It’s a glorious bluebird February afternoon on Snowmass Mountain, and I’ve squirreled myself inside a dog hole, one of a dozen igloo-like structures that have been constructed on Slider, a closed intermediate run. Dressed head-to-Sorels in Gore-Tex, I’m clutching a drool-frozen, knotted-wool-rag-of-a tug toy to my chest as Vail ski patroller John Alfond, like the narrator in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” methodically stacks frosty white blocks across the snow cave’s opening. 

Outside and just up the hill, I can hear the sing-song voice of instructor Mark Hall, a British expat K9 handler from Calgary’s Canada Task Force II Disaster Response Team, lecturing to my classmates, a quartet of patrollers (Alfond, Crested Butte’s Liz Bolton, Keystone’s Preston Burns, and Beaver Creek’s Gavin Mastell) plus one military search and rescue paratrooper (Kentucky Air National Guard Master Sergeant Rudy Parsons). Not that I can hear a word Hall is saying, given the sustained cacophony of barks and howls emanating from our wolfpack of avalanche rescue dogs and puppies—three golden retrievers, two black Labs, a Dutch shepherd, and a German shorthaired pointer/red heeler—who are simultaneously registering their displeasure at being staked out in the trees while another dog (Izzy, a British Lab handled by our assistant instructor, Taos Ski Valley patroller Leland Thompson) gets to search for me. 

Alfond wedges the last block in place, then shovels snow over his side of the wall for good measure, and suddenly I’m insulated from the outside world, blanketed by a silence so absolute the only sound that registers is the rhythmic thrum of blood pulsing through my veins. It’s 20 degrees outside, yet here I am comfortably warm in this achingly beautiful grotto with walls glowing blue from filtered sunlight, cocooned in wispy clouds of exhaled vapor that swirl around my face before freezing over my buff and on my eyelashes. As I’m waiting for Izzy to find me, the solitude and beauty afforded by these confines inspire contemplation.

This is the final afternoon of Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment (C-RAD) Winter Dog School, an annual February training event hosted by a different resort each season where ski patrollers (mostly from Colorado, but also from Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) gather for four days to learn and master the skills required of validated avalanche rescue teams—handlers with specially trained dogs that have passed the organization’s rigorous testing standards and are certified to search for victims buried in snow. While similar programs exist in other states (the oldest is Wasatch Backcountry Rescue’s International Dog School, held every other year at Utah’s Alta and Snowbird resorts), C-RAD, with 42 registered teams in 2023, is the largest and only annual K9 academy of its kind, earning a reputation in the discipline as a sort of Top Gun school for professional avalanche dog handlers and technicians. 

Of one thing I am certain: While I may be able to manage experts-only terrain without a yard sale, on skis I’m no Maverick. In 2012, paid work as a magazine editor relocated me from Oregon to Colorado, and I settled in Edwards with a high-drive puppy with a penchant for shredding couch cushions that, for my sanity, needed a job. As an outdoors enthusiast who last purchased a lift ticket in high school, instead of auditioning for Beaver Creek or Vail ski patrol, I volunteered with Vail Mountain Rescue Group (VMRG), Eagle County’s search and rescue team, where I specialized as a search and rescue (SAR) K9 handler, over weeks then years teaching Halo, a wirehaired pointer, to channel his hunt drive to follow human scent on the ground and on the wind to locate subjects lost or missing in the wilderness. 

More than a decade later, Halo is retired and I’ve started a second SAR K9, Stryker, a prodigy from a long line of working Labrador retrievers bred for SAR deployment—Stryker’s sister, Denver firefighter Johnny Adams’s Havoc, recently earned a berth on Colorado Task Force 1, a FEMA urban search and rescue team. After evaluating Stryker, VMRG’s avalanche rescue specialist, Chris Johnson, a patroller who oversees the avalanche dog program at Beaver Creek and is C-RAD’s dog coordinator, urged me to enroll him in Dog School. 

So here I lie, buried and awaiting rescue on Snowmass Mountain. 

