University, where she became only the eighth person ever to earn a PhD without an undergraduate degree.
Goodall also revealed chimpanzees’ capacity for violence – from infanticide to long-running territorial wars – challenging the belief that our closest cousins were inherently gentler than humans.
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to further research and conservation of chimpanzees. In 1991 she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth-led environmental program that today operates in more than 60 countries.
Her activism was sparked in the 1980s after attending a US conference on chimpanzees, where she learned of the threats they faced: exploitation in medical research, hunting for bushmeat, and widespread habitat destruction.
From then on, she became a relentless advocate for wildlife, traveling the globe into her nineties.
Goodall married twice: first to Dutch nobleman and wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick, with whom she had her only child, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, who survives her.
That marriage ended in divorce and was followed by a second, to Tanzanian lawmaker Derek Bryceson, who later died of cancer.
Message of empowerment
Goodall wrote dozens of books, appeared in documentaries, and earned numerous honors, among them being made a Dame Commander by Britain and receiving the US Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-president Joe Biden.
She was also immortalized as both a Lego figure and a Barbie doll, and was famously referenced in a Gary Larson cartoon depicting two chimps grooming.
“Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?” one chimp asks the other, after finding blonde hair. Her institute had its lawyers draft a threatening letter, but Goodall herself waved them off, saying she found it amusing.
“The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet,” she told AFP in an interview last year.
Her message was also one of empowerment.
“Each individual has a role to play, and every one of us makes some impact on the planet every single day, and we can choose what sort of impact we make.”