A California middle school aide died this month while climbing in Yosemite National Park, authorities said.
Patricia “Trish” Stoops, 57, died June 8 in a rappelling accident at the Central Pillar of Frenzy, one of the popular rock-climbing lines at Yosemite.
“She had taken the lead to get the team down before dark and something, what exactly still isn’t clear, went horribly wrong,” her brother Michael Stoops wrote on a climbing forum. “She did not survive the fall, unfortunately. No one else was injured.”
Stoops had worked at Glick Middle School in Modesto, where she and another teacher founded the HOPE Project, an extracurricular program that organizes service trips for students. The Modesto Bee featured the program in February when the teachers took a group of students to help a family who had lost their Paradise home in the Camp fire.
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