When Bobi, a mixed-breed, chocolate-brown, furry dog living in the Portuguese village of Conquieros, on May 11, 2023, the event created worldwide buzz, and with good reason—online calculators used to convert dog to human years stop at 20-year-old dogs. Bobi, like Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman who lived to 122, is the supercentenarian of the canine world, obviously endowed with superb genetics.  Like Calment, Bobi has also lived a life conducive to longevity: stress-free, with daily walks in an unpolluted environment, and the comfort of many friends. In a recent interview, Bobi’s genial, laid-back, 38-year-old person, Leonel Costa, also described in detail the life-extending care that he and his family have given Bobi since puppyhood, most of that care contrary to the received wisdom of raising dogs in America.

How Is Bobi, the World’s Oldest Dog, Still Alive?

First off, Bobi isn’t neutered, validating what an increasing number of studies show: intact dogs retain the protective effects of testosterone and estrogen and have lower . Second, Bobi was vaccinated as a pup and has subsequently received only a rabies vaccine when legally required. Third, he eats human food—grilled fish and meat—and lots of vegetables from the family’s organic garden, the fish providing the DHA and EPA critical for brain and cell health and the vegetables rich in anti-carcinogenic phytochemicals. Bobi has been allowed to roam freely and has never been leashed, having the opportunity to socialize with other unleashed village dogs. In other words, he’s been able to conduct his own life while being showered with his family’s love.

Maximizing a Dog’s Lifespan

Costa’s experience with Bobi mirrors mine with my dog Pukka, a yellow Lab who recently turned fourteen, two years older than the average lifespan for the breed. Pukka, like Bobi, has explored our Wyoming hamlet at will, coming and going through his own dog door. He isn’t neutered, has received only puppyhood vaccinations plus his required rabies shots, and has eaten local elk along with free-range domestic meat, plentiful organic vegetables, and a daily dose of fish oil. His dog toys are made of certified-nontoxic materials, and he drinks filtered, non-chlorinated water from our well. Like Bobi, Pukka has an extremely rich social life, fraternizing with other dogs on his rounds, hanging out with me while I’m writing in my office, driving with me to town and going into stores that allow dogs, while accompanying me on countless skiing, biking and hiking trips. When assignments call me away, he’s not kenneled. He stays at our home with a sitter he knows.

Simple Tips to Extend Your Dog’s Life Expectancy

Clearly, dogs who reside near busy roads can’t lead the free-roaming lives that Bobbi and Pukka enjoy, yet city dwellers can still push the boundaries of their dogs’ lifespans by allowing them unleashed exercise in big, safe green spaces, leaving them intact ( can prevent unwanted puppies), feeding them a pesticide-free, human-grade diet with lots of veggies and fish oil, vaccinating them at puppyhood and then them to see if they retain immunity, and, of course, by giving them tidal waves of love.

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SURGERY HAS LONG BEEN the accepted fix for creaky knees, grinding joints, and tweaked backs. But there’s mounting evidence that the knife isn’t always the best medicine. Consider a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine that showed that arthroscopic knee operations—known as “dust and cleans”—produced no better results than a placebo procedure in which an incision was made but no arthroscopic instruments were inserted. That study didn’t stop 650,000 knee scopes from happening last year, but it boosted a sense among pro and weekend athletes that there has to be a better way.

sports injuries

Stop that Scalpel! Can natural-healing therapies provide an alternative to “invasive” treatment?

sports injuries

sports injuries

sports injuries

sports injuries

This topic is particularly applicable to my aging bod. When I started breaking down after 35 years of serious pounding in the outdoors—I’ve got toe joints that have lost their surrounding cartilage, nagging lower-back pain, and a misshapen shoulder (the result of a bike crash)—there were plenty of surgeons eager to cut me open. But I wanted options. So I asked Jackson Hole–based Erich Wilbrecht, a 42-year-old real estate agent who competed on the 1992 U.S. Olympic biathlon team, for a recommendation. I knew he’d had the inside of his right patella scoped unsuccessfully in 2001 and was now trying different approaches.

Wilbrecht told me about Andy Pruitt, the founder of the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, in Boulder, Colorado, and a specialist in nonsurgical techniques who has treated athletes like cyclist Lance Armstrong and marathoner Frank Shorter. Pruitt, a physician’s assistant, belongs to the expanding niche of doctors and physical therapists who try to avoid surgery by figuring out the external causes of our aches. (See ““.) This year he expects the patient base of his clinic, open since 1998, to climb to 31,000 people from across the United States. Nationwide, the number of noninvasive practitioners like Pruitt certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine has doubled in the last three years.

Pruitt prescribed balancing and muscle-building exercises for Wilbrecht’s glutes and knees, as well as orthotics—customized footbeds—to align his hips and legs in a less stressful position. Result? “A 90 percent reduction in pain and a return to racing,” says Wilbrecht. Since seeing Pruitt, he has won the 25-kilometer Yellowstone Rendezvous cross-country ski race and two national titles in summer biathlon, which combines trail running and marksmanship. Naturally, I wanted to find out what Pruitt could do for me.

FIRST, THOUGH, I checked with Eric Heiden, 46, the five-time Olympic speed-skating gold medalist, who’s now an orthopedic surgeon and sports-medicine expert at the University of California at Davis. He heartily approved of shopping around. “People like Pruitt are worth their weight in gold,” said Heiden. “Surgery is only appropriate if you’ve completed all the nonoperative treatments available. A small change in fit and form can often keep athletes away from doctors like me.”

With that, I paid Pruitt a visit. A fit 54-year-old of average height, he presides over a facility that’s part gym, part rehab clinic. Before looking me over, he let me tag along as he saw another patient, a muscular 42-year-old female cyclist complaining of soreness where her iliotibial band, a ligament that stretches along the length of the hamstring, joined the knee.

“I’ve been resting it,” the woman said, pointing to her knee.

“Rest isn’t going to solve this,” Pruitt replied after a quick look. “We’ve got to change how you ride.”

Pruitt described the woman as his classic patient: hard-charging, well informed, and, like many of us, imperfect—biomechanically speaking. He diagnosed her as flat-footed and knock-kneed. For her feet, he recommended orthotic shoe inserts. For her knees, we headed to the state-of-the-art 3-D-motion-analysis room, a $60,000 system consisting of six digital video cameras, their rigging, and a computer.

The patient’s bike had been set up on an indoor trainer. Infrared sensors were placed on her hips, thighs, knees, shins, and ankles, and she was filmed while cycling, her stick-figure image appearing on a computer screen. The image clearly showed that her knees were torqued inward. To remedy this, Pruitt moved her seat back two centimeters. Then he worked on her cycling shoes, placing shims under the cleats to tweak the angle of shoe to pedal.

The patient got back on her bike, and before long a smile lit her face: no pain. Pruitt pointed to the computer screen, which now showed her knees vertically aligned with her feet.

Next it was my turn. Pruitt looked at my X rays, had me walk around on my toes and heels, and grilled me about my outdoor activities. His prognosis? First, he advised no surgery for my toes. Instead, he told me to stay with my randonnée setup for backcountry skiing, since the stiff boots would protect my toes. Come spring, I was to wear stiff-soled climbing boots and have my trail runners custom-fitted with rigid rocker soles. To ease the discomfort, I could get annual cortisone shots in my toe joints. For my back, strengthening and stretching exercises would alleviate the pain enough to let me climb and ski.

As for my shoulder, the news was grimmer: I either had to give up climbing and kayaking or get the offending bone spur removed arthroscopically.