As a SAR K9 handler with nearly 3,000 cumulative hours of volunteer service who has deployed on dozens of rescue missions since I joined the team in October 2012 (my official title at VMRG is K9 Technical Lead), I rank among the most experienced handlers on the roster at Dog School. Sure, I’ve come to Snowmass to learn how to be more effective at the human end of the leash when searching for people in distress, but really what I want to understand is how patrollers do this work on snow—how to ski with Stryker balanced over my shoulders or running between my pepperoni-pizza-wedged skis and how to safely load and unload my dog on and off a moving chairlift (a tendon accidentally sliced by a razor-sharp ski edge can end a working dog’s career, if not its life).

The predicament of a ski patrol avalanche dog handler is much like that of a law enforcement K9 officer whose primary duty is patrolling the streets and responding to a litany of mundane radio calls: Almost all of a ski patroller’s clocked hours are tasked to workaday chores like setting up and taking down rope perimeters and shuttling injured guests down the mountain in ski toboggans, while their dogs spend most of the day crated at patrol headquarters patiently waiting for the 30 or even 15 minutes when their handlers can break away from their duties to run obedience or search drills. Spending four full days doing nothing but being a K9 handler is a luxury for a ski patroller. It’s also a pure joy, and you can see it on their faces and hear it in the squeals of delight even the burliest male channels unselfconsciously while playing tug of war (known as “ragging” since the game usually is played with a knotted wool rag toy) with their K9 partners every time they make a find; no professional dog handler plays tug of war more ebulliently or effectively than a ski patroller.  

Leland Thompson explains it to me this way: “If you’re a handler and you’re not having fun dog training—if this is not your happy place—then you are in the wrong line of work. C-RAD is my favorite week of the year. I get to go and be a total dog nerd and talk about dogs and think about dogs and hang out with a bunch of amazing people who are changing the industry and how dog handling is done within ski patrols.”

But there’s also a darker side—a dichotomy to the dynamic highs and lows coupled with this peculiar work, and this particular job. 

Reality Check

In addition to being a K9 handler, I also serve as one of VMRG’s on-call coordinators, a 24-7 point of contact that a 911 operator can transfer a distraught caller to when someone is having a backcountry emergency anywhere in Eagle County’s 1,700 square miles, including outside patrolled ski area boundaries. Just after 2 p.m. on January 16, 2023, I was the county SAR coordinator on duty when a local pro skier called 911 from the East Vail Chutes, Vail Mountain’s notoriously avalanche-prone side country terrain, to report that he had been skiing off piste with a friend—a beloved 26-year-old Ski & Snowboard Club Vail coach—who had followed him over a cliff band and now was dead, the 11th snowsports fatality in East Vail since 1986. Without hesitation, a team of seven Vail ski patrollers (including my Dog School classmate, John Alfond) left the safety of the resort late that afternoon and collectively risked their lives to reach the reporting party and package the body, then over several hours, rig multiple rappels and descend in darkness to hand off the skier and the deceased to first responders. Just another day in the life a ski patroller to be filed away and rarely, if ever, discussed. 

Seasoned patrollers like Alfond and Thompson, who have a dozen or more winters under their skis and have elected to make this their life’s work, understand that if and when they finally do get deployed with their dogs on an actual avalanche, it is almost a foregone conclusion that the person their dog finds and that they or an avy tech will dig out will be dead rather than alive. 

This is what’s running through my head as I’m huddled there in my dog hole when the silence of my reverie is interrupted by the sound of frantic knocking—digging—outside the frozen door. Snow blocks vibrate, then explode in a powder cloud as Izzy breaks through. She pauses for a moment with just her head and forelegs in the hole, staring at me (maybe I’m imagining this, but I swear I see relief on her face when we make eye contact), then leaps inside to grab the still-frozen rag from my hands and initiate a quick game of tug before rocketing out of the hole and delivering her prize to Thompson and the others, who finish the job of loving on this revered four-legged veteran. She’s the only patrol dog in the 40-plus-year history of Taos Ski Valley’s avalanche dog program—and for that matter anywhere on this continent since then—to be the first on scene after a slide and make a live find. 

Nobody, not even her handler, knows it yet, but this will be Izzy’s last Dog School. In April, Thompson will announce her retirement after seven years on patrol, ostensibly due to a physical injury—a hyper-extended hip from a long-distance retrieve, he’ll tell a reporter from the Santa Fe New Mexican. But my medical training as a wilderness first responder makes me wonder if Izzy’s hip might more accurately be diagnosed as a distracting injury, secondary to acute mental trauma following an avalanche that claimed two lives in Taos at 11:45 a.m. on January 17, 2019, and forever altered so many others.

