How Did Will Stanhope Die? His Partner Details the Fateful Accident and Rescue.

One of Canada’s pioneering climbers and soloists, Will Stanhope died on April 23, following a head injury sustained during a trad climbing accident on April 13. Until now, few details regarding his ultimately fatal fall from the second pitch of Rutabaga (5.11a) on the Stawamus Chief in Squamish, B.C., have been released.

Stanhope, a 39-year-old prolific 5.12 soloist, was best known for a slew of bold alpine rock routes. Perhaps his most famed effort was the first (and only) free ascent of the Tom Egan Memorial Route, a sustained, 13-pitch 5.14 on the east face of Snowpatch Spire in the Bugaboos. He and partner Matt Segal—who nearly freed it—spent more than 100 days on the line over four years. When rockfall destroyed Tom Egan in 2022, it still hadn’t been repeated.

More recently, in 2024, Stanhope partnered with Tim Emmett to complete the first free ascent of Smoke and Mirrors, a 4,500-foot 5.12+ variation on Matt Maddaolini and John Furneaux’s The Smoke Show, which scales the south buttress of Mount Combatant (12,343ft). The route took the pair 52 hours, and is one of the hardest, longest routes in Canada. A memorial for Stanhope is forthcoming.

The tragic accident has left many in the climbing community wondering how an experienced climber lost his life on a well-protected 5.11a. To piece together what happened, Climbing reached out to Stanhope’s partner from that day.

What happened to Will Stanhope on April 13?

Marina Leon, a Pemberton-based life coach and body work therapist, was Stanhope’s climbing partner on the day he fell. The pair connected online, and it was their first time climbing together.

She told Climbing that with rain in the forecast, they originally planned to sport climb at The Circus, an overhanging crag in Cheakamus Canyon. However, that morning, Stanhope called her and suggested they instead head to the Stawamus Chief. He thought the formation, a 2,000-foot granite dome, looked like it would avoid the rain. Leon felt reluctant, but agreed. “I was upset driving there, because there were dark, rainy clouds in all directions,” she said, “but on the Chief it was sunny.”

When she arrived at the parking lot, she discussed the conditions with Stanhope. “I was like, ‘Listen, bro, I just drove from Pemberton, and everywhere around us it’s wet, raining,’’’ she said. “He was like, ‘You’re right. I might have sandbagged us there.’ We knew we were going to get rained on.”

The pair decided to try to climb a few routes, but bail if the rain hit. Neither wore a helmet. Leon said she normally wears a helmet trad climbing, but had thought they would be sport climbing at the overhanging Circus, so had left her helmet at home.

The first crack they jumped on was dry. “Will led it, I followed him, but after we came down, it started raining on us,” Leon said. She and Stanhope discussed escaping the rain at the Smoke Bluffs and Zombie Roof—home to an eponymous 5.12+ roof crack that Stanhope famously made the first-ever free solo of. Instead, they decided to try at least one more crack and see if it remained dry.

Their chosen route, Rutabaga, consists of a 5.8 pitch followed by a 5.11a pitch up a dihedral. Leon led the first pitch through an intermittent drizzle, but said the crack remained dry. When she reached the top of the pitch, Stanhope called up to her and suggested she come down due to the rain. But Leon thought they should take a look at the second pitch. “I told him, ‘I’m already up here, why don’t you come up, and we can rap down if we don’t feel good,’” she recalled.

She brought Stanhope up, and he began leading the second pitch. “Anything on the slab was wet, but the crack really was dry,” Leon said. “As he climbed to the end of the pitch, it started to rain again, not heavy, but just a constant drizzle.”

The fall

Stanhope had soloed Rutabaga many times, Leon said, and he appeared relaxed and in control. “He was casual,” she recalled of his demeanor as he led. She described him as “chill” and not “pumped at all.” But the final, crux sections of the pitch move slightly left, out of the dihedral and onto the slabby face, now streaked with rain. As Stanhope moved into this section and out of sight, Leon glanced down to address a tangle in the rope. When she looked back up, her partner was airborne.

“I didn’t see him slip, because he was up and around the corner,” she said. “But I saw him in the air, falling sideways.” Stanhope hit the wall first with his foot, impacting a small ledge. This caused him to cartwheel into a second, headfirst impact.

After the fall, Stanhope remained unconscious for 10 to 15 seconds; Leon began lowering him to her. When he was a few meters away, he woke up, and the two began communicating. Stanhope was cogent and responsive. “I got him to me, secured him,” Leon said, “and then I started lowering him to the ground.”

Leon explained that unlike what some online news outlets including CBC and The Inertia reported, Stanhope’s fall was at most 10 meters (33 ft), not upwards of 20 meters (66 ft). None of his gear blew. “It wasn’t a really big fall,” Leon said. “It wasn’t like he was dragging out all his gear. He was making good placements.”

Ten minutes after the fall, the two climbers were at the base of Rutabaga, where Leon called 911. Stanhope had a broken foot, and Leon suspected he had also sustained a skull fracture. “I checked the front to the back of the cortex, and noticed inflammation on a straight line to the back of the head,” she said. One of his eyes was also swollen and blood-filled. As Leon communicated with emergency services, Stanhope grew increasingly disoriented. Around 20 minutes after his fall, he began messing with his ear, as though he was trying to pop it or dig out an earplug. “I started to get really concerned about brain pressure and internal bleeding,” Leon said.

