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WHOFLEWTHESEARCHMISSION‘Peoplesaytheyhaveadeathwish.
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JOHNROSKELLEY,JESS’SFATHER,ISSTILLINAWEABOUTHOWSEPEAK,WHICHHECLIMBEDIN1971Howse:Mountaineers’daringfeatwasalmostforgotteninthesnow
Over a reporting period from Oct. 31,
2018, until Sept. 30, 2019, there were a doz-
en avalanche fatalities in Alberta and Brit-
ish Columbia. Victims include ice and
mountain climbers, backcountry skiers,
snowmobilers and snow-shoers.
“[Avalanches] aren’t discerning of who
they strike,” says Lawrence White, the ex-
ecutive director of Alpine Canada.
Although an avalanche can occur any
time, December through April is the peak
season. Spring is especially dangerous be-
cause ice and snow becomes unstable as
temperatures rise. Think about it like this:
When the temperature is low, snow sticks
to the roof and windshield of your car.
When the temperature warms, snow slides
down, often in pieces. Something similar
occurs on mountains.
More than 5.1 million people visited Al-
berta and British Columbia’s national
parks between April 1, 2018, and March 31,
- Banff is Canada’s most popular, with
nearly 4.1 million visitors over the same pe-
riod.
The surroundings are so spectacular
that it is easy to be lulled into complacen-
cy. Because of that, the parks service has
created programs to educate visitors about
the risk. Daily avalanche forecasts are post-
ed from November on. Information in-
cludes an overview of the region’s ava-
lanche conditions, recent avalanche activ-
ity and an outlook of how the snowpack
can react in current and coming weather.
Elite climbers understand. “Snow is the
most complicated medium for us to
judge,” says Barry Blanchard, who has
been climbing without ropes or safety
equipment since the late 1970s. “It can go
from as safe as it gets to as dangerous as it
gets in 24 hours.”
Will Gadd has made at least a half-dozen
attempts to climb Howse Peak and turned
back multiple times when he felt condi-
tions were unsafe. “Danger does not add to
the thrill of the chase,” he says. “It is some-
thing you mitigate. There is enough inher-
ent danger that you don’t need to add
more.”
He was raised in Jasper and spent a lot of
time in the mountains. He was age 17 when
he began to climb in earnest, but the ele-
vated risks associated with alpinism made
him uncomfortable. He has come to accept
the consequences. “I have gone to a lot of
funerals and wakes,” he says. “Basically, ev-
erybody that taught me to climb is dead.”
The avalanche risk was unpredictable
when the climbers set out on April 16.
Snow from storms the preceding week
could unsettle the snow. Wind could push
a slab loose and down the mountain. It is
impossible to know. “The more complex
the environment, the more complex the
results,” Gadd says. “Big faces are harder to
control.”
So why do climbers expose themselves
to the danger?
“It is while doing these things that they
feel most alive,” Maloney says. “People say
they have a death wish. They don’t. They
have a life wish.”
In his practice, Powter, the psychologist,
sees many climbers. He recognizes they
flirt with danger and handle it in ways
most of us can’t. Brain studies show the
most elite barely react when confronted
with fear. It even sharpens their responses.
“You know the price is high,” Sharon
Wood says. “It ups the stakes and ups your
performance.”
Ben Erdmann shared a rope with Jess on
climbs across Alaska and stood beside him
on summits in Patagonia. He started to
climb as a teenager as a way to cope with
the trauma caused by his father’s suicide.
A few years ago, he stopped climbing.
Three of his friends died, one after the oth-
er after the other. “It broke my heart,” says
Erdmann, who lives in Leavenworth,
Wash., a mountain town with a Bavariantheme four hours south of Penticton, B.C.
“I tried to climb after that, but I lost my
drive.”