So I didn’t win ’em all, but by following Pruitt’s suggestions, I was able to ski 100 days last winter, and this summer I rediscovered the mental challenge of rock climbing in less-flexible shoes—pain-free. This fall, I’ll undergo surgery to get my shoulder fixed, but that’s OK. There are times when the knife is the only way to stay in the game, and I intend to keep playing strong for years.

BIOMECHANICS AND JOINT LUBES
At Pruitt’s Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, specialists will take your shoes, bikes, skis, clubs, and boards and fit them correctly to the quirks of your body. A consultation and 3-D analysis of your running or biking form costs about $400. For joint pain, you can sign on for viscosupplementation (lubing your sockets with hyaluronan) or cortisone injections. Three to five treatments run $1,500 per joint. (303-544-5700, )

POSTURE PERFECT
When NFL players John Lynch and Junior Seau needed relief for their aching joints, they turned to the Egoscue Method, founded by San Diego–based sports therapist Pete Egoscue. His strength and flexibility program restores spinal—and therefore biomechanical—alignment. After a consultation with an exercise physiologist, clients begin a two-week prescription of daily 30-minute workouts. Patients then return every two weeks for a checkup and a revised workout program. The cost for eight office visits is $1,495. (800-995-8434, )

THE BACK RACK
Using a high-tech version of the medieval torture rack, the Lordex Lumbar Spine System gently pulls your spine apart and eases the pressure on your mashed and bulging discs. Following each 30-minute traction session, patients work through a doctor-prescribed stretching-and-resistance routine, using a modified stomach-crunch/back-extension machine to strengthen and stabilize the afflicted area. The 25 weekly one-hour visits can cost up to $5,000. (281-398-1700; )

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THE HORTON RIVER heads on a rise of barren land north of Great Bear Lake in the far northwestern corner of Canada’s Northwest Territories. It flows west and north some 400 miles before winding through the Smoking Hills and emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Protected by distance, an inhospitable climate, and a lack of precious metals, oil, or gas, it has remained much as it was when the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted away, 13,000 years ago: the home of grizzly bears, caribou, musk ox, eagles, and an infinity of space.

Wireless Communication in the Wilderness

Wireless Communication in the Wilderness

In a noisy age, it seemed like the perfect place to go for a vacation.


Crammed into a Cessna 185 floatplane—packed with three weeks’ worth of food, camping gear, and our folding canoe—we fly east on an August afternoon, from the village of Inuvik into one of the largest roadless, ice-free areas on the planet. Our goal is to paddle from the river’s source at Horton Lake to the Arctic Ocean, taking us through country still as wild as it was when it was first explored by British sea captain Sir John Franklin in the 1820s and, beginning in 1910, by the American Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who saw much of the region by dogsled.


The other half of the “we” is Len Carlman, my longtime friend, attorney, and father of my godson. Len has a shock of short red hair, blue eyes, and a whooping laugh that reveals a childlike wonder at moments many adults might find ordinary: camping in the backyard, building his kids an igloo playhouse, and fiddling with his ever-present Palm Pilot, onto which he has downloaded six novels to read during the inevitable storm days we’ll encounter.


I’ve longed for this change in schedule. For seven months I’ve been editing an anthology of wilderness essays, and my little office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has felt abuzz with electronic energy, sometimes two different phones and the fax machine ringing simultaneously. Occasionally, I’ve looked out the window above my computer, across Grand Teton National Park, and imagined the dense web of wireless traffic arcing overhead, connecting us in virtual office space, with billions of conversations taking place, either vocally or by e-mail, many between people who have never seen each other.


Even in the evening, when the workday is done, the house remains filled with the ambient noise of what almost all of us have adopted as necessary technology: the whispers and whines of refrigerator and freezer, the subtle hum of answering machines, stove, stereo, clocks, smoke detectors, computers. Most of us don’t even notice this kind of low-grade static. Only when we go to really quiet country do we realize how shocking silence can be, so thick away from the thrum of civilization that it presses against our flesh like the pressure beneath the sea.

WE LAND ON HORTON lake at six in the evening and unload. The pilot lifts off, leaving us under an immense sky. The only vestiges of the wired world we departed from yesterday are Len’s Palm Pilot, his handheld global-positioning-system unit, and his Globalstar satellite phone. Len’s family—believing that a grown man with two young children shouldn’t be going off to run a river in the grizzly-infested Arctic—told him that if he insisted on paddling the Horton, he had to bring along a sat phone, the kind that works anywhere, in case of an emergency. I really couldn’t say no to the phone, even though the subtext of bringing it along was apparent: It wouldn’t be used only for an emergency; Len, who also lives in Jackson Hole, was expected to stay in touch. Networker and family man that he is, he thought it a fine idea.


Compared with mountaineering trips, with their lean sense of deprivation, canoe journeys are lavish. Our 16-and-a-half-foot folding boat has a potential payload of 800 pounds, but Len and I have tried to balance our wish for comfort with easy portages and a fast-handling boat. Our entire pile of supplies and gear, plus canoe, weighs 285 pounds—including four cans of pepper spray and a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with slugs.


On the flight up from Calgary, Len sat across the aisle from me, poring over the sat phone’s thick manual. He asked me which personal telephone numbers I wanted him to program into it—in case I needed to call someone and “say some last words.”


“You’ve read too many Everest books,” I told him. “This is a moderate river, and we’re going to portage the big rapids.”


“What about the bears?”


“Every bear I’ve seen in the Arctic, and who’s seen me, has run away. And if they don’t, that’s why we have the pepper spray and the shotgun.”


“I’m not going to use the shotgun,” he said. “I’d probably hit you. If there’s a bear in the tent, I’m going to lie flat, and you fire over me.”


This left me uneasy. “What if the bear decides to eat me?”


“I’m tastier,” said Len, who’s a bit heavier than me, and he went back to programming his phone.


The sat phone was impressively compact, about ten inches long with its antenna extended. This was the latest version of a device that debuted in the late 1970s, at the time the size of a large suitcase. Sat phones had shrunk to briefcase size by the early nineties, and, by 1998, to little bigger than a traditional handset. Perhaps more important, the value of these phones had been driven home during the 1996 Everest disaster, when guide Rob Hall, pinned high on the mountain, bade farewell to his pregnant wife in New Zealand. Hall had been carrying a two-way radio and was relayed by sat phone from Base Camp. The message was clear: If the situation turns dire, you can at least say goodbye. Now that relatively inexpensive (about $600) sat phones are available, both 24/7 rescue and, if necessary, farewells are a reality for the average backcountry traveler.


After trimming the boat, we cast off, Len taking his preferred spot up front, where he can enjoy the rhythm of paddling without the worry of steering. The current whisks us quickly downstream, into country so empty of human artifacts that it seems as if we’re the first people on earth: tundra, sky, a distant wisp of cloud. Still, the old edginess is gone. What’s diminished is that familiar mixture of genuine fear at being alone in the fastness of the high latitudes and the lovely tension of facing your fear with nothing besides what you’ve brought along and the wit necessity inspires.


The air-taxi service’s telephone number, programmed into Len’s sat phone, is no more than the push of a memory button away. Then the entire rescue services of North America would be at our disposal, down to a huge twin-rotor helicopter that can navigate through fog and find us by our GPS coordinates.


