Two college students who went missing while hiking in central Colorado last month have died after a “catastrophic failure” while rappelling, authorities said Tuesday.
Colorado Mountain College students Kaden Matsuda, 19, of Ridgway, Colo., and Jackson Donlon, 20, of Queensbury, N.Y., “fell a considerable distance” while rappelling in the Rocky Mountains of Chaffee County, Colo., the county sheriff’s and coroner’s offices said.
The two men were reported missing on October 26, three days after leaving campus for a hike on Ice Mountain in Colorado.
Authorities said the two men fell after a “catastrophic failure of unknown cause” of their anchor. The men died from “multiple blunt force injuries and their death was instantaneous,” officials said.
“While their lives were cut far too short, they spent their final moments together surrounded by the majestic beauty of the Chaffee County high peaks that they loved,” said Chaffee County Sheriff Andy Rohrich. “There is also relief knowing that none of them suffered.”
The sheriff’s office said in a statement last week that it received a call from Colorado Mountain College’s Leadville campus reporting the students missing.
Friends and family members said the two men planned to return from their hike a day or two after they left, according to the sheriff’s office. Both men were experienced climbers and should have been properly dressed and shared a map of their route, friends and family told authorities, the sheriff’s office added.
Officials say Ice Mountain received about 2 feet of snow as the two men set out on the hike. It’s unclear whether the heavy snowstorm “had a negative impact” on the incident, “but it did not play a direct role in their deaths,” authorities said.
“Ice Mountain is a very technical climb, and hikers are recommended to be very experienced when attempting it,” the sheriff’s office said. “It’s when it’s dry.”
Last week, authorities located Matsuda’s car and the two men’s tent, which had collapsed under the weight of the snow, the sheriff’s office said. Several days later, their bodies were found in a pool beneath West Apostle Mountain.
The mountain’s peak, located in the Sawatch Range, a mountain range in the central Rocky Mountains, is about 13,600 feet tall, about nine times taller than New York’s Empire State Building, according to 14ers.com, a Colorado-based website dedicated to documenting the topography of the state’s mountains.
Authorities said they did not know the exact distance the young men fell.
“There are no right words to tell family and friends about such a heavy loss,” Rohrich said. “Please know that whenever we explore our backcountry in the future, we will look back on them as young men who not only looked at the world; they climbed it.”
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