Before he quit, he and Jess talked about
climbing Howse Peak. “I feel like I am liv-
ing a second life right now,” he says. “If I
hadn’t stepped away, I would have been on
the rope with Jess and Hans and David.”$- $/ /0
4fter an early conference call on
April 18 to discuss what they
hoped would be a rescue, Mal-
oney flew the team back to
Howse Peak. As they scanned the endless
mountains, they realized the biggest ava-
lanche cycle of the season had just oc-
curred.
When they arrived at Howse Peak, wind
and snow were so relentless that he was
unable to set the helicopter down. Malo-
ney found a safer spot a half-kilometre
away. From there, the search team
watched avalanches tumble down. They
would have no more than 25 seconds at a
time to search before needing to be lifted
out.
At the same time, another fierce storm
was bearing down. The forecast called for
40 more centimetres of snow. Again, the
search was called off.
On April 19, as the storm raged, the team
deliberated how to proceed once the
weather cleared.
Searchers are trained to hang beneath a
helicopter on a sling and unclip them-
selves before they start to look. The ava-
lanche risk made that impossible. “There
was a lot of conversation among us,” Grant
Statham says. “If we couldn’t do it that way,
how could we go in there?”
As luck would have it, Brian Webster, the
team’s safety manager, had attended a pre-
sentation about a new technique being
used in Switzerland. It requires searchers
to fly beneath the helicopter and remain
attached as they probe in the snow.
That night, the team watched a how-to
video and got ready to try it at Howse Peak.
The next morning, for the first time in
days, the weather was beautiful, sunny
with blue skies. Maloney swept up and
down the face.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of optimism,
but we wanted to eliminate the possibility
that somebody was clinging to the side,”
he says. “There are tremendous survival
stories.”
He returned to where the boot was seen
sticking out of the snow, but the spot hadbeen covered by multiple avalanches. Mal-
oney used the GPS co-ordinates he had
saved and touched his skids to the ground.
As he did, somebody in the back planted a
flag.
He returned to a staging area where
searchers were waiting. For 20 minutes,
one probed beneath the snow while sus-
pended on a line 120-feet long. Nothing
was found.
As searchers considered their next step,
they were called to an avalanche 20 kilo-
metres away. They found a backcountry
skier with fatal injuries. By the time the re-
covery was made, it was too late to return
to Howse Peak.
The search began anew on April 21. The
weather was perfect as the team left Can-
more at dawn. “It was what we needed,”
Maloney says.
Initially, the same ground was covered
as the preceding day. In 20-minute inter-
vals, a searcher with a probe worked be-
neath the helicopter. As they looked, Malo-
ney flew 120-feet overhead and matched
them step for step.
“We were still not hitting it,” he says.
The parks service placed a call to Adam
Sheriff and asked him to bring his ava-
lanche dog, Brooke, to Howse Peak. Sheriff
drove two hours from his home in Golden,
B.C., and parked along the Icefields Park-
way where Maloney picked them up.
He flew Sheriff and Brooke, a 10-year-
old German shepherd, to the search site.
Each was clipped to a harness on a 170-foot
line. It was longer than the others to keep
the helicopter from kicking up snow.
Sheriff, who works as the visitor safety
manager at the Kicking Horse Resort in
Golden, got Brooke as a puppy for ava-
lanche rescues. Over two years of training,
she learned to fly in a harness, ride on
snowmobiles and ski lifts, and search for
items beneath the snow.
“Her tail wags non-stop when she hears
a helicopter,” Sheriff says.
Sheriff and Brooke began searching. Just
like the others, they came up empty. The
team was about to call the operation off,
but decided to give Brooke 10 more min-
utes. “It was probably going to be our last
try,” Maloney says. “If we weren’t success-
ful, there was a likelihood the bodies
would not be recovered until the snow
melted in summer.”
Suddenly and frantically, Brooke fo-
cused on one spot and began digging. A
foot-and-a-half down, the black dog un-
covered one of the climbers. Soon, all three
were found within a few metres of each
other. Two were tied to the same rappelling