All this technology doesn’t mean that we’ll be less careful. Getting pinned in a rapid with your head underwater takes only a few seconds of inattention, and then all the sat phones and GPS units in the world won’t do you a bit of good. Nevertheless, the phone has given us a newfound cushion and is extinguishing an awareness that’s always been part of these trips, what I like to think of as slipping through the world’s harshness by a mixture of skill and divine grace.


Small rapids come and go, cooling the air with their riffles. Round yellow rocks flash beneath the canoe, and in the big pools—perhaps 20 feet deep—we can see the shadowy forms of large grayling, their caudal fins waving slowly like fans. The air is sweet, the water is sweet, the vast lay of tundra inviting, its purity magnified by the knowledge that its emptiness won’t come to an abrupt halt. This isn’t a 300,000-acre national park or a two-million-acre wilderness area, the boundary of which we’ll soon reach. No bridge crosses the Horton, no ranger station sits upon its banks, no sign will tell us when we’ve reached a campsite. The nearest road is a 15-day walk to the west, assuming a person could walk 20 miles a day over this terrain.


We stay in the country’s embrace throughout the long afternoon, camp river left on a high bank, cook a stir-fry under our bug net, and enjoy what Ed Abbey called the “sleep of the just—the just plain tired.”

IN THE MORNING, as I fetch water from the river, I hear Len start talking. Surprised, I glance up and see he’s holding the phone to his ear. Until now, I haven’t been able to measure the quiet. His words give the silence perspective, and I realize that without even thinking about it, we’ve lowered our voices.


As I reach the bug tent, he powers off the phone and gives me a weather report from Jackson Hole (sunny and warm). He tells me that Anne, his wife, wasn’t home, so he called Lee, his sister, who will tell the family that we’re alive and well, and would I like to call my girlfriend? He extends the phone under the lower edge of the bug net. For a moment I’m transported back to my childhood—an older boy is offering me a cigarette.


“No, thanks,” I say.


“She’d love to hear from you.”


Len is a Quaker, but he could be a dutiful Catholic. The technology to stay in touch now exists, and he’s using it: the good brother, the good husband, the good father. By comparison, my desire for solitude and detachment, even if only for two weeks, seems self-indulgent—no, worse: irresponsible. The logic of the sat phone is overwhelming and, to me, pernicious.


“Maybe when the trip’s over,” I tell him, feeling like a Luddite.


“Anytime you want,” he says and puts the phone away.


Years ago, when I was fresh out of college and traveling in South America, exploring jungles and mountains, phones were often days away, and typically broken if I found one. I checked my mail only at three-month intervals. It was in the midst of this journey that my uncle Michael, who’d taught me so much about the outdoors, suddenly died. He was a marine engineer, a world traveler, and it was from him that I acquired some of my wanderlust. Coming into Santiago, Chile, I walked into the American embassy and found a string of telegrams and letters waiting for me—the shocking news of his heart attack; the family’s tremendous grief (he was only in his forties and left my aunt and my two young cousins behind); and the pleas to get home for the funeral—all three months old.


It was a turning point in my life. I realized that one of the reasons my relatives had never taken any extended trips was the fear of not being home if such a tragedy struck. I had overcome that fear, as had my uncle. (He died tending one of his ships in Japan.) There was a cost, however, to this freedom: I had missed one of the elemental passages of any family—bidding communal farewell to one of its departed members. Had it been worth it?


I thought so. In that era, there was simply no other way to become intimate with the outdoors, a family that called to me more than my own. Now there is. We can have it both ways: be gone and be attached. As Len and I continue downriver, he checks his voice mail—in my mind, often; in his mind, occasionally—and, thankfully, it’s always empty of bad news.

ON DAY TEN, the river slides into a canyon, a phantasmagoric, watery cavern of dripping red-and-gray walls. A peregrine falcon and a merlin swoop overhead, and the canyon soon curves to the left. To the right stands a headland of black rock, carved smooth as the inside of an oyster shell. Shaped like an amphitheater, it echoes the roar of water. Just above this rapid, a green canoe is pulled onto the left bank, with a hodgepodge of gear piled alongside it on the rocky beach. The canoe’s a rental, the name of an Inuvik air-taxi service written on its bow and stern.


It’s obvious that the owners of the canoe are portaging, so we park nearby and walk along the shore to see if the rapid warrants our carrying as well. A single tongue of river, smooth as moving oil, flows between boiling waves and holes. The bottom of the tongue is blocked by a flat, dark rock the size of a banquet table. Crashing whitewater lies to its left; directly to its right, the same. If we can dart the canoe to the right, at the bottom of the oily tongue, there’s a slim passage.


Len and I stare at this crucial move for a long time: down, feint right, not too much, straighten, and escape. It looks doable—not barely doable but very doable. It’s within the limits of the canoe, and our skill, and it’ll be a challenging run. After all, we came here to run as much of the river as possible. Neither of us wants to be influenced too much by the decision of the other paddlers, whom we spy coming back from their portage: a heavyset man and, much slower and far behind him, a heavyset woman, crossing several hundred yards of boulders.


They both smell of wood smoke, and Mr. Dunn—he gives us only his last name when we greet them—tells us that they capsized in a rapid two days upstream and had to spend a day building a fire to dry their clothing and gear. Taking a swim has “frightened the missus considerably,” he says. He looks at the ground and adds, “This is a much harder river than I thought.”


“We’re really flatwater canoers,” his wife offers, “and we were told that the river was flat mostly.”


She looks scared, and her husband seems morose. Both are obviously weary. They’ve gotten themselves in over their heads, and more-difficult rapids lie ahead. In some ways, they represent that older spirit of adventure; I doubt they have a sat phone or GPS. Unlike us, they are truly on their own if things go wrong.


The Dunns pick up their next load of gear, say goodbye, and start walking painfully over the rocks. We eat some energy bars and Len says, “I wish we could do something for them.”


Feeling at a loss, we get into our canoe and shove off, and then any thoughts of the Dunns’ welfare vanishes as we think of our own. We ferry upstream and eddy out into the current, and I line us up. We sit the canoe, roaring white waves before us, split by a slick green tongue of water. We put in only a stroke or two to keep us pointed downstream. A moment later, spray erupts around us as we slip over the edge—the table of rock, with its Scylla and Charybdis of breaking waves, looming off the bow. Even as I shout for his draw, Len leans right and sinks his paddle. Braced against the thwart, I hang my paddle far over the left gunwale and suck the stern toward it, and the edge of the table rock whisks by our port side. We straighten the heeled canoe and race downstream on the tail of the rapid, passing the Dunns, who sit on the shore, watching us. We raise our paddles; they wave back, looking as sad as two people can be.

A FEW MILES downriver, we reach an even more intimidating set of rapids. Whitewater rushes through a boulder garden and plunges past a house-size rock. Landing, we walk along the shore, climb the rock, and stare downstream, over an incongruously calm pool to a narrow slot where the river erupts into a rooster tail of spray before churning through a violent hole. To the hole’s right lies a broad shelf of rock; to its left, a tower. The entire Horton runs through this small defile.


“Class III plus, maybe IV,” Len says calmly.


Neither of us has to say anything more: This final rapid in the train would eat our loaded, open, erector-set canoe and spit it out in pieces. It’s not runnable in our craft and, if we’re sucked into the hole beyond the chute, perhaps not survivable.


We discuss our alternatives. The safest is to off-load the canoe, carry the gear and canoe around the house-size boulder’s right side, repack everything, paddle down the pool just upstream of the rapid, ferry to a gravel bar river left, off-load the canoe again, and portage around the tower. However, the technical challenges of negotiating this boulder and the swift water adjacent to it are appealing. Almost midchannel from us is a beach-ball-size rock that creates a slot where we could shoot down to enter the pool, ferry river left, and portage around the tower.


