Splitboard mountaineering tours have certain elements that rank them on the totem pole o’ touring. The very best tours include: Aesthetic quality, difficulty, produce adrenaline, and the snow needs to be quality deep powder.  Climbing up and riding down Coalpit Headwall was always looming somewhere near the top of my hit list because it usually possesses all of these qualities.

8pm Birthday Weekend.

Zach tells me that Him, Mark, Alecs, and Justin are getting up at 4:00 am to summit this incredible line called Coalpit Headwall. Being near the top of my hit list for years, it only took a split second to start packing my gear.   I got all my normal stuff together: Split board, skins, bindings, poles, transceiver, probe, shovel, food, water. Then I got my axe and crampons, it is a special moment when I get to take those off the shelf, because I know I’m in for an adventure day in the backcountry.

Coalpit is kind of an illusive powder island because it is a beautiful untouched headwall that is surrounded by difficult approaches. One of these approach options is by starting from White Pine. You climb up and over all the drainages: White Pine, Red Pine, May Bird and finally get to Hogum, but then you still have to go straight up the tube shaped chute that pierces through the vertical cliff band call the Hypodermic needle.

Another way is to do a Salt Lake Valley start from Bells Canyon, climb 5,000 ft up “pie in the sky”, traverse a high consequence ridge and then climb the western ridge to the summit of Coalpit. There are also numerous other ways, but our skimo partner Mark had something else in mind. Out of true Wasatch backcountry style we decided, why not just go straight up it!

We started off the side of the Temple Quarry trail where the bridge had been washed out the previous spring by very high running melt off. Head lamps on; Justin and Alecs headed right for the crossing and we heard a fall in the river somewhere off in the darkness. Zach and I decided to look elsewhere; we found a down log covered in freshly fallen snow. The first thought was to try to walk it, but risk the chance of falling 5 feet to an icy river. After just recently being influenced by the Man vs. Wild episode we watched the night before Zach and I tried the old straddle and scoot method. This was particularly awkward because we had to hold our skis together and our poles all while trying to scoot across the slippery snow covered log. Finally we both made it and the first barrier to our powder island was put behind us. We skinned up what is a small stream in the winter and a major tributary to Little Cottonwood in the summer; shortly after we reached Coalpit’s waterfall. We were very relieved to see it was mostly frozen over and so we got out the crampons and ice axes and climbed up and around it. The exposure of the vertical climb felt good and got our, still sleeping, adrenaline pumping; it was a sweet way to start this beautiful day.

Coalpit drainage is a spectacular sight to see. You are completely engulfed in steepness and because that night had given us freshly fallen snow, it was steep freshies all around. Because of the 360 degree towering walls, we didn’t get any early morning sun until we were almost to the ridge that divides Hogum and Coalpit. As the sun crept over the ridge, I remember bolting for the sun line so I could get the warmth on my ice cold face. Once we all crossed over into the sun there was an unspoken sigh of relief from the cold dark wee morning hours.

The ridge didn’t look like too much technical climbing when standing under it, but I noticed the precarious over-hanging cornices all the way up. I was glad to be there as early as we where that morning because it was April 27^th and that late in the spring the snow has potential to heat up significantly. Along the way we skirted around the cornices that had the potential of being a platform of death, and gained more and more of the ridge.

Mark and Alecs were  ahead of me. Mark in his light skimo gear just seemed to glide up ridge without resistance. I decided I was going to keep up with Mark and that determination stuck with me. As I followed tight, steep, and small switchbacks to the summit, there was one kick-turn  that changed the way I experienced fear. It was the way that I let it effect me that made the experience happen, because I let the fear take over, and I slipped.

My knee thudded onto my ski and I scrambled frantically trying to drill my poles and fingers into the snow in an effort to keep my position on the ridge. If I fell forward, I would fall over a 200 foot cliff into the Hypodermic Needle and would not stop falling for 2000 ft, when I would arrive at the Hogum valley floor. If I fell backward, I would get thrown over a 50 ft cliff and get washed thousands of feet down to the bottom of the Coalpit drainage. And so I froze. It wasn’t like any type of freezing I had experienced before. I literally couldn’t move for about 10 seconds and it felt like 10 minutes. When I finally started to shake, I tried to get up. It took me two tries and after the first failed attempt, I drew all the focus and drive left in me and stood up. Just those 10 seconds of real fear changed my composition completely. I was shaken, sweating, and the butterflies that had overrun my stomach decided to stick around for awhile. The moments following where some of the best! I gained the summit, and euphoria kicked in. All those butter-flies came out of my stomach and went under my feet, I was floating!

