An avalanche and a miracle that saves two students' lives
Everyone who wanders very far into the Northwest backcountry wonders, at some point, what he or she would do in a true life-or-death predicament.
Greg Bachmeier was doing math.
Lying flat on his back in the shadow of Mount Baker, with 5 feet of avalanched snow pressing his body like a leaf in a dictionary, Bachmeier, 22, was calculating the odds he would get out alive.
They weren't good.
Moments before, an 80-foot-wide wall of cascading snow had blindsided him and two fellow Western Washington University students out for a carefree snowshoe hike. The three friends, celebrating the end of finals, were about two miles and two hours from their car, parked below at Mount Baker Ski Area, when the avalanche struck.
It was as shocking as it was brutal: The same legendary snow, stunning terrain and easy access that had lured them up toward Artist Point, a favored spot for years, now were conspiring to kill them.
The avalanche blasted the wind out of Bachmeier, briefly knocking him out. When he came to, he punched frantically at faint light above him until some snow caved in, creating a narrow air hole — his only window to the world.
Bachmeier could see now — at least straight up. He could breathe. And he could move his arms slightly. The rest of his body might as well have been in a plaster cast.
But his mind was doing jumping jacks. "I'm thinking: Can I get out of this?"
The avalanche, which broke about 50 feet above them, wasn't large by Cascade Mountain standards. But the weight of the snow told Bachmeier it could quickly suffocate anyone caught beneath it.
He doubted help was near. Only a couple of skiers had passed the three friends as they climbed toward Artist Point, a 5,100-foot-high vista that, during summer months, marks the end of the Mount Baker Highway. With steady falling snow and poor visibility, it was unlikely anyone had seen the slide.
Bachmeier yelled once for help, hoping his friends, Jacqueline "J.P." Eckstrom and Laurie Ballew, both 21-year-olds with modest backcountry experience, were safe above and could dig him out.
When no one responded, he started adding.
It was sometime between 11 a.m. and noon on Friday, Dec. 12. What time would his brother, a high-school teacher who knew about this trip and lived in the same house in Bellingham, notice he wasn't back? Did Eckstrom's and Ballew's roommates know where they had gone? How long before they grew worried? How long would a rescue attempt take even if someone called for help?
The prospects weren't encouraging: College students failing to arrive home by dinner time, or even midnight, rarely set off alarm bells.
"I didn't hold out a lot of hope," Bachmeier recalls. "I knew I had to get myself out."
BACHMEIER CLAWED at the snow. During the climb, he had peeled off his lightweight gloves and slipped them inside his parka. Now his bare fingers smarted, then ached, then went numb.
His Tubbs snowshoes were set, like barbed hooks, in the densely packed snow. To get free, Bachmeier would have to unbuckle the bindings that held his hiking boots. But he couldn't reach his legs. For a long time, he wiggled his feet, hoping he could slip out of his boots. No dice.
"After I realized that digging myself out would be more difficult, it became kind of a waiting game. I'm thinking, 'I'm going to spend the whole night here, or maybe spend the rest of my life in this hole — which won't be very long.' "
He knew the sun would set about 4:30 p.m. He watched it happen, peering up through his little portal. As light faded, he heard the distinctive whine of snowmobiles somewhere below. Rescuers? He waited and hoped, but the whines faded. He later learned they were ski patrollers, shutting down the ski area for the night, checking the boundary for stragglers.
His heart sank.
He had no way of knowing what had happened to Ballew, a college pal since his freshman year, or Eckstrom, a close friend, classmate and colleague from a summer youth camp in the Snoqualmie Valley.
"I tried not to think about it. I knew, from what little avalanche training I had, that snow will suffocate you and do it very quickly. I kept calling for help, kept calling for Laurie and J.P."
Early in the night, he swears his calls were met with a response — a steady thumping in the snow close by.
"That kept me going," he says. "There's somebody out here I can help. I heard it on and off throughout the evening.
"Sometime during the night, it just kind of stopped."
THE LONGEST NIGHT of Bachmeier's life was a busy one.
"I was awake all night. I had a lot to think about."
By 2:30 a.m., he was able to squirm out of his day pack and get to its contents: wristwatch, food, water, extra clothing and a knife. He ate some granola bars, drank some water, covered himself with more clothing and got back to work.
He tugged an aluminum support bar from his pack with his teeth and, using the "Indiglo" light on his watch as a dim flashlight, tried to poke the bar down and unhook his snowshoe bindings.
"I tried a lot of things. Nothing worked."
But hours of persistent movement probably helped stave off hypothermia. Bachmeier shivered often, but aside from his hands and, to a lesser extent, his feet, he never felt like he was freezing. The same snow he struggled all night to escape also insulated him from the swirling winds and mid-20-degree temperatures above.
