Kalie McCrystal’s Family Says She Fell While Descending the Matterhorn

Kalie McCrystal’s family said Tuesday that they have accepted she died on the Matterhorn, two weeks after the Canadian skyrunner disappeared on the Italian side of the mountain while training for a speed record.

McCrystal, 38, was on the Lion Ridge on the afternoon of Sept. 1, learning the route before an attempt to climb the mountain and get back down in under five hours. Two Polish climbers saw her at around 4 p.m. below Pic Tyndall, a 4,241-meter (13,914-foot) shoulder that sits under the summit, and her phone registered on a cell tower at about the same time. Nobody has heard from her since.

Hillary Gerardi first raised the alarm, and the family named her in Tuesday’s statement, calling her support since then “indispensable.” Gerardi is an American-born runner who lives in the Chamonix valley and holds the women’s running record on Mont Blanc.

Her mother, Wendy Cooper, and her sister, Jody McCrystal, put the statement out through Athletics Canada, which had joined the Skyrunner World Series in asking for her safe return the week before. “The Matterhorn is as majestic as it is unforgiving,” they wrote. “Despite Kalie’s exceptional skill and experience in technical mountain terrain, including her previous experience on the Matterhorn itself, everything we now know suggests she fell while descending.”

A helicopter from the Aosta Valley alpine rescue service flew the upper mountain first. When it found nothing, the Guardia di Finanza’s alpine rescue station at Breuil-Cervinia sent up drones carrying software meant to spot a rope, a jacket or a helmet against the rock. The search stopped on Sept. 11, the Italian wire service ANSA reported.

“We did everything that was possible to locate her,” Valerio Segor, who directs civil protection for the Aosta Valley, told the Globe and Mail in an interview Monday. He said even the AI analysis of the drone images had produced nothing new.

Cooper and Jody McCrystal thanked the Guardia di Finanza rescue team for its “professionalism, kindness, and commitment,” and thanked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian embassy for their help through the search. Friends and other runners came from around the world to look for her. “How beautiful it has been to witness the love that surrounded her,” they wrote.

McCrystal was a lawyer from Squamish, British Columbia, who taught in the school of legal studies at Capilano University and was among the best mountain runners Canada had. She won the 4 Refugios Non-Stop in Argentina this year, a 40K race with 3,350 meters of climbing and her best result on the Skyrunner World Series, and took third at the Madeira SkyRace in 2024.

Zermatt’s guides had warned against the ascent in July and stopped taking clients up, and the Breuil-Cervinia association did the same after a large piece of rock broke away from the south face at around 3,900 meters on Aug. 5. Neither side of the mountain was being guided by the time McCrystal went up. A Finnish climber who reached the summit by the Furggen route on July 31 and started down the Italian side has not been found either.

Before this summer only two women had a Matterhorn round trip on the Fastest Known Time database, Emelie Forsberg in 2013 at 5:51:35 and Elena Fernández López in 2023 at 11:15:26. Five more went up between mid-July and mid-August. Karina Andersen’s unsupported 5:14:53 on Aug. 9 was the quickest of them, and it was 23 days old on the day McCrystal went missing, which put the sub-five-hour round trip she wanted almost 15 minutes beyond anything a woman had run. Kilian Jornet holds the outright mark at 2:52:02, set in 2013.

McCrystal is on that leaderboard herself. On Aug. 14 she had gone up the Hörnli Ridge from Zermatt, on the Swiss side, and come back down in 6:47:33. “I intended this to be a recon run, but ended up faster than I thought,” she wrote on her entry.

At least 500 people are thought to have died on the Matterhorn since Edward Whymper reached the top in July 1865, and dozens have never been recovered, though retreating ice has been uncovering some of them. In July 2023 a German climber missing since September 1986 was found in the Theodul Glacier below the mountain and identified by DNA.