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Outside Magazine April 2003

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A Thin White Line
During two deadly weeks this winter, avalanches swept away 14 lives in the heart of British Columbia's remote backcountry. Were these simply unpredictable, unstoppable acts of nature with a brutal cost? Or did somebody make crucial mistakes? An exclusive report details what really happened—and unfolds the agony of a grieving guide who led his clients to their deaths.

By Ted Kerasote


	"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." (Andy Anderson)

"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."

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."

TUMBLING DOWN

Will outrage over the deaths of seven students change how the B.C. backcountry is run? CLICK HERE

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.



	"Nature wanted to hit us:" Beglinger choppers in to the Durrand Glacier Chalet nine days after the accident. (Andy Anderson)

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."

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Ted Kerasote's most recent book is Heart of Home: People, Wildlife, Place, a collection of essays.

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