Scandia ? A teenager killed while hiking near Custer, S.D., had gone off a trail because he wanted to do something he couldn’t do at home in Kansas, his brother says.

Colton Stensaas, 16, of the north-central Kansas town of Scandia, died Tuesday during a family trip to the Black Hills for the Fourth of July. Colton; his brother, Nathan; their mother, Robyn Erickson; and her boyfriend, Randy Nelson, were visiting a friend, Eric Swanson.

The brothers, Nelson and Swanson were walking on a trail in Sunday Gulch at Custer State Park when Colton and Swanson went off through the forest, Nathan Stensaas said. He and Nelson stayed on the trail.

“Colton said, ‘I need to get off of this path. I need to do something that I can’t do at home,”‘ Nathan Stensaas said.

About 30 minutes later, Nathan Stensaas said, they heard Colton yell, then heard his body hit about 60 feet below the peak.

Nathan Stensaas found his brother about 10 minutes later.

“They said he died instantly. It was rough finding him like that,” he said.

The Custer County Sheriff’s Office said Colton was apparently climbing without safety equipment when he lost his grip and fell, but his brother said that’s not true.

“He was on top of a rock formation that he walked up. He was looking over the peak,” Nathan Stensaas said.

The death is still under investigation, the sheriff’s department said.

Colton’s mother, Robyn Erickson, said she takes comfort “that at 60 feet, he didn’t have to be afraid for very long.”

“It was a little bit more of a risk than he normally took,” she said.

The funeral was scheduled for Saturday at Pike Valley Football Field, with 12 of the teen’s friends, including Jarrett Payne, serving as pallbearers.

“He was a brother, to put it simply. That’s just what I thought of him,” Payne, 17, said. “This is my first real funeral.”