This was the day I would arrive at Stevens Pass
and would be spending the night at the last trail angel's home on the trail,
Hiker Haven, located eighteen miles west on Highway 2 in the little town of
Baring, and hosted by Andrea and Jerry Dinsmore.
I made an experiment this day regarding my food.
I was at the tail end of my 2,665-mile journey, and I was always
famished. I ate five to six meals a day, including snacks, which meant
every two to three hours. I had to stop and prepare something to eat,
even if it was just another one of the hundreds of peanut butter and jam
tortilla sandwiches I had eaten in the last four and a half months.
I had half a bag of Frito chips and four peanut
butter cups left in my pack, both of which were highly caloric. These
were the only food items I ate this day, and to my great surprise, they
provided me with enough energy to complete the day’s hike, without feeling
starved.
From Piper Pass, it was fifteen miles to Stevens
Pass, and the trail going forward was much like the trail I had traveled on for
the last three days. First, the trail climbed thirteen hundred feet to
its high point around Sunrise Lake, and then descended seventeen hundred feet
to the highway at the pass.
Nearing the pass, I walked under another set of
heavy-duty transmission lines that brought “hydroelectricity from the Columbia
basin east of the Cascades to the cities of the coast,” [3] and shortly
thereafter, I encountered the tall, steel pylons that marched straight up the
slopes of the mountain carrying cables and ski chairs for the ski lifts at
Stevens Pass.
Death at Stevens Pass
The ski resort at Stevens Pass was the site of a
very tragic avalanche accident that occurred on February 19, 2012. A
group of friends, well known to each other, were sharing beers in a restaurant
at Stevens Pass, when the subject of a ski run down Tunnel Creek drainage was
suggested for the following day, Sunday, February 19.
Tunnel Creek drainage is a three-thousand-foot
descent down the backside of Cowboy Mountain to Highway 2 that meanders up the
mountain to Stevens Pass. It’s out of bounds and off-limits to skiers,
and not managed for avalanche control. Anyone who ventures into this
terrain and gets into trouble is on their own, although, in practicality,
search and rescue personnel will respond when it’s a matter of life and death.
The small group eventually blossomed to a group
of fifteen, all of whom were expert skiers, and many had skied Tunnel Creek
numerous times.
Ski conditions were perfect, sort of; twenty-six
inches of powder had fallen in the last twenty-four hours, and the day offered
clear weather and blue skies.
The group rode the Skyline Express ski lift to
the top of the mountain, and then transferred to the Seventh Heaven ski lift
leading to the top of Cowboy Mountain. After getting off the Seventh
Heaven ski lift, it was only a short ten-minute walk to the summit of Cowboy
Mountain. Some in the group had deep reservations about making the run,
but said nothing. They deferred to the most experienced members of the
group, figuring, incorrectly, that they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t safe.
Before starting the descent, four members of the
party split off to try a different run, leaving eleven, very experienced
backcountry skiers, trained in avalanche safety and equipped with the proper
gear, to go it alone. Pairing up in twos to provide support for one
another, they started down, periodically stopping in the trees to keep in
contact with one another and to assess the progress of their run.
A group of four stopped momentarily in a stand
of old-growth spruce trees, while the remaining seven plunged on down the
chute, whooping and hollering and congratulating each other on how great the
powder was.
And then, above the seven, the crack appeared,
creating a shelf two feet deep and hundreds of feet wide. A wall of snow
twenty-five feet high roared down Tunnel Creek drainage, sweeping anything and
everything in its path to the bottom of the chute. Seven were caught in
the maelstrom of the avalanche and only four survived.
The three who died that day were
forty-six-year-old Jim Jack, a legend at Stevens Pass and a longtime ski
patroller at nearby Mission Ridge and head judge on the Freeskiing World Tour;
thirty-year-old Chris Rudolph, marketing director for Stevens Pass; and
forty-one-year-old Johnny Brenan, a local contractor.
One of the survivors, thirty-year-old Elyse
Saugstad, a pro skier from Lake Tahoe, was wearing an ABS airbag backpack.
As she was being swept down the chute, she was able to yank the cord and
activate the devise which inflated two giant air bladders, which allowed her to
float on the surface of the avalanche rather than being buried at the bottom of
it as two of her companions were. Both Chris Rudolph and John Brenan were
buried under more than six feet of snow and debris.
Megan Michelson, a member of the group and the
author of the article that appeared in Outside Magazine, wrote
this:
"All of the warning signs had been there,
glaring and obvious: heaps of new snow, terrain that would funnel a slide into
a gully, a large and confident group with a herd mentality, and a forecast that
warned of dangerous avalanche conditions. All of us had been trained to
recognize these risk factors, yet we did not heed them.” (Michelson)
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