An Epic Rocky Mountain National Park Ski Accident

This is the story of a ski accident in Rocky Mountain National Park: Dave’s back is about to break. Three hundred feet below the summit of 13,267’ Mount Copeland, Dave caught a ski edge on a buried rock, launching him into a ragdoll tumble in which he knocked his head against another rock, and compressed his spine. Unknown to us at the time, the impact caused Dave’s fifth thoracic vertebrae to explode into a thousand tiny shards of bone, which became lodged dangerously close to his spinal cord. Dave and his ski gear lay littered across the couloir. By good fortune, his skis and poles managed to bury themselves in the snow without sliding off into the jumble of rocks and cliffs between us and Bluebird Lake 2000’ below. Suddenly, everything goes silent.

Daan and I return Dave’s ski gear to him while he sits in the snow, staring out aimlessly over the great expanse of Wild Basin. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, and his breathing is heavy and laboured. Something is not right. We decide that given our remote and precarious position, Dave needs outside help to get him back to the trailhead and off to the hospital. Dave activates an emergency locator beacon which alerts Search & Rescue that an accident has occurred, and with any luck, also informs them of our position. We decide to move out of the avalanche and rock fall prone couloir, down to the lake below before weighing our options. All three of us are experienced, equipped ski mountaineers, although as luck would have it, Dave is the only one of us with extensive medical training. I lead the charge down the couloir, pulling over into a safe zone after a few hundred vertical feet. I sit and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. Forty-five minutes later, Dave pulls up beside me, breathing heavily, exhausted from sidestepping down the couloir a few inches at a time. We have a group meeting: this is taking too long, we need to make sure Search & Rescue is coming, a night out in the cold without food or shelter would be disastrous. I volunteer to go ahead. I give Dave and Daan all of my spare clothing, water, food and emergency supplies and take with me a request from Dave for a helicopter evacuation.

Under ordinary circumstances, a broken back is disastrous. Wild Basin, however, is hardly a place of ordinary circumstances. Things always seem to go wrong. Wild Basin is large, remote, confusing and difficult to negotiate. The mountains are the tall, imposing and rugged remnants of Rocky Mountain glacial retreat from the last ice age 20,000 years ago, which makes them a prime playground for climbing and skiing. It also makes Wild Basin a terrible place to have a ski accident. 2000’ of extreme skiing still lies between Dave and the frozen shores of Bluebird Lake, and yet even once he reaches Bluebird Lake, it is still seven miles back to the trailhead through deep snow, dense forests, and rolling terrain.

I ski out of sight of Dave and Daan. My jump turns are tight and conservative, but they move me down the couloir quickly. I am six or seven hundred feet above Bluebird Lake; darn-Darn-DARN! The couloir is blocked by an unexpected 30’ cliff. My mind starts churning. At this point, there is no way Dave is capable of climbing back up the couloir to the summit, nor is there any way he is going to be able to deal with the cliff. I’m at a loss. I try to rig a meager rappel line using 25’ of parachute cord I have in my backpack. No luck. I wait for Dave and Daan to ski down to within earshot and yell up the news. Tense silence. Daan looks around and yells back that he sees a ramp exiting the couloir which they are going to follow in hopes of finding a continuous band of snow further over on the face. It’s definitely a gamble, but at this point it seems to be the best option for the pair to get off the face quickly. I stare down at the cliff below. A clock is ticking in my head. I need to move quickly. I take my skis off, strap them firmly to my pack and toss everything over the cliff. I am committed. Taking a deep breath, I jump off after my gear.

Our morning began miles away and hours earlier at the Wild Basin winter trailhead. The sun is rising slowly over the eastern Front Range, bathing the mountains in orange glow. It is springtime; the days are long and warm, the snow is deep, and the touchy Colorado snowpack has consolidated into a cohesive unit, free of the dangerous slab avalanche conditions that exist during the winter. Dave, Daan and I are good friends from Boulder, CO, all avid extreme skiers out to enjoy the solitude and adventure of the Rocky Mountain wilderness. Recently graduated from college, Dave works in the ski industry at Backcountry Access, a company most famous for selling avalanche rescue equipment and other backcountry ski essentials. Daan and I both attend college at the University of Colorado, where Daan is a graduate student studying Aerospace Engineering, and I study Philosophy and Atmospheric Science. Together we form a tight, like-minded crew.

We gear up in the parking lot, sipping on coffee and putting on our ski boots. We are alone at the trailhead; no one else dares to venture out at 5AM to brave the twisted, snowy trail ahead. We are all excited for the day to come. For Dave, this will be his third time trying to ski Mount Copeland, for me it is the second, for Daan it is the first, and so we head out onto the trail for another day in the mountains. Birds sing in the trees, greeting another beautiful day and sending us on our merry way with a tune. A couple miles pass and we turn off the main trail and begin climbing a broad, open ridge, scarred by a destructive wildfire 25 years ago. Reaching the top of the first ridge, we head into a dense, old growth forest and lose sight of everything except the sky overhead. The trees are tall and stately, but they have a friendly air to them; they are wishing us the best and parting a path to treeline. The time passes quickly; we laugh, joke and talk our way up towards the sky. These are the days we live for. Gradually, the prominent east ridge of Mount Copeland comes in sight through the trees, the pure white snow absolutely sparkling against a backdrop of deep, sky blue. A smile spreads from ear to ear across Dave’s face. Daan is grinning too. With a mad twinkle in our eyes, we briefly glance at each other before stepping into the alpine, far above the troubled world below. The mountain is calling us and we hear it loud and clear: today is our day.