After a period of silence, Len asks, “What do you think?”


“I think we should do it. I think we can do it”—I point—”running right down this slot.”


“Thank you,” he says, relieved that I haven’t suggested the cumbersome portage. “But I think we should aim at the big rock and carom off its pillow of water.”


I consider this. Len has done some Class V kayaking—very demanding boating—and has run a few rapids that I wouldn’t entertain in my dreams. I don’t want to dismiss his knowledge; still, I’m not convinced this is the right strategy. The loaded canoe isn’t like the kayak he’s used to. It’ll bore through the pillow and hit the rock. Yet most of the decisions on this trip have been mine—I’ve been doing Arctic trips for two decades—and in an effort to balance our power, I decide to go with one of Len’s suggestions.


“You’ve done a lot more difficult boating than I have,” I say. “I’ll go with it.”


He nods, satisfied that I’ve taken his suggestion.


We hike back to the boat, snug our life jackets, and push off, the first set of waves and holes going by almost without my notice. My eyes are fixed on the rapidly approaching boulder. We head directly toward it, as planned, but it’s coming way too fast. We’re hurtling forward on a crest of green water and foam. Before I can yell it, Len shouts, “Backpaddle! Backpaddle! Backpaddle!” He strokes madly, leaning upstream for all he’s worth.


As hard as I can, I backpaddle with him. For one incredible instant, it appears that we’ll stop the canoe in midstream and be able to angle it left and down the slot. Then we hit the boulder, head on, not violently—our backpaddling prevented that—but hard enough to bounce the canoe crosswise, stern first, out into the main current. In half a heartbeat, we’re rushing sideways downstream, directly at the smaller rock, on which we’ll broach and be pinned, wrapping the boat and breaking it in two.


I spin in my seat, kneel in the bottom of the canoe, and yell at the top of my lungs, “Take the stern!” Simultaneously, I paddle two strokes forward with all my strength as Len spins, drops to his knees, and paddles from what has become the rear seat. The canoe kisses the midstream boulder, slightly behind midships, rides up alongside it, and teeters on its right beam as the Horton comes under us and lifts. We paddle another stroke and pull around the boulder, the forward part of the canoe levered into the main channel by the enormous force of the river. We are now precisely where we didn’t want to be. Waves higher than our heads swamp the canoe. Half full of water, we paddle through the haystacks, into the pool downstream, and manage to guide the ungainly boat onto the gravel bar.


“Well,” I remark, stepping ashore, “that was exciting.” I’m shaking a little.


“You pulled us around the midstream rock,” Len says. “‘Take the stern!’ Great call.” We’re talking fast, pumped on adrenaline, overjoyed to be in one piece, our estimation of each other confirmed— neither one of us clutched.


We drink some water; we eat some food; we stare 30 yards downstream at the rapid that could have ended our lives. Would I have made the same decision without the damn sat phone? Absolutely. And that’s a comforting thought.

THROUGHOUT the evening and most of the next morning, we portage an unrunnable section of the river, then load up and paddle on in a cold, steady rain. Occasionally, I look down and see the river rocks ten feet beneath the canoe, sliding silently by in their green-and-ocher world, mottled by the elongated shapes of grayling and char. When I look up, the world above seems just as liquid, the sodden shapes of caribou moving on the banks, the eagles flapping silently across the river, buoyant and drifting as fish.


Wind, rain, and low clouds sweep across the river but part by midmorning to reveal a pale Arctic sky. On cue, the sun emerges and we pull onto a cobbled beach at a place called Coal Creek, our alternate pickup site. We’ve been paddling hard for 13 days, stalled by storms for three of them, and have run out of time. As the crow flies, we’re only 22 miles from the ocean, but we’d have to paddle another 97 miles of the Horton to get there. Our time is up, our trip at its end. We step ashore and shake hands.


A large moose antler lies at our feet, green with moss. Len suggests that I keep it as a memento. But I return it to the sand, and as I stare at it, wishing that the trip weren’t over, Len pulls out his sat phone and calls his law office. His secretary briefs him on clients, then he chats with his partner, telling him that we’ve arrived at Coal Creek and how useful the borrowed GPS has been. I walk down the beach and look north.


When Len’s done, we call the air-taxi service. Once, a few years ago, you waited until the pilot showed up. Now you call and say, “Hey, we’re here, come get us.” But this time it doesn’t shake out quite that way. Another storm rolls in, the pilot can’t take off, and Len calls home, telling his family about the delay. He then suggests I call my girlfriend, reminding me that she knows the day we’re supposed to come out, and she’ll worry. I also know that she’ll call Anne and will then wonder why I was so thoughtless, or obdurate, that I didn’t call her.


I walk down the beach, then dial her up. The connection is so clear, she could be down the block. I say, “I can smell the Arctic Ocean.” She says, “It’s warm here.” Silence. Even though I use a computer, the Internet, and a cell phone daily, this seems to be crossing a boundary I’m unprepared to face. She senses my uneasiness and says, “Call me from a land line.”


I collapse the antenna and walk back along the cobbles, thinking again of Sir John Franklin, who overwintered in this area and received mail eight months after it left England. Nearly a century later, sledding down the Horton, Vilhjalmur Stefansson learned of the Titanic’s sinking a full three months and ten days after the ocean liner had foundered in the North Atlantic. Now, in the early 2000s, the lag time between the occurrence of a newsworthy event and one’s hearing of it has shrunk to the thinnest of margins. In fact, even here on the Horton, the blessing of uncluttered mental space is no longer a function of remoteness but of desire: to bring the sat phone or to leave it. To use it or to keep it in the emergency pouch. To stay connected or to cut the cord.


Were it up to me, I’d leave it at home. The put-in on a river, the start of a climb, are doors to another universe, where the silence makes you think about why noise has become such a necessary part of our lives. Wearing the silence, you come back scrubbed and radiant. Or, with a certain mixture of bad luck and misjudgment, you don’t come back at all. Before the sat phone, it was always so—no rescue, no farewell except the one you said upon departing.

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ALL MOUNT EVEREST HOPEFULS dream of topping out. But for 38-year-old Maegan Carney, a Seattle native now living in Chamonix, France, the trip back down should also provide excellent material for nightmares. This October, Carney—winner of the 2002 Women’s World Extreme Skiing Championships, in Valdez, Alaska—is hoping to become the first woman (and only the second skier) to cut turns from the very top of the world all the way to Base Camp, some 11,000 feet below.

Meagan Carney

MADAME SANS FEAR: Carney, making turns at 12,500 feet, near her home in Chamonix, France

Carney will face perhaps her greatest challenge shortly after her climb to the summit, when she pushes off on her fat sticks and reaches the Hillary Step. With luck, post-monsoon snow accumulation will partly fill in this 60-degree slope, allowing her to jump-turn her way down. If not, Plan B is to skirt around the Step on a small, precarious section of the impossibly steep, two-mile-high Kangshung Face, where there is almost no survivable margin for error. Either location, says four-time Everest summiter and filmmaker David Breashears, 47, “is a terrifying place to fall.”


