Unforgiving Nature
Unusual weather create deadly conditions

by Jack Kintner

The Mt. Baker Ski Area got buried by snow in January, closing for several days mid-month as area employees and the ski patrol spent time knocking down avalanches with explosives.

It was the first time in six years that the area closed due to too much snow. In ’99 the area set a world record with a 95-foot base; the problem was just having the space to operate as the snow buried sections of the chairlifts.

This winter things took an ominous turn as the heavy snowfall turned deadly. The season began in November with heavy, wet snow but that didn’t seem to be a factor in the death of film cameraman Trinity McQuair, 20, of Nakusp, B.C. He was skiing out-of-bounds with several friends near the Chute underneath chair 1, became separated and went over a 125-foot cliff.

Then on December 18 it began snowing, heavy and wet, and kept up more or less continuously into the second week in January, when Bellingham had received a record 23 straight days of rain. It would become one of the deadliest weeks ever at the Mt. Baker Ski Area.
On January 9, Bellingham geologist Matthew Chase was boarding in the Chute under chair 1. He was with a friend who lost track of him about noon. He was reported missing about 4 p.m. and found dead three hours later in blizzard conditions by the ski patrol using avalanche probes, buried upside down next to a rock wall. Chase, 31, who left behind a wife and two sons, was considered to be an expert boarder, according to friends, and was in good physical shape.
Three days later, Nathan Rawhouser, 30, of Clear Lake was found barely alive, upside down in a tree well by the ski patrol after becoming separated from friends on the last run of the day. He was evacuated to St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham but died two days later. A Fairhaven College graduate (2003), Rawhouser was an avid skier, boarder, hiker and climber and had taken avalanche safety courses.

The day before Rawhouser’s accident, Charlie Heggem and John Adams were skiing the Elbow, a run near the top of chair 5 a few hundred feet outside the ski area boundary, a run they’d done many times. They skied onto the bench where the run starts and Adams went on down the hill, triggering a slab avalanche about 15 yards long and 10 inches deep behind him. Near the end of his run, about 200 yards below Heggem, Adams said “I fell face first. It just sent me right over the handlebars. I tried to kick my legs up and over, kind of like a barrel roll, to get back on my feet but all that snow came down and buried me, and I couldn’t do it.”

“I was upside down with my arms straight out,” Adams continued, “facing uphill, buried to my waist with my legs waving in the air, waiting for Charlie to show up. I was totally packed in and couldn’t even get to my face with my hands. A lot of stuff goes through your mind. I was thinking that I hope Charlie gets here soon. After a while it felt like I was breathing helium.”

Heggem, still up on the bench above the run that Adams had taken, watched Adams struggle for just a few seconds and then gingerly started down the hill, carefully choosing a route that wouldn’t send more snow down on top of Adams but knowing that he didn’t have much time. At one point, to get safely to the side, he had to set off another slide on purpose that slid down, safely away from Adams and over the hundred-foot cliff at the bottom of the run that Adams had just taken, his fall stopping him short.

“I got to him on his downhill side and tried to reach around to clear his face,” Heggem said, “but I couldn’t, so finally I just grabbed his arm and yanked him out of the snow. He came up with a big gasp, and was pretty blue [from lack of oxygen].” Two minutes had elapsed, Heggem said, from when he first saw and called out the avalanche’s release.

Adams went back the next day to the same spot, “and put my ski pole down as far as I could with my arm straight out and still couldn’t find the bottom or anything solid,” he said. Earlier he’d seen another skier being dug out, and the day would end with Rawhouser being pulled out from a tree well, hypothermic and nearly dead.

The area was closed the next day, January 13, receiving between eight and nine feet of snow the five days it was closed. It re-opened on the 18th, when Adams went back up for a half-day, and reported that the area staff and ski patrol were “all over that hill, checking on people and trouble spots.”

In relating the story later, Adams mentioned some of the monster trees that broke loose near the top of [chair] 5, “two great big ones, sliding all the way down the hill, debris piles everywhere, roots and all.”

As experienced a skier as can be found anywhere, Adams knows very well what he survived, and in his talking about the trees sliding down the hill under chair 5 he seemed to be really saying behind it that there’s nothing like getting caught in an avalanche to make you feel really, really tiny.

Only, unlike the other three victims in this story, Adams didn’t die. He went as deeply into the trapped-by-an-avalanche experience as he possibly could have, not knowing until the very last seconds when he was beyond being out of air that help had indeed arrived, when Heggem yanked on his arm and pulled him out alive and gasping for breath. The changes this experience will create in and for him are yet to be seen, but if you want to know more, go talk to him.

One important point in telling these stories is that none of these fit young men are rookies in any sense of the word when it comes to snow sports. They were pushing the limits but none of them could have said later that they were unaware of what might happen. It’s the freedom to do that, in fact, that there are serious limits to push and against which to measure yourself that makes skiing and boarding so appealing.

McQuair grew up in Nakusp, a small town in eastern B.C. that’s a home base for heli-skiing operations in the nearby Kootenay Mountains. He had recently moved to Vancouver where he worked as a cameraman in the local film industry and where he discovered Mt. Baker skiing. Chase and Rawhouser both had years of vigorous outdoor activities in addition to their many years of experience snowboarding.

Both Heggem, 33, and Adams, 39, have been skiing at Baker for many years. Heggem coaches the ski area’s racing team, and Adams, co-owner of the Glacier Ski Shop, skis over 100 days per season. Adams and his younger brother Drew grew up near Truckee, California, where their parents owned and operated the Ski Stalker ski shop in the Northstar ski area. Both skied competitively for years, “and we grew up under the waxing bench, hiding in piles of ski boots, that sort of thing,” said Drew Adams.

So what conclusions may be drawn? “Would I do anything differently? Yeah!” said Adams, but added that he’s still sorting the experience out on some levels. A local newspaper quoted him as saying that he’d really be careful about whom he’d ski with after this, implying that picking the wrong partner may be a risk in itself.
“That’s not the point, though,” he said, “it’s not who you’re with. No matter who you’re with, you’re going to have to be responsible for each other.”

His brother Drew agreed, saying, “the main issue to come out of this is that you gotta pay attention to your partner. I see a lot of inexperienced skiers, people without much knowledge about operating in that environment, but that’s not nearly the problem that comes from not getting the concept about what skiing with a partner is all about. I see groups of boarders all charge down a hill together, which is fun, but if one of them falls who’s going to pull them out?”

For more information on deep snow hazards, see the previous issue of the Mount Baker Experience, “Winter 2006,” at the Glacier Library or at www.mountbakerexperience.com.

For more information, go to the ski area’s website at www.mt baker.us/safety/index.html.