Out of bounds
Last winter, a couple skied beyond the boundaries of a B.C. ski resort into a life-and-death ordeal. And though their SOS signals were reported, no searchers came looking. What went wrong?
It was a crisp, clear morning February 15, 2009, when Gilles Blackburn and his wife Marie-Josée Fortin woke in their room at the Mountaineer Lodge.
As the sun crested the Rockies to the east, brilliant winter light flowed into the Columbia River Valley around the small town of Golden, British Columbia. It was, by any measure, a perfect day to hit the slopes at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, cold enough-at around —10°C-to keep the snow feather-light, but not the kind of mid-winter Rockies freeze that sears the nostrils and makes the snow crystals bite the ski bases like tiny knife blades. Blackburn and Fortin checked out of their room, loaded their luggage into a rental car parked in the underground lot, then walked across the squeaky morning snow to the base of the Golden Eagle Express gondola. (Mountaineer Lodge is part of the resort’s village complex.) The couple had come west from their hometown of LaSalle, Quebec, for a dream Valentine’s ski vacation. After an initial stop at Lake Louise, Alberta, they were looking forward to a day on the slopes at Kicking Horse.
The gondola carried the couple right to the top of the mountain, an extension of the Dogtooth Range. For first-time visitors to Kicking Horse Resort-such as Blackburn and Fortin-the view from up here is breathtaking. Far below to the east sits the downtown area of Golden, a logging and railway town turned adrenalin mecca. To the southwest lies row after row of wild peaks.
Kicking Horse has a well-earned reputation as a serious skier’s resort, much better known for its advanced runs than for its family fare. Steep glades, bowls and mogul-studded faces-punctuated by cliff bands-leave much for the beginner and intermediate to contemplate. Even for avid and experienced downhill skiers like Blackburn, a 51-year-old construction contractor, and Fortin, a 44-year-old nurse, it would have been challenging terrain.
Some time that February day, the Quebecois couple boarded the Stairway to Heaven chairlift, which whisks people almost to the resort’s highest point-My Blue Heaven. Standing near the top, Blackburn and Fortin decided to duck under the rope and follow an alluring track in the powder that beckoned beyond the ski-area boundary down the southwest side of the mountain.
It was a fateful decision that would lead to a tragic series of events.
It would also spawn a vigorous debate over personal responsibility and the public’s duty to help when things go wrong. For some people, the events that followed seem like the anatomy of a rescue gone awry; for others they add up to a grim cautionary tale of inexperience, ill-preparedness and bad choices in the backcountry. The truth, most likely, lies somewhere in the middle.
To be fair, when Gilles Blackburn and Marie-Josée Fortin slipped past the out-of-bounds signs at Kicking Horse, they weren’t the first to venture beyond the resort’s boundary. The southwest flank of the peak is popular terrain for “slack-country” touring. There, thinly treed avalanche glades funnel steeply into thick timber, and once you point the boards downhill you’re committed to several hours of skinning back up to the resort.
Gravity and topography dictated Blackburn and Fortin’s trajectory, and an epic run it must have been. Almost 2,600 feet of precipitous tree skiing later, the couple slid to a stop at the bottom of the Canyon Creek valley. Except for the sound of an occasional helicopter flying high overhead, they were alone with the fathomless silence of winter. Between them they had only two granola bars and the clothes on their bodies. They had no water, no matches, and no survival gear, and-other than realizing that the resort was up above them-they were lost. They had no way of knowing just how lost they would soon become.
At about the time that Blackburn and Fortin were pondering their next move at the bottom of the valley, an off-duty ski guide named Jeff Gertsch was backcountry skiing with some buddies approximately 10 kilometres to the northwest at the head of Canyon Creek. Jeff and his friends were staying at the Serenity Cabin, which belongs to Rudi Gertsch-Jeff ‘s father, boss and the owner of Purcell Heliskiing. The Canyon Creek valley runs through the northern end of Gertsch’s primo 200,000—hectare heliskiing tenure.