The first responders asked Leon if she could carry Stanhope down to the parking lot on her own, which she said would be impossible. “They were having a hard time understanding the trails to get to us,” she said. “But he’s six foot, I’m five-three. There was no way.” Stanhope, she said, was at first reluctant to call for a helicopter evacuation. He tried to stand and walk out on his own, but fell down.

Leon convinced him to stay put, and tried to communicate the severity of the situation to the dispatcher. The approach hike is only 15 minutes long, Leon said, but is fairly technical. Given Stanhope’s condition, a ground retrieval wasn’t a good idea. “I said to the girl, ‘Look, I can’t get him out,’” she recalled. “‘I’m holding him still and
I need to keep him in one place. I also have a clear view of the sky for heli-access. This needs to be a heli evac.’”

Fifty minutes after the fall, first responders and search and rescue professionals arrived at the crag on foot. Stanhope’s cranial swelling began to worsen. He remained conscious, but grew increasingly disoriented.

“Will was quite responsive the whole time, talking,” Leon said. “You could ask him a question, he could respond back, but he was forgetting things more and more. He was forgetting my name, which is very common for a head injury.”

The evacuation

First responders initially wanted to carry Stanhope down in a litter, but soon after they arrived, his vital signs began decreasing. So they switched their plan and called for a helicopter. “From the time he fell until the helicopter arrived, it was about three hours,” Leon said.

This helicopter, however, did not take Stanhope directly to the hospital. Instead, it dropped him off in the parking lot. Then responders loaded him into an ambulance and drove him to the hospital, which took another hour. “It was a four-hour window before he was in surgery,” Leon explained.

At the hospital, Stanhope underwent surgery to remove part of his skull to relieve the swelling. The surgery was a success, and for a time he appeared stable. But his condition later deteriorated, and he passed away 10 days after his accident.

It’s unclear why first responders didn’t call a helicopter sooner, or didn’t take Stanhope directly to the hospital in the helicopter once it arrived. “Their excuse was that they called the heli after deciding the trail was too technical,” Leon said. “But, anybody could have hiked up and known in 10 minutes if the trail was too technical to carry him down. It took them an hour to process that, and then it took another hour to get the heli out. So, there was a bit of a fuck up.”

Climbing reached out to Squamish Search and Rescue on April 29, but has not yet received a response.

Missed signs and a notoriously unforgiving pitch

Leon said she wasn’t sure why Stanhope fell the way he did—sideways even before hitting his foot on the ledge, then cartwheeling. But she noted that at certain points during the day, he’d been leading with the rope behind his feet. The top of Rutabaga’s second pitch also has a reputation for causing uncontrolled falls.

“I also whipped right at the top and went upside down, smashing my helmet,” wrote one climber on the route’s Mountain Project page. “Thought my foot was in the right place relative to the rope, but I think it may have slipped past the rope when it skated off.”

Another Mountain Project user wrote: “I’ve spoken with many people who have attempted the route, and reported that it felt like they would have got injured if they fell from a certain point … It seems to be something about the way the rope is running relating to either the [pitch 2] crux moves, or the traverse away from the corner, which makes the upside down fall hard to avoid, and there’s a ledge in exactly the wrong place for the landing.”

Leon said that the April 13 tragedy wasn’t just due to one factor, or one person’s decision-making. “We missed our signs,” she said. “We ignored a lot of the signs to turn back, and we just kept going on with a bad idea. It was a slab. It was rainy and wet. We didn’t have helmets.”

She noted that either party could have called it quits, but claimed she also felt some reluctance to question Stanhope. He’d climbed these routes before many times, whereas she hadn’t. And it was their first time climbing together. “I questioned him a few times,” she said, “but he’s the pro, right?”

Stanhope’s mental health and legal struggles

Off the wall, in the months leading up to his death, Stanhope’s life had become fraught with personal and legal challenges. At the time of his death, he faced nine criminal charges in the British Columbia justice system: four counts of assault, two of mischief, and one each of criminal harassment, sexual assault, and breaking and entering.

The charges relate to alleged offenses committed on eight separate days over a one-year period, from November 2024 to November 2025, in Squamish. He had not yet been convicted of any crime, and was scheduled to appear at the North Vancouver Provincial Court between December 14 to 16 of this year, according to an online court services database.

In reporting this story, Climbing contacted some of Stanhope’s friends, who described him as a much-loved, dauntless climber. But a few acknowledged that in recent years, he struggled with alcoholism and increasingly severe mental health issues, prompted by the loss of many close friends in the mountains, such as Hayden Kennedy, Marc-André Leclerc, and Michael Gardner.

Leon spoke with Climbing on the condition that her account of Stanhope’s accident include an addendum that she hopes to use this traumatic experience to give back to the community. She plans to work to help others manage mental health issues catalyzed by loss in the mountains.

“There are deaths in the mountains every year, and a lot of the time, people get through that by going back out there and just hucking harder,” she said. “We can default to using our physical bodies to manage stress, and that’s not always sustainable.”

Leon said she hopes Stanhope’s passing would spark an honest conversation about mental health in the climbing world. “I want people who read this not to just think about the physical mechanics of an accident, but to know that the hurt and the suffering we feel from the losses is something that needs to be addressed, something we have to learn to cope with and grow from.”

This is a developing story. We will update it as new information becomes available. 

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