Dragons in the Snow by Ed Power

Author:Ed Power
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680512977
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2020-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

16

SOLDIERS OF THE SNOW: GUIDE VOICES, HASTY PARTIES, AND RESCUE DOGS

Backcountry ski guide Shannon Finch remembers watching a ski client get swept away in an avalanche on a mountainside in Thousand Peaks Ranch, where she works full-time for Park City Powder Cats. One second, the client was standing beside her. The next, he dropped into a run, made a turn or two, fell, and slid ten feet down from one of his skis that had released.

Another client, a snowboarder, became impatient while the skier was trying to retrieve his ski. “Hey, I want to go,” the snowboarder told Finch. As he adjusted his snowboard binding, he unintentionally slipped into the top of the pitch, slid down to a shallow rock, and started a small avalanche.

Finch glanced down to where the fallen skier was struggling. Below the breaking avalanche, he was swiftly caught in the onrushing snow and heaved over a hump in the slope. Then he vanished. “The last thing I saw was the client’s arm go up and then disappear,” she recalls.

Hearing Finch describe the experience, it’s as if she had set something down on a beach berm only to see a giant wave suddenly snag it and suck it out to sea. But this was a human, who had just paid five hundred dollars for a day in which Finch was charged with shepherding him safely through mountain terrain. She ordered the client group to freeze in place. She jumped on her skis down into the avalanche debris field and skied over the roller in the slope. Just below, the client came into her sight. He was mostly above the snow, digging himself out.

“I felt a surge of emotion,” Finch says. “I just remember asking, ‘Can you breathe, are you okay?’ ” The “vibe” of the client group changed dramatically that day to a wary regard for the potential dangers around them, although all agreed they should keep going. After another five or six runs, Finch and her fellow guides, back at the Park City Powder Cats cabin, debriefed with the client. “You look at these things,” Finch says, “and ask, ‘How did we get here?’ ”

The next day, she had ski patrol duty at Sundance ski resort. But after a night of replaying the avalanche accident in her mind, the image of it haunted her. She couldn’t shake the feeling of “What if?” Suppose her client had been completely buried and seriously hurt—or worse. “I went to Sundance and just felt hollow,” she recalls.

Unable to stop thinking about the what-if, she had a long talk with her twin brother. And then she started to cry. “I needed to let that emotion out. I had had all that adrenaline.” Finch, who has had mercifully few experiences with avalanches, found her scare to be an emotional jolt that she learned from. Like other snow professionals—particularly patrollers and guides to whom skiers and boarders entrust their lives—she discovered the true depths of her own commitment and weight of that responsibility to be even greater than she imagined.

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