Each tragedy that occurs in the mountains seems more
personal to me the longer I’m around. The longer I live by the mountains; the
more people I meet, the more experiences I have and the greater the chance of
tragedy hitting home.
Every moment, people make decisions that may determine their
fate. Some decisions are obviously poor, while others are more subtle, but all
have consequence of some degree. Over the years I have dug out a handful of
petrified people out of the snow; those who died in avalanches. None of them
were people who I immediately knew though; they were just bodies, each with a
story forever then on attached to the tragedy. Each scene was visually
horrifying but since I personally knew none of them I lacked an emotional connection;
each scene was somewhat surreal. Last year,
however, that all changed but I was not there to see the accidents first hand.
Not only is it hard to deal with the death of those you
know, it is that much harder when friends die doing the things that you do
yourself, by decisions that you may have easily made yourself. When the people
you look up to the most fall, it is hard to rationalize your own existence by
the decisions you have made that leave you alive today. You will never know how
many of those decisions were left to luck, and that is the problem with
learning from experience.
Each accident leaves something to be learned, or at the very
least speculated upon to what went wrong. In some situations when negotiating
the mountains lady luck is all you have. We try our hardest to minimize risk
but never know when we are truly just skating by. Conditions in the mountains
are always tangible and we as humans are only as good as the knowledge and
discipline we have and choose to use.
My first personal connection to death in the mountains was
nearly a year ago with the passing of my friend and colleague Kip Garre. More
recently, Steve Romeo, an acquaintance from a ski trip to Antarctica (easily
one of my most memorable skiing experiences) has now passed. It is all quite
difficult to process really. Kip and Steve were both motivated like the super
human and carried the idea of motion in the mountains on skis, a concept
which I have based my life around, more than anyone else I have known. Kip and
Steve defined the sport of ski mountaineering. Both Kip and Steve died with their touring partners (Allison
Kreutzen with Kip, and Chris Onufer with Steve).
Both accidents occurred while on ascent in steep, high elevation
terrain. Kip passed in the Sierra and Steve most recently in the Tetons.
In the years to come I can only hope that death in the
mountains stays at arm’s length to me, but with the constant passage of time
the reality of the situation is likely to be the opposite.
Help support Utah Backcountry Skiing with a purchase from... Backcountry.com!
