I learned to ski at a fairly young age, and like a number of activities I participated in early on, skiing became part of my adult persona. We got season passes to a mole hill called Ski Roundtop, where the snow was often man-made and the vertical drop was all of 600 feet. There were two chairlifts and lights for night skiing and the longest run took less than a minute to descend. Still I found skiing exhilarating and something I wanted to pursue.
Thirty years ago almost to the day I had quite a misadventure in the snow. I get to thinking about it every year around the Ides of March because it was a definitive life experience.
I was cross country skiing in the Donner Pass area of California with my girlfriend of just a few months, Quincey Tompkins, a high school exchange student, Philip Shearer, and a black lab Australian shepherd mix named Betty. We had skied a few miles up to a hut for lunch and were returning to the trailhead. I decided to climb up into the mountains for more of a challenge. Betty was wearing a pack with a few essential items like a map and a compass and a little food. After racing back and forth between us, she decided to go with Quincey and Philip.
As I climbed up to the shoulder of Castle Peak the flurries turned into a blizzard. I carved some turns down what I thought was a logical route to our meeting place. But I was turned around. I skied for a long time in the opposite direction of where I thought I was going. The snow fell harder. It got colder. I called out. There was no one around. In hind sight I should have stopped right there and retraced my path back up the peak and down to the hut then the car. But darkness was falling and I decided on another plan: make a snow cave and wait out the storm.
This idea came from a guidebook I had read on backcountry skiing. Somehow I could see the pages on avalanche and emergency preparedness in my mind even though I didn’t have a photographic memory. I found a depression under a huge boulder that was well protected, collected five or six armfuls of pine branches, and climbed in. I hadn’t made a snow cave before and this one wouldn’t have won any prizes. I had dressed for spring skiing with knickers and a fleece top rather than for a winter storm, and needless to say, it was freezing. Snow was falling steadily.
The gravity of my situation was quickly obvious. I made the decision that if I was going to make it back to safety I wanted to do so with all my fingers and toes. I had read a book by John Muir called Stickeen, about a sleety night he spent with a small dog on a glacier in Alaska. He ran in place under a sheltered ledge and I based my plan on his example. This meant scrunching my fingers and toes together inside my mittens and leather boots for a few minutes. My body’s reaction to these simple movements took me by surprise. My abdomen began convulsing somewhat violently for several minutes followed by another bout of hyperventilation. After a few rounds I realized that this was my body’s way of telling me that it wanted to keep the blood around my vital organs. It was perfectly willing to sacrifice my extremities. At least that was how I interpreted it. Either way, I quickly adopted this routine throughout the night: moving fingers and toes, convulsing then hyperventilating until my heart settled down and I could start the exercise all over again.
I slept very little with all kinds of thoughts racing through my head and when dawn broke I felt elated. A foot of snow had fallen, however, and there were no tracks to retrace. I skied energetically for what I thought was an hour in what I thought was the right direction. Then I crossed my tracks. This was devastating. It began to snow again and there was no sun to get my bearings. I was completely lost.
I skied all day heading toward what I hoped was the highway. The wind howled like the sound of highway traffic but I was caught in a drainage far from any paved road and far from where I’d started. I climbed a ridge only to find more ridges beyond that. I worked hard to block out fearful or dismal thoughts. Instead I focused on having a plan. I remember falling down in the powder and needing to use a lot of energy to pick myself out of the snow and saying to myself, “be intentional with your movements! Don’t fall! Think like a rabbit,” whose tracks I had seen, “he uses only the energy he has to.”
I drank water from emerging streams and skied most of the day until reaching a large lake created by the Fordyce Dam. The skiing conditions were incredible. I was flying on old school wooden waxable Norwegian skis. As I crossed the snowy lake I experienced some hallucinations of an imaginary village but made sure to stick to my plan and keep moving. There were a number of cabins around the dam but they were all safeguarded with metal doors and burglar bars. For some reason I decided that following the creek gave me the best chance to find a road out.
Breaking trail around trees and thick scrub and boulders was tough going and I was getting soaked. Darkness was coming, especially down in the drainage and it was time to make a second cave. This one was more igloo like. I made it with big snow balls. It had a side entrance I could slide in and out of and I again laid out a bed of branches. Before I climbed in I had to wring about a glass worth of water from each of my wool socks before putting them and my boots back on.
It was another night of scrunching and shaking. Time passed painfully but I told myself that if this was what had to be done this is what I would do for six nights straight. At one point I sensed a rather large creature on the outside of my cave. Later the clouds lifted and the storm subsided and it got extremely cold. After a number of hours I decided I had to do something to get my body moving. In the predawn blackness I climbed my way back up to the dam. It was freezing. I found a big pile of railroad ties and snuggled in amongst them.
The sun came out and it was a whole new day with a foot or two of glistening powder in all directions that is normally an adrenaline pumping sight for any skier. Again, following the advice of the guidebook I made a sign across the dam with the railroad ties for rescuers to find me: DAN 17. It was the 17th of March. The day before had been my grandmother’s eighty second birthday.
Where the hell was everybody, I was thinking. I had made it all this time, left plenty of clear tracks, why weren’t they looking for me? I sat on the dam as the sun rose in the sky, warming myself, finally getting a bit of rest. I ate half of the pack of Peanut M and Ms which Quincey had given me before we parted.
After some time in the warm sun I decided to explore the maintenance cabins. I noticed a sign for a Girl Scout camp I hadn’t seen before. There seemed to be a road. Exploring this route would be my Plan B if I couldn’t break into a cabin. I chose one that had some known commodities I could see through the window: a box of pasta and a bottle of Wild Turkey. But it was all locked up. I found a plank under a deck and a large stone and I leaned it up against the window. I stood on the board for some time pounding the burglar bars with the rock. For two sleepless nights, I had an amazing amount of strength.
I shattered the glass and tried to force my body through the bars but my efforts were futile. At one point I stepped back from the plank and noticed two troubling signs. I had nicked my elbow and there was an arc of blood in the snow from my pounding. There was also a piece of glass hanging straight above me like a guillotine blade I had failed to notice when I was trying to lunge between the bars.
I was thinking it was time to head toward the Girl Scout camp when I heard chopper blades. A helicopter was coming straight across the lake toward the dam and I waved my arms like the desperate soul I had become. They circled around then landed not far from me, a police unit out of Sacramento. I gathered up my skis and poles and someone helped me into the back. As I climbed into the seat I reached down for some support and the pilot screamed “Don’t touch that lever it could flip us over!”
Quincey and Philip had it much harder than I did. That’s a whole other worthy tale. They spent two days and nights with a wilderness search and rescue team that had been looking for me about twenty miles from where I ended up. Because of the storm, no one could fly. We were all united eventually, after Quincey and Philip got back with the rescue team and I’d been interviewed by the local news and cleared of any injuries except a little sunburn at the hospital emergency room.
This was an undeniably stupid predicament to put myself and all of my friends and family through. It was also life affirming. I had no idea how truly strong my will to stay on this planet was. So rarely have I had to fight like this to make it one more day. Still I look back and think I really got away with one. The angels had my back. A door closed on thirty-two years of living and from then on was the beginning of my second life.
I went on to do many things. I became a husband, a father, wrote books and recorded albums, learned the basics of small-scale farming and forestry. Skiing has remained a constant, although I’ve spent most of my subsequent years in-bounds. I hope I’ve made the most of my time.
In case you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few thoughts, Wiggle fingers and toes, shake, breathe. Always have a Plan A and Plan B. Be ready for the unexpected. Keep the negative thoughts at bay.
©2022 Dan Imhoff. All rights reserved.