The Khumbu Icefall is the next deadly obstacle. Carney will sneak around the crevasse-riddled glacier on a line that traverses the Khumbu’s north side and leads into Base Camp. Here she’ll need to ski like hell, because the route is regularly hammered by falling seracs. Given such hazards, it’s hardly surprising that only one skier has successfully completed a full descent: 40-year-old Slovenian Davo Karnicar, in 2000. (Some skeptics would asterisk that, believing that Karnicar rappelled down the Hillary Step. The matter remains in dispute.) Carney has never even climbed an 8,000-meter peak, much less skied one, but she’s not lacking in confidence. A national ski champion in college and the daughter of a ski instructor, Carney studied Buddhism in Nepal in the early 1990s. In 1999, while taking a ski vacation from her Boulder, Colorado, psychotherapy practice, she got swept up in an avalanche in Portes du Soleil, Switzerland. The near miss actually prompted her to amp up her commitment: The following year, she moved to Chamonix and took up extreme skiing, quickly knocking off a stunning list of 60-degree couloirs and faces in Europe and Asia. On Everest, Carney believes, her skills and mental toughness should allow her to safely descend through the death zone. “The most critical part for me,” she says, “is my control and discipline.”

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“THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT about it—can I go, can I not go. It was a clean decision. The snow was superstrong, superpositive. Fantastic.”

“I know what happened,” says Ruedi Beglinger, the guide in charge during the January 20 avalanche disaster. “It would be a different ballgame if I couldn’t figure it out.”

“Nature wanted to hit us:” Beglinger choppers in to the Durrand Glacier Chalet nine days after the accident.

The alpine dream: SME’s Durrand Glacier Chalet

Two hours after the February 1 avalanche (red outline), a probe line of rescuers (center) looks for survivors

In his lilting Swiss-German accent, Ruedi Beglinger, the founder and owner of Selkirk Mountain Experience (SME), a popular hut-skiing operation in Revelstoke, British Columbia, begins to describe the conditions five days earlier, on January 20—the day a large Class 3 avalanche killed seven of the 20 people he was guiding on a peak named La Traviata. “If I would have come home that evening with nothing having happened,” he continues, speaking quietly inside the third-floor office of his Revelstoke home, “I would say that today was the best day ever. Absolutely amazing snow. You can jump into that stuff with no worrying. Like a hardwood floor. But that’s not how it was.”


As fate would have it, the Revelstoke slide was just the start of a particularly brutal two-week period in British Columbia. On February 1, 12 days after the Selkirk avalanche and less than 20 miles away, another powerful slide claimed the lives of seven Calgary high school students on a school-sponsored cross-country excursion. Combined, the two accidents represented the deadliest fortnight in the history of North American alpine touring, prompting deep questions about ethics, risk, and the business of skiing the backcountry.



Despite the eerie similarities, these disasters involved very different circumstances. In the second incident, an inexperienced and young group passing through a high-traffic area was blindsided by a more-or-less random event. (See “Tumbling Down,” page 107.) In the January 20 avalanche, however, expert skiers who had signed on expressly to seek downhill thrills on exposed terrain were led by a guide with a flawless safety record. Both avalanches left devastated families, friends, and survivors in their wake. But the fate that befell Beglinger’s SME group seemed less purely accidental, and more subtly problematic, because it involved the judgment and decisions of a renowned backcountry guide—a man known for aggressively providing his clients with access to some of the most demanding landscapes on earth.


A 48-year-old from Glarus, Switzerland, Beglinger grew up skiing in the Alps, and in 1977 completed his Union Internationale des Associations de Guides de Montagne certification—the gold standard for mountaineering and skiing guides. Spare and of medium height, he is nearly inexhaustible in the mountains, spending 200 days a year in the backcountry, breaking more than a million vertical feet of trail for some 400 skiers a year. Beglinger’s customers must be prepared to push themselves mentally as well as physically—a day of skiing with SME usually involves seven hours, and the pitch of some powder runs approaches 50 degrees.


Furthermore, unlike heli-skiers and cat-skiers, SME clients climb every inch of vertical they descend. “It’s a chance to come out of your regular life and really go for it,” one skier told me. “Ruedi’s a real hard driver,” said another SME veteran. “He’s out to squeeze the last drop of skiing from the mountains.”


Such full-tilt charging at the winter backcountry, as well as Beglinger’s old-school European approach—in which the guide’s word is law, and you’re ready by 8 a.m. or you’re left at the lodge—aren’t for everyone. Some clients have called him “militaristic.” Others have even declared his style of probing the steep and the deep for more exquisite powder lines “a time bomb waiting to go off.”


The criticism hasn’t altered Beglinger’s style; it has, however, made him more willing to explain to weak skiers that his emphasis on speed, precision, and efficiency isn’t some autocratic power trip, but a crucial element in his approach to safety. “My style was learned in the Alps,” he says, “and is the one given by all big mountains.”


SME’S brochure doesn’t mince words about the ability levels required of customers. Skiers must be able to negotiate “rugged terrain” that is “very remote and wild”; safely link 20 turns down the fall line in deep snow and on slopes equal in steepness to black-diamond runs at international resorts; and climb at least a vertical mile each day of the trip. SME staff also conduct phone interviews to make sure skiers comprehend what’s involved. Up to two months prior to the trips, which last from four days to a week, guests are told, “If you’re not comfortable with any of this, you can back out and we’ll give you your money [about US$1,000] back.”


Until January 20, SME had never had a serious injury or fatality in 18 years of operation. Yet in the days immediately following the accident, the questions multiplied: Why were Ruedi Beglinger and his group skiing when the official avalanche forecast was “considerable”? Why were there 21 people in two groups on a single slope, with one group skiing above the other? Who—if anyone—was to blame?


“My guests are my friends, and I take care of my guests,” Beglinger tells me, on the verge of tears. “But on the 20th of January, at 10:45 a.m., I failed. And I failed not because I made a mistake. I think I failed because nature wanted to hit us.”

THE GROUP THAT SET OFF ON on January 20 was a strong one. In addition to Beglinger and 38-year-old assistant guide Ken Wylie, it included five SME staff. One of the staff members was snowboarding legend Craig Kelly, 36, who was training to become a certified mountain guide. There were 14 clients—three were returnees, and two others were part-time skiing and mountaineering instructors. Six of the clients were friends from Truckee, California; one of them, Rick Martin, a 51-year-old electrician, later noted that “most of us had 20 years of experience in the backcountry.” As always, SME had conducted transceiver and rescue drills with all the clients before embarking into the backcountry.


It was the group’s third day at the lodge. The skiers left at 8 a.m., with the temperature climbing into the low twenties as they glided along in single file. The pace was stiff, the mood buoyant. Beglinger led the skiers northwest toward 8,400-foot La Traviata and its 30-degree west couloir. Their original destination had been a peak called Fronalp, but the mountain was socked in. Conditions on La Traviata—with only high, broken clouds above—looked more favorable. The skiers had traveled in fog the previous day, and Beglinger wanted them to have a view.
Each avalanche season has its own unique meteorological history and risk profile, as weather and temperature build layers in the snowpack. In November, rain throughout the Selkirks had left an icy crust upon which moderate December snowfall did not bond. In early January, a warm spell triggered multiple avalanches that slid down that crust, but cold temperatures soon returned, and SME’s snow-pit, compression, and shear tests during the following two weeks indicated that conditions were stabilizing as the snowpack began bonding to the underlying ice. On January 17, Beglinger dug a test pit on a 45-degree, west-facing slope called the Goat Face, not far from the chalet, and he could no longer find the dangerous November layer. Moreover, for the past two weeks the Canadian Avalanche Association had pegged the risk of avalanche around the Durrand Glacier at “considerable”—a midlevel rating, and one that generally doesn’t deter guides from taking groups out.


