A day in Deer Creek: What could possibly go wrong?
Rescuers recount Monday's harrowing 550 slide

The north-facing, deeply wooded slopes of the Deer Creek drainage north of Coal Bank are the "safe" choice: the place where backcountry skiers go on big days, when avi danger is high.

But on Monday, as split-boarder Mark Helmich, 49, of Durango, and his ski buddy (who declined to be identified for this story for fear of scaring the bejesus out of his loved ones – fair enough) exited the popular backcountry spot north of town, a good day was about to get bad. Very bad.

Instead of exiting the traditional way, via the ridge line to the northeast whereby skiers hitch a ride south on Highway 550 back to their cars, Helmich and his partner opted for an out and back, returning via the south-facing slope, directly to their cars.

Helmich, who has lived in the area 16 years and been an avid backcountry skier almost as long, admits he is not overly familiar with the Deer Creek drainage, something he chalks up to mistake number one in the ill-fated exit attempt.

“We thought we had the line dialed in, but we should’ve been farther west,” he said. “We thought we could manage the risks.”

And while hindsight may be twenty-twenty, as the storm continued to dump as much as 2 inches an hour, visibility was down to nearly zero.  During the descent, things got sketchy.

“The first cut we took, something ripped up top, so we knew we had to be careful,” Helmich said. “Then we had another slope release on us midway down and we lost track of the skin track.”

Helmich, who recently completed a Level 1 avi course, knew with such instability, skinning back up wouldn’t necessarily be the best option. With one final pitch left, they decided to make a run for the road.

“It was a complete white out, everything blended in,” Helmich recalls.  

With only a short distance to go, Helmich’s ski buddy thought he had a line of sight to the highway. Only thing is, there was a 25-foot cliff that separated the two.

He took the fateful turn, and Helmich watched in horror as the slope broke, taking his ski partner with it over the cliff and onto the road.

Helmich himself was forced to launch the cliff to take the most direct line to his friend. With adrenaline pumping, he was able to locate his partner with use of probe and beacon within five minutes. But the digging proved arduous. For the next 10 minutes, Helmich dug, alone, through the dense debris pile, eventually reaching the top of his partner’s helmet. But he was running out of gas.

“I did a whole lot of praying,” he recalls of those precious moments before others appeared on the scene. “It’s definitely pretty lonely, being by yourself and digging. It was feeling surreal. Till you’re in that situation, you can’t understand what it’s like.”

And that’s when the mens' luck would change again – this time for the better.

Silverton residents Mike and Sallie Barney were making the commute back to Silverton when they came across the debris pile. At first, it took Mike, a professional ski guide and instructor/board member of the Silverton Avalanche School, a minute to discern what was going on.

 “There were people out there in street clothes digging,” he said. “We thought they were just digging to get their cars through.”

But unbeknownst to Mike, they were digging to save a life. When Mike found out, he sprang to action. With gloves and a shovel in the car, he threw on his jacket and got to work.

“I was adding up the minutes he had been buried and was sure he would be unconscious,” Barney said.

About 20 minutes after he had been buried, Mike excavated the skier’s head and used his bare hands to clear the snow from his airway. 

“I asked him if he could breath and he said yes,” he recalled.

Again, luck had intervened. The skier had both an airbag and Avalung. Although he was unable to deploy the bag, he did manage to get the straw from the lung in his mouth – a move that likely prolonged his life long enough to be rescued.

 “His partner did a great job,” Mike said of Helmich, who it turns out, is an acquaintance. “He performed an awesome rescue, he was just totally tired when I got there.”

Mike said the spot that slid is not considered a formal slide path, although it is southeast of a slide path known as Henry Brown. “It’s more of an unsupported pocket of snow above those cliffs,” he explained.

In the end, the victim walked away with a broken binding and a tweaked knee.

As for Helmich, he walked away with a heightened, humbled respect for the mountains and how quickly things can snowball, if you'll pardon the phrase.

“We made several mistakes that day,” he said, the first of which was not checking the avi report or having an accurate read on how much snow had fallen. Instead of relying on the Silverton snow report, which registered 10 inches, they went by the one farther south at Purg, which had only recorded 4 inches that morning.

“We completely underestimated the amount of snow that fell overnight, and we got into a bad spot,” he said. “We should’ve known better when we had to dig out a spot to park the car at the trailhead.”

Nevertheless, he is happy to share his cautionary tale if it is able to help other backcountry travelers avoid a similar scenario.

 “We tried to manage risks, and that didn’t go so well,” he said. “I’m an avid backcountry traveler, so I'll do anything I can to help others. We try to stay safe out there, but we need to understand the effects of our decision-making.”

And if there was once decision he could change?

“We probably should’ve just gone to Purg,” he said.