Kelly's tragic death adds to his legend, offers others lesson

The morning after snowboarding's greatest legend died, it snowed on Mount Baker.

Fittingly, cold, damp weather rolled down from Canada, dumping rain down low and snow up top in the North Fork Nooksack Valley, the mother church of free-riding, if there could be such a thing.

It was the kind of day that Craig Kelly, born on April Fool's Day, 1966, saw hundreds of times as he made his way to the mountain: Up the winding Mount Baker Highway, through Maple Falls, past that tree filled with bald eagles near the corner of that foggy, riverside ranch.

Through those hairpin turns, into the Heather Meadows parking lot, onto a creaky old chairlift that dangles like a fragile necklace, right up toward the face of Mount Shuksan. Off the chair, under the ropes and into backcountry paradise, where the snow is bottomless and the sky never ends.

Mount Baker, known around the world for its steep chutes, deep gullies and mile after mile of plentiful snow, was Kelly's free-riding homeland.

For most of his life, he lived for this taste of alpine heaven. Monday, he died in it.

Not at Baker, which ultimately proved incapable of confining the man. Just up the road in B.C., where Kelly pursued his latter passion, backcountry guiding.

Given the circumstances — a tragic avalanche on an organized, well-equipped backcountry expedition — it is tempting to simply wax poetic on the man's free-riding spirit and remind grieving friends and family that Kelly, snowboarding's first international superstar, died doing what he loved most.

His mountaintop demise, in fact, likely will only add to his legend.

"He took it from end to end," Canadian rider Ross Rebagliati said in admiration to a Vancouver reporter after Kelly's death.

But to stop there is to offer an incomplete, if not backward, lesson about survival in the world that Kelly and thousands of track-followers love most.

Consider, first, who he was. Random glimpses of this powder magician cling to the memory of many a Northwesterner:

• Watching a distant, lone rider carve a perfect line on Shuksan Arm, flowing down the mountain as smoothly as syrup on warm glass. You blurt out: "Did you see that guy?"

"Yeah," came the reply across the chair. "That's Kelly."

• Standing along a snow-filled creekbed at Baker and watching him smoke the field in Baker's annual Legendary Banked Slalom — a throwback race with a duct-tape trophy that he listed as prominently on his résumé as four world snowboarding titles.

• Witnessing his breathtaking, endless B.C. powder runs in Warren Miller film spectacles that removed any lingering doubt that the snowboard was God's chosen instrument for riding deep powder.

He was a Northwest icon, a child of the alpine who always seemed to live in a state of Zen balance with the mountains. If anyone knew how to ride the backcountry and stay alive, it was Kelly, who, as a guide, had extensive avalanche training.

But look at how he died. Kelly, on a snowboard that splits into skis for climbing, was swept away in a massive avalanche near Durrand Glacier, B.C. — an accident that claimed six other lives on a day when Canadian avalanche forecasters noted "considerable" danger in the Selkirks around Revelstoke.

Ruedi Beglinger, the head guide for Kelly's group, is an expert known to put a major emphasis on safety. One experienced skier, John Seibert, 53, of Alaska, later said guides did their own snow evaluations that day, deeming the local avalanche danger "minimal."

Seibert called the avalanche a "fluke of nature." It may have been exactly that. But given the present explosion in backcountry skiing, riding and snowshoeing, it's worth pausing not only to honor the life of one of the Northwest's great mountain athletes but value the lesson of his death.

It is all too easy, given the benefit of modern transceivers, probes and "expert" guides, to divorce one's self from an instinctive, necessary fear of winter mountain travel. The truth is that people who spend years in the backcountry are toying with the odds.

If experts at a regional avalanche center say danger is considerable, it really is. Failure to heed the warning could end your life. And all the AvaLungs, radios and digital locator beacons in the world are not likely to change that fact.

We'd be the last to suggest that backcountry longings should be suffocated by fear. Training and preparedness can greatly reduce risk. But nothing eliminates it.

Such is the conundrum of the modern powder junky.

"I think the risk is worth the reward," Seibert, one of the lucky ones, said in an unintended twist of words — and logic — after the event. "It's better than dying of boredom sitting around watching CNN."

Is it?

The day after the latest legend died, the sky darkened earlier than usual in Glacier, Kelly's former home. The chill went deeper into the bone than usual at Mount Baker Ski Area.

If you stood there, in Craig Kelly's pioneering footsteps, and stared into the delicately beautiful, violently fractured face of Mount Shuksan, you could feel everything you needed to feel about a special man and his legacy.

Whether you live for them, or die on them, his mountains — our mountains — are the best places on the planet. And the coldest, cruelest places in the world.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.