Rather than face the daunting prospect of boot-packing uphill and retracing their tracks to the resort, Blackburn and Fortin decided to follow Canyon Creek. But instead of going downstream-toward the Columbia River Valley, with its roads and major highway-they headed upstream, assuming the headwaters would lead them back to Kicking Horse. They couldn’t have been more wrong. From where the couple first encountered Canyon Creek, the upper valley meanders northwest away from the resort, to the height of land at Grizzly Col astride the eastern border of rugged Glacier National Park.
Anybody who has sidestepped in powder snow with heels fixed knows that it’s an exhausting exercise in inefficiency. Doing so for any distance without food or water requires almost superhuman effort. However that’s exactly what Blackburn and Fortin proceeded to do. From what observers could later discern from their tracks, over the next couple of days they sidestepped and shuff led up the valley, ascending as much as 2,000 vertical feet over 10 kilometres. At one point, they may have come within several hundred feet of food, warmth and shelter at Serenity Cabin. They would also have crossed the tracks of Jeff Gertsch and his friends, some of which likely led directly to the cabin’s front door. Unfortunately, they neither saw the welcoming glow of a kerosene lantern from the cabin at night nor heard the excited shouts of nearby skiers during the day. Blackburn and Fortin spent two nights outside in the cold, with not a soul in the world knowing that they were missing and in trouble.
On February 17, however, Jeff Gertsch noticed something strange in the snow.
Ski tracks are not uncommon in Canyon Creek, but the ones he spotted traversing the subalpine basin not far from the cabin were conspicuously different. They weren’t the purposeful ascending skin tracks left by backcountry skiers looking to bag a summit, but the awkward traces of skiers sidestepping perpendicular to the fall line. Something in these snowy signatures denoted panic.
Later that day Gertsch stumbled upon a large SOS crudely stamped out in a clearing that said all was not well in the Canyon Creek valley. Yet when Gertsch and his friends scanned the upper reaches of the watershed and further investigated the tracks they saw no signs of movement, no trace of the people who left them. That’s when he decided to radio his father, Rudi, who was back at Purcell Heliskiing’s headquarters on the outskirts of Golden, about 15 kilometres to the east as the crow flies.
It wasn’t the first time that skiers from Kicking Horse had wandered out of bounds and ended up in the veteran Swiss guide’s adjacent heliskiing tenure. Rudi called the resort to inform management of the distress signal spotted by his son in the Canyon Creek valley.
Rudi Gertsch belongs to the pioneering generation of European mountain guides that launched the heliskiing revolution in British Columbia back in the 1950s and ’60s. After emigrating from Switzerland in 1966, he guided in the Bugaboos for the late Hans Gmoser’s Canadian Mountain Holidays before starting Purcell Heliskiing in 1974. Short and stocky, with a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, Gertsch is a fit 64-year-old with the hearty weathered complexion of somebody who spends 100 days a year on skis. There’s also an intensity to Gertsch that is slightly unsettling. Like most people who have been involved in the ski-guiding profession as long as he has, Gertsch is no stranger to grief. On Valentine’s Day in 1978, he lost seven heliskiers in a massive avalanche, among them his brother. Then in a subsequent year, his first wife died in a freak snow slide. And just two years ago, one of his seasoned pilots perished in a sudden hard landing that sheared off the blades of the chopper and also left one of his guides seriously injured. Gertsch still bristles when he thinks about this incident and what he says was a botched recovery mission by police and Golden and District Search and Rescue, which left the pilot’s body in the chopper for two nights while his grieving family waited. To say that there is no love lost between Gertsch and the local search-and-rescue unit is an understatement.
Kyle Hale, a search manager for Golden’s search-and-rescue, and also an avalanche forecaster for Kicking Horse Resort, has been on the receiving end of Gertsch’s criticism more than once. Yet he says that when resort staff, who happen to include search-and-rescue volunteers, got the call from the outspoken guide alerting them to the SOS in the Canyon Creek valley, they took it seriously. Mountain safety personnel toured the resort’s parking lot looking for abandoned cars, inquired about unreturned equipment rentals and contacted local hotels to see if any guests hadn’t checked out. The search turned up nothing. Blackburn and Fortin had made no plans to keep in touch regularly with either friends or their son and daughter, and, save for a rental car in an underground parking lot, there was scant trace of their brief visit to the resort.
“There was no report of missing people so based on the information available at the time, that’s as far as we went,” says Hale.
