Desert Climber Kyle Copeland Dies in Salt Lake City

Kyle Copeland, a prolific desert climber, died in Salt Lake City on October 3 in Salt Lake City at age 50 after battling Crohn's Disease for over 20 years. While I didn't know Kyle well, mostly just in passing, he was a friend to lots of my friends including Jimmie Dunn, Mark Rolofson, and Eric Bjørnstad, and I knew and respected his reputation as a tough climber, desert pioneer, and good person.

Kyle with his buddy, the late Charlie Fowler, basically put the popular Colorado River-side climbing area Wall Street, the most popular cliff in the Utah canyon country, on the map by doing the first ascents of most of its best routes--well, over half of its routes--back in the 1980s. Kyle wrote Climbs to Nowhere, the first guide to Wall Street in 1989 with hand-drawn topos. After the cliff became popular, he stopped climbing there. Kyle also did lots of other first ascents around Moab with Charlie, Alison Sheets, and others.

Copeland also wrote a wonderful essay Climbing in the Desert in Eric Bjørnstad's original 1988 Desert Rock climbing guide, now out of print. In the essay, Kyle's desert climbing advice still rings true and resounds with the kind of climber he was: "...it has become imperative for all visiting climbers to be aware of the unique and delicate nature of this fragile environment."

Shellon Copeland, Kyle's sister, wrote a touching rememberance on Supertopo: "Kyle was my older brother. I Googled him to look at climbing pictures of him and saw your postings. He found a great family with you guys and climbing. He was always so long and skinny he could climb anything and was like a frenetic ball of energy which is such a great gift but can sometimes not fit well with mind-numbing school classes and working in an office. He was so perfectly Yin and Yang, he paid his dues in the last 10 years and has reached nirvana. He earned it. I think going through surgeries and ER visits are equal to extreme climbing with the physical and emotional stress that goes with those."

Rest in peace, Kyle. We're all poorer without your adventurous spirit.

Read Kyle Copeland's obituary at Alpinist 28.

Photographs above: Top: Kyle Copeland leading on The Bride, a sandstone tower near Moab, Utah. Bottom: Kyle on Standing Rock in Canyonlands National Park on Christmas Day, 1985. Alison Sheets wrote, "Kyle climbed the entire route wearing a Santa hat and a cigarette in his mouth." Photographs courtesy Alison Sheets and Todd Gordon.