By daylight, all the thrashing had created a bit of space in the snow around his legs and torso. He was able to stretch a hand down to one of the snowshoe heel straps — and free it. Thirty minutes later, he was out of the other one.
He slowly clambered to the surface. It was around 9 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 13 — more than 22 hours after the avalanche.
Bachmeier looked around, hoping for a sign of his friends, for any sign of life.
Nothing. Nothing but deep, smooth snow. Another 8 inches had fallen overnight, piling on top of 10 from the day before. It was still coming down.
"It looked like we'd never been here."
He had loaned his ski poles to Eckstrom on the climb, leaving him with no tools to probe for his friends. Even if he found them, his hands were too frozen to dig. He had to get help.
But how? Slogging through the deep snow would be next to impossible without his snowshoes. He somehow mustered the courage to clamber back in that cursed hole after them, only to find them encased in snow that had hardened to ice.
So he started stumbling down the hill, toward the ski area. He grimaced as he sank to his hips with each step: a high-school football knee injury had been badly aggravated in the avalanche.
"In an hour, I probably went 100 yards."
Exhausted, Bachmeier swore he saw a figure ahead in the driving snow, with a dog. He still doesn't know if the figure was real. But he yelled at it, anyway.
No one answered.
"I'm thinking: 'For the love of God, HELP me!' "
Then a voice drifted to him on the cold wind — from the other direction.
Two veteran Mount Baker backcountry skiers were making tracks on telemark skis in a basin below when they heard cries for help. Yelling up, telling him to stay put, they followed Bachmeier's voice through the drifting flakes until they found him.
One of the skiers, hearing Bachmeier's urgent report of two lost friends, turned and sped down the mountain for help.
DUNCAN HOWAT was riding a snowmobile near Chair One at the ski area when he saw a familiar face. Local skier and former employee Aaron DeBoer was racing toward him with a "wild-eyed" look, yelling for help. A familiar dread bloomed in the pit of Howat's stomach.
As general manager of Mount Baker Ski Area since 1968, Howat, 59, has supervised dozens of search-and-rescue efforts — all too many of them turning into body-recovery missions.
A major piece of Howat's own family history is buried up there in the timeless ice. Howat's uncle Maynard and Maynard's fiancée, both 23, were among six Bellingham college students and faculty members swept away by an avalanche high on Baker in 1939.
At the time, it was logged as the worst mountaineering disaster in U.S. history. They're still up there. Someday, Howat believes, the glaciers will finally loosen their grip on his uncle.
At this moment, he was more concerned with keeping the mountain's grim body count right where it was. Howat plunked DeBoer on the back of his snowmobile and raced toward the avalanche site, where DeBoer's friend, Barrett Gribble, had stayed with Bachmeier.
Deep snow quickly bogged the machine down. DeBoer hopped off, opting to ski back up to Bachmeier and the search area. Howat returned for one of the ski area's large snowcats, the only machine powerful enough to retrieve the injured snowshoers — or their bodies.
Howat, who has spent much of his life in these mountains, had never heard of anyone surviving overnight buried in an avalanche. Most victims die within an hour. One survivor would be a miracle, and in Howat's experience, they don't come in twos.
Worse, avalanche danger that morning was high and rising. During the initial scramble to reach Bachmeier, Howat already had laid down a firm warning about rescue heroics to DeBoer: It's too late for them, too dangerous for us. Stay out of there.
DeBoer wasn't listening. A short time later, he and Gribble handed the exhausted Bachmeier off to other snowshoers who had arrived to help. He told the helpers to keep Bachmeier warm until the snowcat arrived. And he left them with a parting message for Howat and any arriving rescue crews: "Tell them Aaron and Barrett are going in to start the search."
Then they skied off into the snow.
Steamed as he was by the insubordination, Howat later had only praise for the two-man, self-appointed search committee. "It was very heroic," he says. "They risked their lives."
DEBOER AND GRIBBLE say they want neither publicity nor credit, and declined interview requests. But their search below Artist Point was documented by sheriff's deputies and reported to aid crews:
While Bachmeier was being transported to safety, the two skiers followed his tracks back up the hill and began poking avalanche probes in the snow around the hole he left. Within an hour, not far away, they struck a leg, then a body, of a young woman. She was lying face down under 3 or 4 feet of snow, one arm frozen over her head. She was stiff and unresponsive, and they both knew she was dead.
As they dug to free her body, Gribble's foot sank deep in the powder. He yanked it up, revealing an air pocket — and the head of another woman.
When they scrambled to clear the snow from this second frozen body, it spoke.
"Hello?"
"HELLO?"
DOWN BELOW, Bachmeier was being warmed in the ski area's aid room — and grieving for his friends.
"They told me the chance that they're alive is pretty much zero. They also said it was probably too dangerous to even go in and search."
Accepting that logic was painful, he recalls.
"Here I was, thinking I had worked all night to get out, for what? I could understand their reasoning. But it hurt. I thought I had given my friends at least some kind of chance."