About two hours after departing the lodge, the group reached the bottom of La Traviata and entered the west couloir. Beglinger put in four switchbacks to the top, where the slope eased off to a bench below the summit ridge. Probing along the way, he found excellent conditions.


“Not one hollowness,” he said later, “not one little bit of a crust that I picked up. It was beautiful. As good as it gets.” Rick Martin, third in line behind Beglinger, also remembers seeing nothing on the way up that made him nervous. “There were signs of old activity, but none of the classic signs of avalanches,” he says. “No cracks. No whumping. I saw no windloading. I considered it pretty ordinary.”


The skiers were traveling in two groups: 12 of them following dutifully behind Beglinger near the top, and seven others, led by Ken Wylie, just beginning the first traverse.


Following in Beglinger’s tracks, Martin exited the gully onto a gently sloping bench and moved right, away from the slope beneath him. He joined Beglinger and a client named Age Fluitman, who had paused on an almost-flat spot below the ridge to let the rest of the group catch up. Not too far below, but still on steep ground, were Jean Luc Schwendener, a 40-year-old chef from Canmore, Alberta; Evan Weselake, a 28-year-old corporate trainer from Calgary; Craig Kelly; Naomi Heffler, 25, a canoeing guide also from Calgary; and Dave Finnerty, a 30-year-old SME trainee from New Westminster, B.C., bringing up the rear.


When Weselake had nearly reached the top of the couloir, he stopped and looked back to observe the lower group’s progress. He saw Wylie, the guide, about halfway across the bottom of the slope, with the others trailing, and then he returned his concentration upward.


There was no warning for what came next. Beglinger, standing on his perch above the couloir, felt a sudden huge settlement almost directly beneath him, not anything like the normal whump experienced by countless backcountry skiers. Then he heard a percussive explosion. “Unbelievably loud,” he says.

JUST MOMENTS LATER, Weselake saw a crack open in the snow uphill from Schwendener. Then a second fracture line ripped between them, and the world began to move.


Weselake yelled, “Avalanche!” and was reaching down to release his telemark bindings when the moving slab pushed him over. Schwendener, Kelly, Heffler, and Finnerty were also caught and began moving down the slope. Weselake tossed his poles aside, lay on his back, and tried to swim as everyone and everything around him disappeared in a maelstrom of snow.


Below, third in line in the lower group, was John Seibert, a 54-year-old geophysicist from Wasilla, Alaska, who was on his eighth trip with SME and had skied this very slope a year before. He heard what he later described as a “shotgun blast” and, a millisecond later, a “whump.” As the slope began to move, Seibert tried to turn and ski off it to safety, but the slide knocked him on his butt. “I backstroked from here to eternity,” he said, “and in my peripheral vision I saw the slab breaking up into blocks. It was like being in big whitewater. I never lost sight of the sky. It didn’t slow down. I thought I was going to get my hands in front of my face to make an air pocket. But it stopped instantly. The snow was level with my neck, and my head and my left hand were sticking out.”
The three skiers at the end of Seibert’s group, all of them SME employees, had managed to turn in the track and were trying to ski toward the side of the gully when they were overwhelmed by the slide and buried. Also engulfed were Wylie and three clients: Vern Lunsford, 49, an aerospace engineer from Littleton, Colorado; Dennis Yates, 50, a ski instructor from Los Angeles; and Kathleen Kessler, 39, a realtor from Truckee.


Now completely submerged, Weselake felt the slide abruptly come to a standstill as the leading edge of the avalanche halted in a depression at the bottom of the slope. Blocks of snow were wedged around his head, and he could see dim light and take rapid, shallow breaths. But he was locked tight in the debris, unable to move anything except his right ski tip. He tried not to panic. He remembers thinking, “Relax your body, slow down your breathing, and just wiggle your ski.”

FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT ABOVE, Beglinger watched the avalanche roar to life. After the explosive noise, he recalls, “It was quiet for maybe a tenth of a second, and then it was like a rocket went down the slope—woosh-shoo!—accelerating as it went. The ground started to vibrate, and I realized that the energy was going behind me to the west.”


The first slide set off a second, smaller avalanche—still to the right of the ascent track. But then a third, huge split opened up high in the chute above Ken Wylie’s group, and the entire couloir washed down the mountain.


Beglinger whirled around and ran over to get a better view down the couloir, yelling into his radio as he went, “Durrand Glacier Chalet from Ruedi! We have a terrible accident! I need all help there is!”


He looked past the crown of the avalanche and saw a nightmare. Twenty-one skiers had started out that morning from the chalet; 13 were now buried below.


“It’s huge!” Beglinger shouted into his radio. “Everybody’s down! We need all help there is. Nobody on standby, everybody coming up here. Selkirk Tangiers, CMH, Department of Highways, avalanche-dog masters, paramedics, and everything you can find—bring it up!”


The cook at the Durrand Glacier Chalet fielded the call and handed it over to Beglinger’s wife, Nicoline. The call was also picked up by Ingrid Boaz, a part-time SME employee in Revelstoke, where radio communication is constantly monitored. She radioed Selkirk Mountain Helicopters and reached Paul Maloney, one of the pilots, who happened to be in the air about 28 miles away. Maloney sped toward the chalet, where he picked up two guests, extra shovels, and a trauma kit.
On La Traviata, Beglinger jumped over the crown and glissaded down the icy bed surface of the avalanche. “I was talking on the radio,” he says, “and with the other hand I took out my beacon, put it on receive, and as I came to a stop, I threw the radio inside my jacket, picked up the first person, flagged him with a probe, went over, picked up the second person, put a pole in, the third person, put a pole in, and that was like two minutes from when the avalanche cracked loose.”


With all the SME staff except for Beglinger buried by the avalanche, it fell to the clients to aid in the rescue effort. Charles Bieler, a 27-year-old skier from New York City, reached Seibert, who was trapped but uninjured.


“Are you OK?” Bieler asked. “Can you breathe?” After Seibert indicated he was all right, Bieler told him, “We’ve got a lot of people buried—we’ll get to you as soon as we can.” Another client—Seibert can’t remember who—reached down and turned Seibert’s avalanche beacon to receive, so it wouldn’t confuse the search, and handed Seibert the shovel from his pack, which he used to dig himself out. He stood up and saw a sea of debris, packs, skis, and eight members of the group searching, probing, and digging. He joined the rescuers and began pitching in.


Evan Weselake, locked in blocks of hard snow, was still wiggling his ski tip, which was protruding above the surface. One of the clients, Bruce Stewart, 40, a skier from Truckee, noticed it and dug him out. Weselake paused long enough to put on heavier gloves and then began searching with his transceiver, finding a signal only 2.6 meters away from the hole he’d just climbed out of and 1.2 meters below the surface. “Those numbers will be burnt into my memory forever,” he told me. “It was Jean Luc.” He yelled for a shovel and Beglinger appeared. The two of them frantically began to dig, but when they finally reached Schwendener, he was dead.


Meanwhile, Rick Martin had ripped off his climbing skins and skied down the bed surface of the avalanche. He located a victim and began to dig, eventually uncovering Naomi Heffler’s face and chest. Heidi Biber, a 42-year-old nurse from Truckee, performed CPR—to no avail.