One thing I learned at Dog School: Humans aren’t the only ski patrollers suffering from PTSD. 

“It’s been documented in dogs that have worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, also the majority of the 9/11 dogs never returned to work because they were emotionally shut down,” Thompson later will tell me. “Our energy flows down the leash and it doesn’t matter if that leash is physically connected or not, that energy is still flowing through that relationship because of how dogs evolved and who they are. To really be a handler, you must be in control of your emotions all the time.… 

“Only in the last two years since COVID have first responders been talking seriously about our mental health. Before then, it was ‘Suck it up, buttercup.’ The culture was go to the bar and bury it in a bottle of whiskey. It almost destroyed me.”

Run of Luck

Before the K3 chute slid on Kachina Peak at Taos Ski Valley in 2019, nearly a decade had passed since a certified avalanche dog in the United States had found a subject alive after being caught and buried in an avalanche. 

On April 10, 2010, Ian Rogers, a 23-year-old mountaineer from Suffolk, England, out on a solo training hike to prepare for a summit attempt on Mount Rainier, was traversing across the south face of Granite Mountain near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington, when a snowboarder higher up the slope and unaware of Rogers below unwittingly triggered an avalanche. Slicing across the snow, the board acted like a knife blade, scissoring the crown of an enormous slab of what Northwest backcountry skiers and riders refer to as “Cascade concrete,” unleashing a cataclysm of potential energy that went kinetic as it broke 200 feet wide and slid more than 1,300 vertical feet. 

Rogers thought he had dodged a bullet when the first wave rolled over him without consequence.  

The second wave, a tsunami of snow, swept Rogers off his feet and churn-tumbled him several hundred feet down the mountain, where he came to rest on a bench of snow, wedged between a pair of large frozen blocks, lying prone with his head downhill, arms at his sides, legs above his head and twisted in a 90-degree jackknife. Buried under five or more feet of bowling-ball-size debris that set up around him like fast-curing cement, Rogers opened his eyes and silently took stock of his situation, relieved to see a foot-wide void just above him funneling fresh air, and filtered light, from the surface. After 45 minutes of frantic digging with and warming his only free hand, Rogers managed to wrest a cell phone from a hip pocket and dialed 911. To his astonishment a dispatcher somewhere in a warm cubicle calmly asked him to state the nature of his emergency—and no doubt was rattled when he did—quickly connected him with a coordinator from the local SAR team who deployed avalanche technicians and Alpental Backcountry Avalanche Rescue K9s (one of the teams training just uphill from me on Slider at Dog School).

“Upon arrival at the scene a muffled voice was heard in a section of debris,” Kevin Marston, a member of Washington State Department of Transportation’s Avalanche Control Team for Snoqualmie Pass, wrote in a report filed with the American Avalanche Association and the Forest Service National Avalanche Center. “A dog was immediately deployed and alerted on the victim within seconds. Probing was not necessary and digging began immediately.”

A Navy helicopter winched Rogers off the mountain and flew him to Bellevue’s Overlake Hospital, where, after treatment for hypothermia and a sprained knee, he was released four days later.

On camera with CBS News two days after the incident, gowned and seated in his hospital room, Rogers appeared relieved and still somewhat dazed as he retold his epic story of survival, punctuated with a qualifier that just might be the understatement of the decade if not the century: “I was extremely lucky.”

Slide Rules

On Day 3 of Dog School, an off-snow day of lectures and synchronized handler/K9 marching drills, C-RAD avalanche technician Dale Atkins (an Eagle-Vail resident who refers to himself as a “Lawinologist,” a term he coined for a professional who studies avalanches) opens the session with a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates just how fortuitous Ian Rogers was that day. 

As a past president of the American Avalanche Association, past forecaster/researcher at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, and a member of Alpine Rescue Team for nearly five decades, Atkins would be world champion if Jeopardy had an Avalanche Arcana category, having compiled a database of avalanche-related statistics and facts dating back to the 19th century. 

First formal avalanche rescue dog program? Developed in Switzerland in 1938.

