Lights Flashing and Bodies Stiffening

It was a bizarre scene, lights flashing through pine trees weighed down with powder alternated breaking my view of a perfectly clear night. The stars were so beautiful against the high alpine background that it would distract me for minutes until the reality of what we were doing came inching back to me, dripping down my neck and reminding me of our situation.

A kid, 16, had been missing since about 2pm. It was now 8pm. Six hours at 10,000 feet in rapidly cooling conditions and with feet of new, light snow on the ground decreases your survival time significantly. She was without any survival gear, without an avalanche beacon, and had been in a resort skiing with her family. High winds turned around our helicopter so we were alone and searching a mountain on skis.

The beams from our headlamps are really what sticks in my mind. I'd be alone, or I'd feel alone, then one of my teammate's lights would splash across me and be gone as they turned to complete another traverse. The reality of the situation was that we were searching for a body. All of us would like to think she was still alive but I doubted it. In an area with excellent cell phone coverage we would have heard from her by now.

When one of us skied across her skis... literally skied across them, their edges stopping my teammate, our suspicions were confirmed. Her skis didn't move, they were firmly attached to her boots and thus to her. She was upside down, headfirst in the soft snow of a tree well.

People have warned me of the gruesomeness of Search and Rescue... or Search and Recovery... but I hadn't experienced it yet. All of the dead bodies I'd seen were fairly benign before this. She had obviously struggled, attempted to free herself, then passed out from the lack of oxygen.

I wondered if the light filtered down to her like the lights from the snow cat above us randomly filtered down to her. Five feet of snow was probably too much though; and her last images were almost surely dark. She was within sight of a groomed ski run.

Cold bodies with rigor don't fit well in body bags and fit even more poorly into ski toboggans but we did what we could. We skied her awkwardly to an ambulance. It was clear that she was dead but there are less questions if they declare her than if we do.

No one really talked, even at the debrief. Some team mates made mistakes traveling in but no one was in the mood to criticize. I answered some of the medical school student's questions and thought about my little brother, 16, loves to ski, loves to ski through the trees. Then I went home to a warm bed, a cuddly girl, and promised to not dwell.

I lied to myself and said it didn't bother me, it did.