The Ridgway man who died Jan. 7 in an avalanche in southwestern Colorado was found by his wife who went to the trail after he did not check in as planned, Colorado Avalanche Information Center officials said Tuesday in their updated report.
Donald Moden Jr., who was 57 and a one-time member of the Ouray Mountain Rescue team, was killed in an area known as “Bollywood” east of U.S. 550 off Red Mountain Pass, the Ouray County coroner told the Ouray County Plaindealer. CAIC officials say the avalanche was 800-feet wide and traveled 400 vertical feet.
His wife contacted the sheriff’s office when Moden had not checked in as planned, then she went to the trailhead. She arrived at the avalanche and turned on a transceiver and immediately got a signal, CAIC reported. She then located him with an avalanche probe and yelled for help. Other backcountry skiers arrived, followed by the Ouray Mountain Rescue team.
He was buried in about 3 feet of snow, too deep for a self-rescue, CAIC said, and he likely had been buried for more than four hours before he was found.
Moden, who had skied the area the day before, was likely skiing downhill when the Jan. 7 avalanche started. Along with the rescue transceiver he was also wearing an avalanche airbag backpack, but it did not deploy, CAIC said.
“He had skied on Red Mountain Pass for 16 years and knew the terrain on Red Number 3 well,” the report says. “He chose his terrain as appropriate for the day based on his previous experience of the slope and the snowpack.”
Avalanche investigators suspect Moden was on his seventh lap on the slope, stacking lines in fresh powder as he moved southward toward the wind-drifted snow that would eventually avalanche, “possibly with no indications of snowpack instability,” reads the report, which notes that Moden likely did not see signs of dangerous snowpack on his previous day skiing on an adjacent slope.
The avalanche conditions that day were caused by a dry start to December, then more than 2 feet of snow fell from Dec. 24 through Jan. 7, according to a nearby weather station.
“An unusually snowy November in the western San Juan Mountains was followed by a mild and dry December. The result was a very weak snowpack composed entirely of faceted snow grains,” the report found. Strong winds during the two weeks of storms over the holidays “drifted layers of hard snow onto open slopes.”
The avalanche started at the treeline at about 11,300 feet, the CAIC said. At the time of the slide, avalanche conditions were considered “moderate” (level 2 of 5) in the area, according to the state agency.
Moden’s death is the first reported avalanche fatality in Colorado this season. The avalanche center has recorded 25 backcountry travelers caught in 23 avalanches since Nov. 9. Seven of those travelers were buried in avalanche debris. Those numbers through early January are not that different from previous seasons.
Since the 2020-21 season, solo backcountry travelers accounted for six of the 33 avalanche deaths in Colorado. A solo backcountry traveler has died in each of the last five avalanche seasons.
There have been lots of lucky backcountry travelers so far this season. Same as last winter, when the center reported 134 people caught in 105 avalanches, with 54 buried, 10 injured and only two killed, well below the long-time average of around six avalanche deaths a year in Colorado. In the past 20 years, there has been only one season — 2016-17 with below-average snowfall across the state — when so few backcountry travelers were killed in avalanches.
In one incident this year, a skier near Vail was carried nearly 500 feet down a chute Jan. 6 but was uninjured, managing to hike down and meet rescuers who helped him ski out.
On Jan. 5, two experienced backcountry people were snowshoeing north of Red Mountain Pass when one of them triggered an avalanche and was buried but survived, according to the CAIC report.