After that huge range of feeling, I really felt alive and I still got to ride Coalpit Headwall as a reward. We split parties at the top, Mark and Justin where going for the Hypodermic Needle and Alecs, Zach and I were going for the headwall. We all had been spotting our lines from the bottom and where gunning for them. That is one of the nice things about going straight up your line, you then get to see it in it’s current state, only hours before slashing down it.

The line I had selected looked like an opening in the cornice, dead center on the ridge. As I strapped in and looked over I could see that it was really a small drop. Normally, I would have thought twice about dropping over a cornice into a 5,000 ft line, but today I felt good and wanted to do it. Zach spotted me and I dropped in. The landing from the 20 ft cornice quickly passed out from under me because I underestimated the steepness. I stomped into the perfectly fresh powder and triggered a sluff of the fresh snow that quickly spilt out from my board and strait down the fall line. I diverted to a higher island of safety and watched it flush. After that it was pure euphoria, making powder wiggles down all 5,000 feet of Coalpit! These experiences are what I live for and that is the reason I will continue to climb mountains, it is at the top of my lives to do list!

Back in 2008, I had the scariest ski crash of my life. I wrote down my thoughts back then, just a few days after that accident. I recently dug them up to share here:

Last Wednesday was just another epic April powder day at the Snowbird, until I crushed a tree at 30+mph. Before that moment I was stoked because it had been dumping, and over the last four days I had skied some lines that I’ve been looking at the entire year. I had also just quit my job earlier that week and had bought a spring Bird pass to put to use my new-found abundance of free time.

This shot was from earlier in the season, on a typical bluebird pow day at the Bird.

On the last run of my season, I got off the tram with my friends Stephen and Tom. We headed out on the Cirque Traverse to pick our way down a line in the Gad Chutes in the Shot 7 area. The line we chose was steep and exposed, with a small mandatory air at the bottom. I let Stephen and Tom go ahead of me and hung back to make sure they made it down okay. After they were clear, I skied the chute and landed the air with quite a bit of speed.

I started making some big turns through some chopped pow below the chute. There was a group of smaller trees to my left with some untouched powder that needed to be slashed, and I decided to make a turn at high speed right next to those trees. Halfway through a big, sweeping right turn, I caught something under the snow with my tips and instantly shot into the air. My legs were out to my left, and my body was pretty much horizontal at this point. Much to my dismay, there was a lone pine tree in my flight path, and I could do nothing about it. I took the trunk of the tree squarely to the chest, and since I was horizontal, the impact was distributed across my entire sternum. I instantly lost both gloves, poles, goggles, and one ski. Patrol later told me one of my poles was stuck about 15 feet up in the next tree.

The impact was huge and I instantly felt the worst pain of my life. It felt like there was a dump truck full of lead pipes parked on my chest. I couldn’t catch my breath and I was making some horrible noises. I was conscious for about 10 seconds, crawling on my hands and knees, and all I remember was thinking how I sounded like the grape lady that fell off the stage in the infamous youtube video. Then it all went black.

I had a very long, strange dream, and I remember feeling warm and thinking I was in my bed at home. Then I woke up. I was face down in the snow, bleeding, ears ringing, and my arms were jammed into the snow without my gloves. Needless to say, I was freezing and in tons of pain. It was dumping huge flakes at this point, and I was pretty well covered by the falling snow. I stood up slowly, thinking how strange it was that my body just decided to wake itself up. My phone was in my chest pocket at the time of the crash, but the impact had separated the battery from the case. I put the battery back in, and miraculously the phone came to life. I called Tom, but I couldn’t really breathe at this point, and talking was even more of a chore. Tom heard some gasping and figured it out, then he dialed patrol. Tom and Stephen had been skiing just to my right and ahead of me when I hit the tree, but they didn’t see any of it. They had already been on the tram deck for a few minutes waiting for me when I called. That means I was probably unconscious anywhere from 5-7 minutes; we’re not really sure.

