Details Emerge About the Death of Freelance Writer Michael J. Ybarra

There are echos in the piece of another adventurous life laid out by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild. According to Marissa Christman, a climber who met Ybarra last fall and ascended Mount Whitney with the 45-year-old UCLA-UC Berkeley grad just a few days before the fatal climb at Sawtooth Ridge, he had embraced nature’s path:

Ybarra, who was unmarried and didn’t have children, was living mostly out of his car at the time of his death, traveling from area to area and writing to pay the bills, Christman said.