First mention of anyone using avalanche rescue dogs in the United States? A telegram from the Italian embassy in Washington on February 22, 1899, offering to send rescue dogs from Italy to Colorado via steamship and rail after an avalanche near Silver Plume buried a mining village under up to 75 feet of debris, killing 11. 

Deepest find via a dog alert? That’d be a 1986 avalanche in the Sierra Nevada Range near Bridgeport, California, where rescuers tunneled through 35 feet of snow to recover a victim entombed in a destroyed home.

Number of avalanche victims Atkins himself has pulled from the snow in the last 40 years? More than 30. 

Number found alive? “I’m still waiting to find somebody.”

Number of avalanche incidents in the United States since 1906 where a dog was used to execute a rescue? 123. 

Number of avalanche victims found alive by a dog during that time? 13—roughly one person per decade. (One longtime instructor in the room who is more discriminating about what constitutes a true dog find—arguing that Ian Rogers doesn’t count since he had phoned in his own rescue and could be heard yelling through snow—shakes his head and says he believes the actual number is closer to three). 

Average number of annual avalanche fatalities in the United States? Around 25. 

That last data point summons a cohort of statistics that Atkins would like every ski patroller in the room (and every recreationist who frequents the backcountry in winter) to consider. From 2004 to 2013, 360 people (36 per year) were involved in avalanche incidents in the United States. Only 30 percent (106 victims) were found alive. 

Now here’s where things get interesting: Of those found alive, 9 had self-rescued/extricated themselves, while 83 were rescued by their companions or small parties they had been traveling with. Just 14 were rescued by professionals like those in this room.

This imbalance exists because of the nature of how rescues happen: Since most SAR teams rely on a corps of volunteers who, when summoned, must first extricate themselves from jobs, families, and other commitments to gear up and drive to a location, it can take an hour or more to assemble a response. (Ian Rogers had been shivering for four hours before Alpental’s dog team finally arrived on the scene.) Enter C-RAD, a nonprofit that a coalition of Summit County ski patrollers, SAR responders, and Flight for Life air ambulance aviators established in the 1990s to create a pool of certified K9 avalanche teams at ski resorts across the state who could be airborne and en route to a scene in as little as 15 minutes. But factor in the rule of threes that every rescuer knows (a person can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air).

If you’re a recreationist caught in an avalanche, long before the dogs arrive, your best hope for survival is that you have equipped yourself with an avalanche transceiver (strapped to your body and set to transmit an electronic ping on a particular radio frequency) and that your companions also have transceivers (set to receive your pings) and have practiced using them. 

Even if everything goes absolutely right and your adventure buddies find you in record time, shovel strategically, and manage to open your airway in under three minutes, given the abovementioned physical brutality of an avalanche, the odds you will survive are still less than 50/50, the flip of a coin. 

“Very few, if any, people even contemplate the potential for rescue when they go outside of the ski area,” Atkins says. “They’re going out to have fun, and they’re not thinking of the consequences of what could happen. Almost all the time, everything ends up great and they have a great time. Otherwise, nobody would be going out to play in the mountains, right? What people don’t realize is just how destructive an avalanche can be, and once you go under the snow, your chances of survival become very poor.

“Any time we find someone, it’s a big success,” Atkins adds. “It’s big for our dog, for our program, for our rescue team, and for us individually. But often our successes do not always mean happy endings for families and loved ones. And that’s an emotional roller coaster. 

“As rescuers, how do we describe this mix of being gratified and seeing people suffering a lot of pain at the same time? It’s really a paradox of mountain rescue.”

A Fateful Day

After a final exam that afternoon—a simulated avalanche the length of the ski run with multiple live burials—Dog School has ended, but the snowcat that was provided as our transportation to and from our training site has been tasked elsewhere on the mountain. Our instructor and his Lab, Glory, hitch a ride on a resort snowmobile and John Alfond and Liz Bolton shoulder their dogs, click into their bindings, and ski away while the rest of us hoof it downhill. I fall in line beside Leland Thompson, and as our dogs trot just ahead of us down the closed groomed run, I ask about Izzy’s one and only avalanche rescue, on terrain he was patrolling at Taos Ski Valley four winters ago.