He had. Moments later, word arrived: Second survivor found.
Howat couldn't believe it. But he fired up a second snowcat, and the two machines powered back up the mountain, through the deepening snow, to the slide site. The two frozen snowshoers — one dead, one barely alive — were loaded up and whisked off the mountain.
At the lodge, a waiting Bachmeier was staggered by equal parts joy and despair.
"I sat there for I don't know how long, knowing one made it and one didn't," he says. "But I didn't know who."
He didn't even know how to feel.
"Both of them were such incredible people. "
Soon enough, he learned that the survivor had been coherent enough to stammer her name:
Laurie Ballew.
THE RESCUERS had found her in a seated position, head bent forward, arms in front of her face. It was the kind of position an avalanche-trained person might try to assume in a slide.
Ballew had no such training. By chance, an air pocket had formed around her head. She thinks her body went into some sort of hibernation.
At the ski lodge, medics initially could not find a measurable pulse or blood pressure in her extremities. Her body temperature wouldn't register on their digital thermometer. After stripping off her frozen clothes and warming her with hot-water bottles, warm blankets and intravenous fluids, they got a core-temperature reading on a mercury thermometer: 85.5 degrees.
She remembers little. After the avalanche and a brief struggle, panic giving way to calm, everything went dark. She doesn't remember thumping on the snow that night, being pulled from the snowbank the next morning, talking to her rescuers, or anything else before she looked up into a ring of smiling faces surrounding her in the ski lodge.
Someone had to convince her it was midday Saturday. She had been buried before lunch Friday.
Ballew was taken by ambulance down the winding Mount Baker Highway to St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham. Her feet and hands were black and blue. The hospital had put a plastic surgeon on standby. But when nurses put heat packs on her skin, the pink slowly returned.
"That was a surprise to everyone," Ballew recalls.
But she had no idea just how serious the accident had been until the next morning, when she learned J.P. Eckstrom had died under the same snow she escaped.
Released from the hospital after three nights, Ballew had some nerve damage in one leg, which persists two months later. Her toes tingle sometimes, and the skin on her feet feels sort of detached. She is expected to recover fully.
Bachmeier was picked up at the ski area the day of the rescue by his father and driven home, where he slept until the middle of the following day. A hospital visit revealed some frostbite damage to his hands, and the redamaged knee. His injuries, doctors say, should heal.
DURING WESTERN'S HOLIDAY BREAK, grieving friends and family gathered to remember J.P. Eckstrom at St. Anne's Church in Seattle. The Shorewood High School graduate was a senior studying communications and women's studies. She had talked of becoming a social worker.
Eckstrom, who had worked the past few summers at a Catholic Youth Organization camp, taught classes on the climbing wall at Western's student recreation center. She was deeply involved in campus clubs and organizations. She loved disc golf and all things outdoors.
Bachmeier had planned to serve alongside his friend at a camp this summer. He feels her absence every day — usually through contact with other people she had touched.
"There is this whole community of people who love her that are going through something really hard," he says. "We're not supposed to be losing our friends at this age."
Six weeks after her death, more than 150 of Eckstrom's friends grieved together at a campus memorial service, this one culminating in a candlelight vigil. They described Eckstrom as joyous, caring and fearless.
Many of them have said Eckstrom often took time to tell people close to her that she loved them. Ballew tries to do this more often herself now, because "you just never know."
Bachmeier and Ballew both grapple with survivor's guilt — why did Eckstrom die and not them? — and the trauma of straddling the fateful line between life and death. Should they feel cursed for being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time? Blessed to have lived through it? Both?
They know they did some things right but a lot of things wrong. Even given the heroics of their rescuers, their survival, in some ways, was a fluke.
What if Bachmeier had landed face down instead of face up? What if DeBoer had rolled back over and hit the snooze alarm that morning? What if?
THE TWO SURVIVING FRIENDS haven't talked much about that day and night in the snow. And they have not been back to Mount Baker. Bachmeier says he'll return at some point; Ballew is less certain.
But neither wants the experience to scare them indoors.
"I'm not going to let it," Bachmeier says.
He goes to class every day, lives his life and tries to channel his energy away from the unanswerable questions. He will take an avalanche course with his brother before he goes back into the snowy hills.
"The best thing I can take away from this is to prepare myself to give someone the same kind of help that I got," he says. "I was incredibly fortunate."
Ballew, like many other survivors of close scrapes in high places, knows some part of that night on the mountain will live on in her soul.
Emerging from such a situation intact and healthy is a gift, a puzzle, a quandary. She keeps asking herself: What did she do to get herself out of there?
Nothing, really.
She knows now, she says, that true blessings — the kind that come from some power far greater than your own — are things that can't be asked for, only received.
"It's given me a really powerful new metaphor for grace."
Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com