After several rescuers succeeded in digging down to Dave Finnerty, they lowered Biber into the hole by her ankles. She again attempted CPR, but Finnerty did not regain consciousness. When the bodies of Vern Lunsford, Dennis Yates, and Kathy Kessler were uncovered, efforts to revive them were also unsuccessful. Craig Kelly, lying lifeless almost nine feet below the surface, was the last victim removed.


In the end, six of the skiers who had been buried were saved, including the three SME employees from the lower group. Ken Wylie also survived—barely. After finding his signal, rescuers first uncovered Wylie’s hand, then cleared away the snow around his head. His cheeks were still pink, and Seibert felt his carotid artery and detected a pulse. Beglinger, who was trying to reach another victim, remembers that a great shout went up behind him: “We got Ken!”


“I cleared his airway,” Seibert said. “I don’t recall if I gave him a breath or two. We were talking to him, saying, ‘Wake up!'”


But then Wylie’s head rolled back. Joe Pojar, one of the SME staffers, jumped into the hole and slapped his face hard. “Ken!” he yelled. “Hear me! Let’s go home!” Wylie opened his eyes and started to breathe.

ROUGHLY 40 MINUTES after Beglinger radioed for help, Paul Maloney, the Selkirk Mountain Helicopters pilot, flew his chopper under the lowering fog and landed at the base of La Traviata. Moving fast, he flagged a landing zone for three more helicopters, two from SMH and one from Selkirk Tangiers Helicopter Skiing.


Wylie was flown to a hospital in Revelstoke. At the avalanche site, Beglinger stood in the debris field, despair over the general disaster only now beginning to descend on him. One failure was particularly haunting: his attempt to save Vern Lunsford. “He was only 1.2 meters down,” says Beglinger, “and I felt I would find him alive. I was hoping because the snow was soft. Then I hit a great block of ice. He wasn’t alive when I reached him.”


The survivors, exhausted, in shock, some beginning to break down, were flown back to the chalet. There they would try to console one another while taking turns on a satellite phone to call their families. Most of the next of kin were notified by police in Canada and the U.S., but Heidi Biber personally made the hard call to Scott Kessler in Truckee. In tears, she told him there had been a devastating avalanche, and that his wife, Kathleen, had been killed.


Before any of the survivors had even returned to Revelstoke, where a makeshift morgue had been set up, wire-service reports—patched together from talking to the B.C. Ambulance Service and the helicopter operators—began to filter out. The earliest of them declared eight Americans dead, then seven, then the correct figures: three Americans and four Canadians. E-mails shot back and forth within the skiing community, and within 24 hours at least 30 print and broadcast journalists, photographers, and TV cameramen had swarmed over the small Wintergreen Inn, the main base camp for SME clients.


Most of the survivors wouldn’t speak publicly about the incident, but John Seibert, acting as spokesman for the group, appeared at a press conference at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police office on January 21. While his companions attended a grief-counseling session at the inn before quietly slipping away, Seibert told reporters and the police that the avalanche was “a fluke of nature.” The same day, in what seemed like a clear attempt to quell the rising storm of media speculation—What happened up there? Was someone at fault?—the RCMP released a statement that said, “There is nothing in the initial investigation at this time to lead investigators to believe that this is anything other than a tragic accident.”

LIKE MANY PEOPLE in Revelstoke’s snow-science and law-enforcement communities, Clair Israelson looks puffy-eyed and tired three days after the accident. As the managing director of the Canadian Avalanche Association, Israelson, 53, has been helping the B.C. coroner’s office with the investigation into the SME incident and, a few days later, the avalanche on February 1. Official reports won’t be out until the end of May, and, with the newspaper and TV reporters temporarily gone, Israelson gets a rare moment to sit back in his map- and file-cluttered office to explain his job’s complexities.


“I believe we can forecast avalanche danger and snow stability at a mountain-range scale with a reasonable degree of confidence,” he says. “What we can’t do is forecast for every slope on every mountain in that range with a high degree of confidence. And so the art of guiding is moving safely through dangerous places.”


Of course, this is what guides do every day of the winter in British Columbia, the risk of “considerable” avalanche danger notwithstanding. As Israelson points out, considerable is only halfway up the five-level International Avalanche Danger Scale, which begins at low and moderate and ends at high and extreme. If people stayed home when the avalanche danger was considerable, no one would go skiing.


Guides base their decisions to go or stay on an aggregate of factors, including recent weather history, their own experience with the terrain, on-site testing, and daily regionwide data gleaned from the Information Exchange—a report compiled by guides, heli-operators, highway departments, and national parks logging every observed avalanche in western Canada. The January 20 Information Exchange showed a particularly quiet day in the region: only eight avalanches triggered by explosives, and two small ones triggered by skiers. On an active day, there would be pages of avalanches reported.


So if the slope was stable, why did it go? “The problem is that unstable conditions can sit way out on the end of the bell curve, a couple of standard deviations away from the mean,” says Israelson. “They’re there; we know it. But despite our best science, we haven’t found the means to forecast them.”


In Beglinger’s case, when he reached some shallow snow—maybe 20 inches deep—on the ten-degree upper slope of the ridge, it settled over the old November rain crust. That settlement started the initial avalanche and set up a domino effect, sending energy toward the skiers and triggering the massive third slide, which buried them.


The day after the accident, Larry Stanier, an independent avalanche expert from Canmore, Alberta, hired by the B.C. coroner, traveled to the site. He measured the slope angle at the crown: 33 degrees, not something experienced backcountry skiers would think particularly steep. He also did several compression tests, which evaluate weak layers in the snowpack that might be prone to being triggered by a skier. He tells me that he got a “very hard” result, which means that the slope wasn’t likely to slide from skier traffic.


“Ruedi ascended in the strong snowpack, and he wasn’t in the fall line above the skiers who were killed,” Stanier says, “but he managed to find the needle in the haystack.”

STANIER’S POSITION corroborates the eyewitness accounts of Keith Lindsay, Evan Weselake, and John Seibert. Nonetheless, the configuration of skiers on La Traviata put 13 people in harm’s way simultaneously, and, as the quick-to-condemn pundits of Internet ski chat rooms were alleging within hours of the accident, this equaled a “major fuckup.”


The logistical realities of guiding large commercial groups tell a different story. It isn’t atypical in the heli-skiing industry to have a dozen or more skiers at the bottom of a run when the next group begins down. As Alison Dakin, one of the owners of Revelstoke-based Golden Alpine Holidays, which began backcountry powder tours in 1986, says, “Unless you have a concern about a slope, you won’t spread your clients out. It takes a lot of time, you can’t keep your day going, and your clients get cold.”


The operative words here are “unless you have a concern.” Backcountry skiers pay people like Beglinger and Dakin to make those calls. And when things do go very wrong, as they did on January 20, should the guides be held criminally negligent?
A 1996 British Columbia Supreme Court case helped establish some legal precedent. In 1991, nine skiers were killed in an avalanche on a run called Bay Street, in the Bugaboos—still the largest single-day ski accident in the history of the province. A victim’s widow sued the operator, Canadian Mountain Holidays, and the guide (the only skier struck by the avalanche who survived), claiming that the guide had not dug a snow pit before attempting the run. She also maintained that it should have been obvious to any competent guide that there was a potential for deep-slab instability in the snowpack, since the slide ran down a deep, weak layer.


After extensive testimony from a variety of snow-science experts, a Supreme Court judge concluded that it was the assessment of all the CMH guides on the day in question that there were no concerns about deep-slab instability. Since this was the consensus, and it was extrapolated from a season of observing the snowpack, it wasn’t deemed reckless, dangerous, or even a marked departure from standard operating procedure to not dig a pit before attempting the run. Even though the slope did slide, the judge observed, “Liability…will only arise where a defendant has transgressed the standards to be expected of a reasonable man, not where he has acted with due care but nevertheless made what turned out to be a wrong decision.”