Thompson prefers to let the written record tell the story of exactly what happened, which I gleaned from the plethora of news articles and official reports found via a quick Google search. One fact that’s quickly verified: Because of the mitigation work that patrollers assiduously perform on resort terrain—digging pits to analyze the snowpack, “bombing” unstable slopes with explosive charges to preemptively trigger slides, and other safety measures mandated by the US Forest Service, which manages the federal land where most skiing happens—avalanche fatalities at ski resorts are exceptionally rare. According to statistics published annually by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, of the 243 avalanche fatalities recorded in the US over the past decade, only 8 occurred within ski resort boundaries—just 3 percent of the total. The other 97 percent were skiers and snowboarders (which account for half of all avalanche fatalities) and snowmobilers, climbers and hikers recreating in unpatrolled backcountry terrain. According to Dale Atkins, since the 1980–81 season, only 21 skiers and snowboarders have died in in-bounds avalanches.

“While 21 deaths in 43 winters works out to about two deaths a winter, that also translates to only one death per 111 million skier days,” he notes. “That is a phenomenal record of safety!”

Yet as every Epic and Icon passholder acknowledges when signing the liability waiver allowing them to access resort terrain, skiing and snowboarding involve inherent risks, including the possibility, however remote it may be, of being caught in a deadly in-bounds avalanche.

In 2014, Taos Ski Valley installed the Kachina Peak Lift to provide easier access to the K Chutes, five steep and deep experts-only powder runs on the north face of the peak’s 12,481-foot summit. Kachina Peak had opened hours later than the rest of the resort did on January 17, 2019, two days after the lift had started spinning for the season, to give patrollers a chance to analyze the snowpack and detonate explosive charges to preemptively release any unstable snow (two inches had fallen the previous day, and 15 the previous week).

At 11:45 a.m., witnesses reported seeing two skiers drop into the third chute—K3—and begin descending when suddenly, the entire couloir collapsed, breaking 150 feet across the ridgeline cornice, running the length of the chute. As a bystander watching from below told the Taos News, “It sounded like an earthquake coming.”

Before the powder cloud had dissipated, the first patrollers (including Thompson and Izzy) arrived on scene, and within 15 minutes probe lines with more than 100 searchers, including resort personnel and guests who had been skiing and riding in the area, had been organized to march up the slide; in some places, probes as long as 30 feet did not touch bottom. 

By 1 p.m., both victims had been located and evacuated to area hospitals. Matthew Zonghetti, a 26-year-old real estate investor who had been visiting Taos from Massachusetts, died that night. Colorado resident Corey Borg-Massanari, a 22-year-old newcomer to Vail who had taken a ski vacation from his job at the Patagonia store on Bridge Street, died four days later. 

Ultimately, the US Forest Service’s investigation determined that in opening the run that morning Taos Ski Valley personnel had followed all industry snow safety protocols and operational procedures required of the resort’s permit. “We didn’t find anything in our review, any red flags, anything they weren’t doing,” USFS Regional Winter Sports Coordinator Adam LaDell told the Associated Press in July 2019. “I’d go up and ride [K3 Chute] and not have questions. Unfortunately, things happen.”

They certainly do. And Thompson will forever shoulder the burden of what happened that January day. The fact that it was he and Izzy, who had found Borg-Massanari, performing exactly as they had trained, only added to the conflicting emotions he felt and grapples with to this day. This is what Thompson wants to talk about—if only to let rookie avalanche dog handlers better prepare for the unforeseen, or rarely considered, realities of the job.

 “It’s hard to marry up the fact that somebody is dead and that you know somebody is dead and that you can be proud,” says Thompson, 34, a Santa Fe native who has been a Taos Ski Valley patroller since 2012, and an avalanche dog handler there since 2015. “It’s hard to be proud of your dog while you’re also so saddened by everything that’s happened.”

To help himself (and his dog) deal with that sadness, Thompson met with Bobbie Gorron, Borg-Massanari’s mother, in Taos not long after the accident, to walk her through a detailed timeline of events and what was done to help her better understand the tragedy that had taken her son. At that meeting, Thompson recalls how Izzy instinctively walked under the table and sat at Gorron’s side.

“She normally doesn’t do that, she’s a very independent dog,” Thompson explains. “That’s part of her training. So for her to just go over and sit there and let Corey’s mom pet her the entire time?”

