Search and rescue team success

Four from Aspen stray into Taylor Park

A Crested Butte Search and Rescue (CBSAR) team brought four backcountry skiers back to safety after the group got turned around in whiteout conditions in the mountains above Taylor Park last week.

Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Adam Crider said his office got a call from the family members of one man in the group after he failed to make it back to town on Monday, March 28. Deputies left a note on a car the group had parked at a trailhead, but after the note failed to illicit a response, Mountain Rescue-Aspen sent a team of two to the group’s last known location at the Goodwin Green Hut at around 4 p.m.
With no sign of life at the cabin, Aspen’s two-man rescue team spent the night and waited for reinforcements to arrive the next day. On Tuesday morning the group of five set out toward Taylor Park, following faint ski tracks in the snow.
The missing skiers had a plan to sleep in backcountry cabins, CBSAR president and public information officer Nicholas Kempin said, and traveled without a tent, a compass or a map of the area. Although unsure of the group’s specific plan, Kempin said, they ended up safe but in a place they didn’t want to be.
“They got lost in that storm that we had and they ended up coming down our side of the divide between [Crested Butte] and Aspen,” Kempin says. “They broke into the Forest Service’s Dorchester Cabin in Taylor Park and stayed there for the night.”
At 7 o’clock Tuesday night, CBSAR was called on to help with the search the following day. The Aspen search team had scheduled a fixed-wing airplane to join the search the following morning. Kempin said CBSAR was ready to make similar plans before the weather rolled into the Gunnison Valley.
“When we got that call we were put on standby, because [Aspen was] planning on getting a fixed-wing up at 8 a.m. [Wednesday],” he says. “But the weather socked us in that next morning. Even a really experienced backcountry person would have had a hard time navigating in those conditions.”
In the high wind and whiteout conditions at nine that morning, a group of eight CBSAR team members set out on skis and skins to “check the low-hanging fruit,” Kempin says. “If they hadn’t been found then [the search] would have escalated.”
But as the team from Aspen and another from Crested Butte converged on Taylor Park, deputy Crider said the tracks to the Dorchester Cabin became visible and the group was found around noon.
“They were in good shape, just ready to be done with it,” Kempin says.