Move, Move, MOVE! The afternoon sun is high in the sky as I ski around the corner and see Bluebird Lake, nestled high against Mount Copeland and Isolation Peak, far above treeline, a jewel gleaming in the afternoon sun. But I don’t have time to pause, my mind is stuck racing on a track, going round and round through different scenarios. Dave and Daan are somewhere above me, still on the face, looking for continuous snow. I don’t know how things got so bad so quickly but I know I need to move. Move as fast as possible, nothing else. The snow is getting wet and gloppy in the warm, spring sun and I have trouble staying afloat in it which only adds to my frustration and despair. I bite my lip and push forward. Questions flood my thoughts. Will Dave need a helicopter evacuation? What’s wrong with his back? Will they find a way off the mountain? Is just his back injured? Are Search & Rescue coming? What more could I have done? What will our friends say? What will his family say? Will he ski again? I can’t help but think that there should have been some clue, some sign that things were going to go wrong. What was it? Why didn’t I see it? I am sinking up to my knees in slushy snow the consistency of wet concrete while doing battle with tight tree branches and rolling hills. I want to lie down and cry, I want this to be over. What kind of friend am I? Keep going. Push, push, push.

The snow is so heavy now that even on the downhill, I can’t get enough speed to ride on top of it. My mind is still running through the same questions; endlessly, turning over and over and over on high speed. I am following the drainage out through thick trees, when suddenly I reemerge at the fire scar. For a few moments, the weight is lifted off my mind; I am making progress, keep going, keep pushing, I can see out to the plains far below. A wide, rocky section appears ahead, spanning a couple hundred feet across the drainage and sprinkled with little cliffs. I don’t have the time to go around. I scrape my skis across the rock and hop my way down the little outcroppings. Stupid, stupid. Why couldn’t I find another way around? I’m wasting time. I need to get to the trailhead.

The sun has set. It’s all over now. Dave is safe in a hospital bed in Denver, recovering from reconstructive surgery on his vertebrae. Friends and family surround him and take care of his every need. By an unbelievable stroke of luck, Dave and Daan managed to find a continuous band of snow on Mount Copeland, bypass the 30’ cliff, and get down to Bluebird Lake. The pair waited at Bluebird Lake until the sun began to set, before Dave decided he’d rather try and hike the seven miles back to the trailhead than spend a cold night in the alpine, waiting for Search & Rescue. Daan tells me that Dave hiked like a man possessed. So quickly in fact, that Dave and Daan made it to within a quarter mile of the trailhead before the search team found them, where Dave refused a backboard, instead opting to walk the rest of the way out under his own power. All told, Dave descended 4000’ from the accident site to the trailhead, and crossed seven and a half miles of unforgiving, wild terrain. When he finally walked out of the woods and reached the trailhead, his eyes were somewhere else, he had an otherworldly look of calm and peace, despite incredible and enduring pain. An ambulance took him to the Estes Park hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken back, necessitating a move to a hospital in Denver better equipped to deal with the severity of his injury.

I wish I could have done more for Dave. I don’t know what, but I wish. Part of me I can’t shake still feels somehow responsible, somehow guilty, as though I should have seen some sign, or said something, or warned Dave about buried rocks beneath the thin snowpack. But I know what happened is done, and there is no changing it. I try and look for lessons to be learned from that fateful day, and I know they are there, and some glaringly obvious. But I also know that I am going to continue doing what I love and taking risks and putting myself in harm’s way, despite the potential consequences. Extreme ski mountaineering is my life, my passion and my dreams realized. It’s what I do. I feel selfish even entertaining the thought, but I know that it could’ve been me in that back brace, that I could have taken that fall, and I know that one day it will be me. Maybe not in a back brace, but a life spent in the mountains means that one day, accidents will happen and there won’t necessarily be a happy outcome. But still, we do what we do and take those risks.

There is a picture of Dave in the hospital taken shortly after his surgery, standing tall with the help of a walker, surrounded by nurses, wearing a pained expression and a beefy back brace. It hurts to look at. I see a great skier and a great friend who not days before was climbing mountains and exploring the wilderness. And now he’s got metal rods in his back and needs help to stand up. It hurts. It hurts because Dave matters, because skiing matters, because nothing will ever be the same.

Dave went on to make an outstanding full recovery, and is back in the mountains, climbing and biking and skiing away. The three of us remain good friends and ski partners, although we now share an unspoken bond. We were there. We saw, we experienced, we reflected and now we keep going.