In early January 2017, seven Salida skiers — three dads and four teenagers — set off for Uncle Bud’s Hut above Leadville in the snowy Sawatch Range. A historic snowstorm buried the hut and one of those dads did not make it home. A 15-year-old barely survived after a 28-hour ordeal following a wrong turn into Porcupine Gulch north of Turquoise Lake.
Breckenridge journalist Devon O’Neil details that catastrophic hut trip in his new book, “The Way Out,” a masterful telling of a simple family outing turned horrible.
But O’Neil goes beyond the drama and tension of a bad decision in the backcountry with a heartbreaking exploration of the unique bonds forged in mountain towns and how the death of a beloved local concusses everyone in a small community.
O’Neil had a mission beyond a tragic tale. He wanted to explain the mountain life in a non-condescending way.
“And I wanted to defend it,” said the 46-year-old O’Neil, a ski bum turned journalist who, with his wife, is raising two boys in Breckenridge.
He wanted to share with readers how mountain residents balance the risks and rewards of adventures. He wanted to clearly point out mistakes made by the skiers and emergency responders — without blame — so that, maybe, similar mistakes will never end with the loss of life. And he wanted to show how individuals and communities must talk about trauma to move forward and heal.
“There was a heavy reckoning in the community following this tragedy,” he said. “There is a lot to learn from what happened.”
Adventure-seeking explorers in modern-day mountain towns are intimately connected to the rewards and costs of their high country fun. O’Neil wanted to show the Peter Pan-like pursuit of good times that thrives in mountain town folks — mostly men — as well as the devastating storms those funhogs can create when adventures turn bad.
“Everyone knew danger and traded near-miss tales, some of which became legend,” O’Neil writes, “depending on how ingenious the escape or the close call. But until you lose another human who, like you, has a pulsing spirit who does everything you do outdoors, it is hard to comprehend the equation in full — or the actual, devastating cost.”
The appeal of risky adventures is something that resonates with most backcountry skiers like O’Neil.
In April 2022, he and a pal triggered a big slide that easily could have killed them. That experience — when an entire season’s worth of snowpack ripped off the face of the 13,684-foot Bald Mountain above Breckenridge, a slope he has skied often — “changed my life,” O’Neil said.
“I had to feel what I felt on that cornice watching the mountain come down to hammer home the stakes of what I was reporting and writing about,” he said.
O’Neil works as a hutmaster, earning an hourly wage hiking up to huts and cleaning them between visitors. The job sounds glamorous until he starts talking about maintenance of composting toilets.
He spent 30 nights alone in huts last year, writing this book on his laptop. There was no internet or phone to distract him as he distilled three years of notes and interviews. He would work until his laptop died and then go ski for a couple hours while the solar panels charged his machine. The entire first draft was written in huts.
He found energy in the snowy cabins far from civilization as he detailed a disastrous hut trip.
“That was another way I could connect with this story,” he said.
Learning from mistakes
A lot of these kinds of books lionize the lost and gloss over mistakes. O’Neil did not do that. The two skiers were ill prepared that morning as they left the hut for what they thought would be a quick lap while the rest of the group geared up.
The skiers did not have functioning skins that would have allowed them to turn back after they realized they had taken a wrong turn that became a 28-hour slog and left one of them dead. They didn’t have enough warm clothes or a way to make a fire. They did not have their phones.
The search-and-rescue team took too long to respond. They held back highly qualified friends who showed up at the trailhead with snowmobiles ready to help.
Chris Burandt, one of the world’s top backcountry snowmobilers who guides trips out of Buena Vista, spent two hours in the trailhead parking lot, waiting for local officials to allow him and his longtime riding partner to join the search. He eventually found the lost skiers after pushing his customized, $50,000 extended-chassis snowmobile purposely built for deep snow into a drainage the search team’s sleds could not navigate.
Burandt was just one of many “spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers” — or SUVs — showing up to search for lost friends that night. Those SUVs are rarely welcomed by search-and-rescue incident commanders whose primary mission is to protect volunteer members, a job that is more easily done when every person in the search field is vetted.
Still, if Burandt had reached those skiers two hours earlier, the outcome may have been different.
Ignoring these mistakes to protect egos and the people involved “does not serve the community that we leave behind,” O’Neil says.
“We need to not be afraid of other people knowing we are hurting”
In the years following the ill-fated trip to Uncle Bud’s, there was a lot of confusion around the specifics and no one involved in the trip was talking. That left a lot of room for unsubstantiated chatter in the small town of Salida.
The lack of a full accounting of the 28 hours the two skiers spent lost in Porcupine Gulch, O’Neil said, “created a mystery that just permeated the town.”
After writing a letter and waiting three years for the teenage skier to talk, O’Neil finally had a sit-down in a Salida park in January 2022.
“This book is a product of very, very courageous people,” O’Neil told a full auditorium at the Crested Butte Center for the Arts on Nov. 19. “Without the bravery of these sources, there would be no story for the rest of us to learn from.”
Originally, O’Neil planned to write a story for a magazine, probably Outside, which often features his work. But as his notes grew to more than 400,000 words on 1,200 single-spaced pages, a book took shape. Most of those notes detailed how the fatality rippled through just about every life in Salida.
He interviewed more than 100 people, talking with family and friends over and over. On tailgates and chairlifts, in back-alley sheds and living rooms, he pushed people to share stories they were hesitant to discuss even in small groups. He saw the lingering pain and sorrow that followed the death of a passionate outdoorsman and father who inspired everyone who knew him.
Many of O’Neil’s sources spoke to him openly about their loss for the first time, uncapping pent-up grief. He watched strong mountain men and women break down and weep. They threw punches at the air in visceral explosions of rage and suffering. He sometimes wondered why he was knocking on those doors, picking at scars.
“I’m an advocate for talking about this shit,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “We need to not be afraid of other people knowing we are hurting. If we are terrified of others knowing we are suffering, that is a problem.”
There’s a mental health crisis in mountain towns, where rates of suicide far outpace the rest of the country and the anguish of those deaths have an outsize impact. O’Neil is part of a swelling contingent of mountain town folks urging residents of all ages to step up and talk about the stuff they have kept hidden for too long.
“Normalization is the key. As hard as it was for everyone to talk through the pain, I have to think that the suffering can heal others,” he said.
O’Neil said it was crucial “to tell a true story while honoring everyone in the book. Honoring the pain they endured. Honoring their humanity and their healing.”
And of course, honoring their willingness to share with a stranger on a mission to tell everyone. It took years to get them to open up.
“Those peaks of their courage are lessened if you can’t show the depths from which they’ve come and the bravery that got them to those high points,” he said. “I tried to honor the beautiful people that they are.”
O’Neil spent a lot of time cajoling the rescuers at Lake County Search and Rescue, who searched for those lost skiers but ultimately did not rescue them. Since that event, Lake County Search and Rescue has invested in new, more powerful snowmobiles and better snowmobile training for members.
“They’ve been pretty proactive about what they learned that day,” he said.
O’Neil hopes his story can prod even bigger changes. Not just around the details — like organizing search teams and planning for backcountry trips — but how best to openly confront the grief that can savage people who keep it buried.
“I think the stories that move us and cause us to reflect, they can change us,” he said. “That’s what I hope for with this story.”