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July 10, 2026
Getting a Week of My Brother's Life Back
Twenty-eight years after my brother Mike died on Denali, I unexpectedly got a week of his life back.
It arrived in an email from a man I had never met.
Eight years ago, an article from Rock and Ice magazine appeared in my news feed. The story was about climber Chuck Odette, who had just set an age record by climbing a notoriously difficult rock route at the age of 62.
While that was certainly an impressive accomplishment, something else caught my attention.
As Chuck explained why he had eventually switched from alpine climbing to rock climbing, he mentioned my brother Mike by name.
That immediately got my attention.
As I have shared previously, my brother Mike and his climbing partner, Stuart Jones, were killed in a climbing accident on Denali in June of 1990 after a violent storm blew them off their route.
I was intrigued to learn how this man knew my brother, so I sent him an email with the subject line: Greetings from Mike Koshuta's Brother
Chuck replied two days later.
As I read his email, I realized I was about to learn things about Mike that no one in my family had ever known.
Chuck explained that he had met Stuart several years earlier and, by coincidence, was climbing the same Cassin Ridge route on Denali at almost exactly the same time as Mike and Stuart.
His team had started a day later, so for much of the climb they could occasionally see Mike and Stuart higher up on the mountain.
Then, after finishing an exhausting 27-hour push during a rare stretch of good weather, Chuck caught up to them on the narrow Cassin Ledge.
Mike was brewing tea.
He and Stuart invited Chuck to sit down and share a hot cup.
That was how Chuck met my brother.
Not at a climbing club.
Not at a conference.
Not through mutual friends.
They met while drinking tea together at 14,000 ft on the side of the tallest mountain in North America.
Chuck wrote that after a short visit, Mike and Stuart packed up and continued climbing.
Over the next several days his team occasionally caught glimpses of them higher on the mountain until a powerful storm moved in.
The weather became so severe that Chuck's team spent days pinned down in their tents by hurricane-force winds and bitter cold. At times, he said they couldn't even stand upright without being blown over.
Eventually, the storm eased enough for Chuck's team to reach the summit before descending by Denali's standard West Buttress route.
On the way down, he met one of the National Park Service rangers.
The ranger asked him when he had last seen Mike and Stuart.
Chuck said his heart sank immediately.
He knew that wasn't the kind of question you wanted to hear on a mountain.
The ranger explained they feared Mike and Stuart had run into trouble during the storm and asked Chuck to check whether the cache of food and equipment they had left lower on the mountain for their descent had been picked up.
When Chuck reached the cache, everything was exactly where Mike and Stuart had left it.
His heart sank again.
A few days later, after the weather finally cleared, National Park Service rangers located Mike and Stuart's bodies from a helicopter.
The storm had claimed them.
By the time Chuck and I exchanged emails in 2018, I already knew how my brother had died.
What I didn't know was how he had lived during those final weeks.
Until then, the time between dropping Mike off at Dulles Airport and receiving the news of his death had always felt like a blank space.
Chuck filled in part of that blank space.
He gave me memories I never knew existed.
For twenty-eight years, I thought that week on Denali had been lost forever.
Instead, it found its way back to me through the kindness of a stranger.
Now, when I think about Mike's final days, I don't think first about the storm.
I think about three climbers sitting on a narrow ledge high on Denali, sharing a cup of hot tea..