One of backcountry skiing’s well-kept secrets is that skiers get caught in avalanches with fair regularity, though they are often small and rarely fatal. Because the hazards can never be eradicated, SME, like other operators, maintains rigorous standards to protect its patrons and its employees. The company’s waiver—which all clients sign in the presence of a staff person—is laboriously explicit about the hazards of wilderness skiing, including the fact that guides “may fail to predict whether the alpine terrain is safe for skiing or whether an avalanche may occur.” The waiver was crafted by Robert Kennedy, an attorney who represents all the ski areas in British Columbia and who has successfully defended at least a dozen previous claims brought against other operators. It continues to be the primary document establishing that paying customers understand and accept the risks they are about to encounter.


At press time, there was no indication that any of the victims’ families were filing suit. In fact, the response, both from other outfitters and from grieving survivors, has largely been supportive rather than derisive or litigious.


“I respect Ruedi’s judgment and how he transfers it to his guiding style,” says Jim Bay, 50, who owns Mountain Light Tours, another backcountry operation in Revelstoke. “He has an admirable safety record if you look at how many skier days he’s put through his operation since its inception. Over the years he’s done a remarkable thing up there, and it would be a real shame if this incident colors it in a negative way.”


As for potential lawsuits, Kennedy says, “I haven’t heard a whisper of a notion that there may be a claim arising out of this. Just the opposite. There’s been an outpouring of sympathy for Ruedi from the next of kin.”


“I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault,” says Kathleen Kessler’s husband, Scott. “Spreading blame will do no good. Risk is part of being in the backcountry, part of doing something that you love. At Kathleen’s memorial service, I spoke, and I said, ‘Hey, all you folks who went out and did something this morning? That’s what Kathy would have wanted.'”

BEFORE BEGLINGER LEAVES for his first funeral—Vernon Lunsford’s, in Denver—we have dinner at his home in Revelstoke. Nicoline makes raclette, served with thick brown bread, pickles, sweet onions, and wine. The atmosphere reminds me of their Durrand Glacier chalet, the smells rich, the table elegant, his two young daughters, Charlotte and Florina, politely passing the dishes, Nicoline lovely and gracious.


This is part of what clients pay for when they sign up at SME: not only great powder, but also the chance to experience—if only for a week—the alpine dream created by this Swiss family. John Seibert has told me, “I’m positive I’ll go back and ski at SME again.” Rick Martin was also unequivocal that he would return—not only to SME and the Selkirks, but to skiing challenging lines.


They are not alone. The backcountry skiing community has grown tremendously as ski areas have become more crowded and expensive. Black Diamond Equipment Inc., based in Salt Lake City, has seen the sales of its alpine touring gear increase 20 percent a year for the last five years. Those rising numbers correlate with problems occurring off-piste: In the U.S., during the two seasons from 2000-2002, ten backcountry skiers were killed in avalanches. During the previous six years, avalanche deaths among backcountry skiers had averaged only one per year.


In British Columbia, the popularity of the backcountry has helped turn guided skiing into big business. According to a survey of the British Columbia Heli and Snowcat Skiing Operators Association, 28,000 skiers took a backcountry trip during the 2000-01 season in B.C., pumping an estimated US$68 million into the province’s economy—most of it from visiting Americans and Europeans. Heli-accessed huts create an additional tourist engine not reflected in the BCHSSOA study.


And the risk? Of the 28,000 heli- and snowcat skiers in B.C. during the 2000-01 season, three died in avalanches. Among heli-accessed operations, until this January nobody had been killed in 17 years. Disasters like those on January 20 and February 1 give the perception of high risk, but statistically speaking, it’s not supported by the numbers. “It’s horrible,” says Beglinger when we talk later, referring to the February 1 slide, “but they just got nuked from above.”


Before I depart, I ask Beglinger if anything will change now, after his accident. “Maybe we cut the groups back from 12 people to eight,” he says. “Less pressure. We will have to charge more, but I think even charging more, people will still come.”


“I know what happened,” he continues while walking me down to the end of his long driveway. “It would be a different ballgame if I couldn’t figure it out. I would be scared of guiding if there had been a bad layer I did not see and I just jumped onto it. But that was not the case. I had a conservative approach of the gully. I chose a self-supporting gully instead of a headwall. I choose the terrain feature which is in my favor instead of something exposed, and I did not trigger that gully. We had a settlement away from this. It fired into a different slope, and wrapped around the mountain and multiplied many times.”


We stand with the snow falling on us; the forest smells moist and sweet. He can’t talk anymore. He seems spent, and much lies ahead. Jean Luc Schwendener’s family will be arriving in an hour. Ken Wylie wants to debrief an hour after that. Tomorrow, Beglinger will be on a plane, bound for memorial services.


Before I leave, he offers a hopeful goodbye: “Until better times and happier skis.” He shakes my hand, turns, and climbs the drive, head bent, scuffing at the snow with his boots, his despair just peeking through the surface, but under control. It’s a large part of who he is—who he has to be, to move people through the shifting dangers of the alpine world. It is the side of him so many have seen and probably many more will view. But it’s not Rick Martin’s memory of him. Boarding the helicopter for the flight to the chalet after the rescue, the Truckee skier looked back and saw the seven bodies of his companions lying on the debris. Beglinger was sitting among them, weeping.

ON FEBRUARY 1, just 12 days after the Selkirk Mountain Experience disaster, seven high school students from Calgary died when their group was slammed by an avalanche just a few miles east of the first accident. The students were starting a three-day telemark ski trip at Rogers Pass in British Columbia’s Glacier National Park. Though the avalanche risk had been rated “considerable” in the heights above the trail, more than 80 other skiers had safely taken the path earlier that day.


The slide, triggered by a natural event, began nearly 3,000 feet above the skiers. By the time it swept over the group of 17, it was a massive killer more than 1,500 feet across. Nearby skiers and rescue personnel managed to pull ten people safely from the debris, but six boys and one girl, aged 16 to 18, perished.


In the aftermath, emotions ran hot, especially since these were teenagers on a school-sponsored wilderness trip, not adults actively courting danger on steep, hard-to-reach slopes. “These aren’t just accidents anymore,” declared the Calgary Herald the next day. “This is backcountry carnage.” Some parents felt the group shouldn’t have been out there at all, given the risk. And at a February 4 funeral, a grandparent one of the victims, questioned the very nature of such outings: “What kind of character are we trying to build by this type of adventure? Rambos? Conquerors?”
Would legal action come next? Rumors quickly started flying about a class-action lawsuit on behalf of survivors and families, although experts say such cases are difficult to win, given that the students’ parents had all signed liability waivers and no apparent safety procedures were violated. Meanwhile, the school—an elite private academy called Strathcona-Tweedsmore—is standing behind the judgment of the two teachers, Andrew Nicholson and Dale Roth, who led the trip. Both had avalanche training, and everyone in the party was equipped with beacons, shovels, and probes.


One thing is certain: the accident will be exhaustively investigated, and probes are already under way by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Revelstoke coroner’s office, and Parks Canada. In the aftermath, government officials were promising better avalanche warnings, a “comprehensive review” of wilderness safety, and a look at whether some backcountry areas should be closed when conditions are deemed too dangerous.

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