By Kevin Fixler, Summit Daily
The allure of Colorado’s stockpile of 14,000-foot mountains has increasingly acted as a siren song to natives and visitors each summer — and over the weekend they claimed another life.
Jake Lord, a 25-year-old Parker resident, fell some 300 feet Saturday morning while hiking with a friend as they approached from the backside of Capitol Peak’s summit southwest of Aspen. Efforts by his hiking partner and a witness to resuscitate him with CPR were unsuccessful and emergency responders arriving by Flight For Life helicopter two hours later pronounced him dead at the scene from the severity of his injuries.
Lord was a recent graduate of Colorado State University in Fort Collins with a background in computer hardware and worked as a software engineer for medical technology firm Medtronic. Photos available via social media showed him to be an experienced climber before he attempted to conquer one of the state’s notoriously most difficult “14ers,” located in the Elk Mountains.
A compilation of news reports confirms him as the fourth death this year on one of Colorado’s preeminent peaks, with the others occurring at Maroon Bells, Mount Princeton and Longs Peak. Two more hikers went missing overnight Sunday after one had a serious but non-life-threatening fall on the trail to Mount of the Holy Cross. The Vail Mountain Rescue Group found them Monday afternoon.
Read the full story at .