Snowbird ski patrol called my phone a few seconds later, and they kept me on the line so I could guide other patrollers to my location. They found me in less than 2 minutes, and I was in the trees in a huge area with no real points of reference. Big props to Snowbird patrol on that one. I was in pretty bad shape, so they strapped me to a board, put a neck brace on me, and got the oxygen flowing. Everything was moving pretty fast at this point, and I was fighting to not puke or black out. The sled ride down 1,600 vertical feet of mountain from the top of Gadzoom was not the most pleasant. Every bump sent waves of pain through my body. Patrol did their best to make the ride smooth though.

Once I was in the clinic below the Tram deck, the medical staff took over and did a great job. I had an irregular heart beat, so they did an EKG and took some x-rays immediately. I had a few obvious broken ribs on my left side, but they were concerned about internal bleeding and damage to my heart because the impact was so hard. They tried to get a life-flight helicopter to pick me up, but the weather was too bad to fly, so they called an ambulance to take me to the ER in Salt Lake. The morphine started to flow and things got much better at this point. I started talking a lot, almost uncontrollably, and I was having a strange out of body experience as we drove down Little Cottonwood Canyon. It was as if I was flying above the ambulance, watching us drive down to the valley.

Once I was down the canyon and in the ER at the University of Utah, I had another EKG, a couple ultra-sound tests to check my heart and organs, and tons of x-rays. Everyone kept saying how lucky I was, and the final verdict was a couple broken ribs, massive cartilage damage throughout my rib cage, and a bruised heart. They were also concerned because I had blacked out so long, from a combination of extreme pain and a lack of breathing. My girlfriend (now wife) Casey showed up at the hospital before I even got there, and she was great throughout the entire ordeal. After the doctors were done, I tried to sit up, but immediately blacked out again from the pain. I stayed in the hospital for a while longer, but they let me go home later that evening.

This is the 4th day since the crash and I have had some time to reflect on all of this. I guess it could be the Percocet talking, but I am damn lucky to be alive. This whole thing has me pretty shook-up. I was completely airborne and doing somewhere around 30-40mph when I hit that tree. If my flight path had been 6 inches off in any other direction, I would have hit the tree with my neck, face, or abdomen, and I would not be typing this right now. The impact was enormous, and I am really glad my ribs were up to the task of saving my ass. I have skied fast for years, and never really thought twice about dipping into the trees at ludicrous speeds. I have had some close calls in the past, but this was my first real injury that endangered my life. I know this will have an impact on my skiing, and I will definitely hesitate the next time I am getting ready to do a straightline or jump off something.

For those of you that know what I’m talking about, how did you get past this? Am I doomed to a life of skiing trees at slow speeds and taking the easy way out of a line?

I am currently staying with my girlfriend’s parents, Penny and Joe, and they have been amazing in helping me recover so far. Thanks Sowul family! I also wanted to say thanks to the Snowbird Patrol and everyone in the clinic. You guys were amazing, so professional, and you made a bad experience much better. Thanks.

For about a month following this accident, my spine was in a weird S-shape because my rib cage was no longer able to keep my body straight. The torn cartilage was more painful than the broken ribs, and I spent the better part of 4 weeks laying flat, while I healed.

It has been over 5 years since this accident, and I’ve had some time to reflect on it. I still do not know why my body decided to wake up after over five minutes of being unconscious, or how I hit that tree so perfectly in the center of my rib cage, which is what saved my life.

The following winter, I had quite a few moments while I was skiing when I  flashed back to the crash. I skied much more timidly that following year, and never left home without my helmet. It took about two years for my skiing to return to the level it was prior to the crash. Sometimes healing the mind takes longer than healing a broken body. I am definitely smarter about my line decisions that I was back then, but I am skiing faster now than I ever have.

I like to re-visit this post from time to time to remind myself of how quickly things can go wrong when you are sliding down a mountain at high speeds. Be safe out there this winter, and live every day to the fullest!