Bill Denz

Bill Denz, formally Matthew William Denz, was a New Zealand mountain climber, born in Surrey, England, in 1951 and raised in Dunedin after his family moved to New Zealand in 1953. He became known for bold free solo climbing and for choosing unclimbed mountains and hard routes in the Southern Alps, the Darran Mountains and Patagonia. On Cerro Torre his friend Philipp Herron died, and Denz reached only the final rime mushroom rather than the summit. In 1981 he made an ascent of Kusum Kanguru in Nepal that Wikipedia describes as the first ever. He died on 3 October 1983 in an avalanche while climbing Makalu with Peter Hillary, Mark Moorhead and Fred From. His life is the subject of the 2011 biography Bold Beyond Belief by Paul Maxim. Sources give conflicting birth dates within 1951.