His voice catches. (“Izzy will always be my hero,” Gorron later tells me. “She gave us four days with Corey. We would not have had that without Izzy.”) One thing that helped the patroller temper his grief: Learning that Borg-Massanari was an organ donor and that hundreds of staffers at the University of New Mexico Hospital lined the hallways as he was wheeled into his final surgery.

“I’m very proud that I was able to bring closure to a family,” he says. “I’m also proud that there are eight people alive because of Corey’s sacrifice, but also because of the professionalism of the crew I work with.”

And sure, there’s a memorial on Bridge Street in Vail Village, an Adirondack chair that Patagonia manager Joe Smith built and etched with Corey’s name and installed as a permanent fixture on the retail floor so he’d never be forgotten. But more meaningful to Thompson is the foundation that he helped Gorron create in her son’s name, which provides puppies free of charge to National Ski Patrol avalanche dog handlers. The first, Finn, an 11-week-old golden retriever, was awarded to Taos Ski Valley patroller Zackery Anderson in August 2021. The next two pups (Ruby, a black Lab, and Telli, a golden retriever) were gifted in 2022 to Beaver Creek Ski Patrol’s Toby Harrison and Gavin Mastell, one of my C-RAD classmates.  And there may be a Corey Borg-Massanari Foundation puppy in Thompson’s future, if and whenever he’s ready.

But what really helped Thompson come to terms with what happened in 2019 was that he attended his first C-RAD Dog School with Izzy in Keystone that February and was able to share this story with peers like Jake Hutchinson, who understood his struggle exactly, and has become a mentor.

Two summers ago, after three decades as a rescuer with more than 30 avalanche recoveries under his belt, the longtime C-RAD instructor found himself driving around the backroads of Oak Creek in Routt County early one morning with his third K9 partner, a Belgian Malinois named Colt, gun loaded, ready to take his life, but one thing spared him: What to do about Colt? He couldn’t walk into the woods with the dog and just shoot himself, knowing Colt would never leave his side. Nor could he ever bring himself to shoot his dog. Mulling this conundrum, Hutchinson happened upon a bicyclist with a head injury lying on the side of the road; after dialing 911, stabilizing the patient, and handing the rider off to paramedics, he had an epiphany of sorts.

“It was an accumulation of working in a stressful environment and dealing with fatalities and trauma, I felt like I was treading water for so long and finally it was just too much,” recalls Hutchinson, 51, the American Avalanche Institute's curriculum and technical director and a veteran of Utah's Wasatch Backcountry Rescue who served as snow safety and ski patrol director at Canyons Resort for more than 20 years in the 2000s. “My whole world came unhinged and what snapped me out of this mindset was that I wasn’t thinking about my family; I wasn’t thinking about anything other than what was I going to do with my dog. That was what intervened in that moment. I had a tremendous amount of support from some friends and my family, but at the end of the day, it was the dog that was there with me—for weeks on end, sitting on the couch. It was Colt. It was the dog that saved me.”

And it was C-RAD, and Dog School that saved Thompson. It was there that he learned that he wasn’t alone in this peculiar purgatory of pride and grief that is the world of the avy dog handler who has made a find only to dig into the snow and discover that instead of a life saved, one had been taken away. 

“Despite everybody’s best efforts, Mother Nature is going to be Mother Nature and nobody beats it. That’s just that,” Thompson concludes matter-of-factly. “It can be no one’s fault whatsoever, and this tragic event can still happen. You’re very proud of what you’ve accomplished and what your dog’s accomplished, and at the same time, somebody is losing a family member. It’s very difficult to marry those two ideas. I don’t think anybody can understand who hasn’t experienced something like that. 

“That’s why it’s important to have other handlers who have had finds, and that we support each other, and say, ‘Welcome to the club that nobody ever wanted to be in.’”

Postscript: I am grateful to the instructors and staff at Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment for agreeing to let me tell this story, and particularly to avalanche dog handlers Leland Thompson and Jake Hutchinson for sharing their struggles, so that others may learn, and live. And to Izzy, for finding me: 

Rest easy in retirement, sweet girl. 

Free dog.

Consider a donation to C-RAD and the Corey Borg-Massanari Foundation.