On Friday, December 25th, two backcountry skiers left the Tenth
Mountain Division backcountry hut in Lake County, Colorado, at 8:00
am. Their intention was to ski to Uncle Bud's hut, approximately
ten miles away.
The Lake County Sheriff's Office received a 911 call from the
skiers at about 5:00 that evening. They said they were lost, and
they sounded disoriented. The Lake County Search and Rescue team
was launched, and a request made for help from other Colorado SAR
teams. The Summit County Rescue Group, Vail Mountain Rescue, and
Chaffee County Search and Rescue responded.
When a team of four arrived from SCRG at 7:00 the next morning, two
teams from Lake and Eagle counties had already spent the night out
in the field. One team was on snowmobiles, and the other was on
snowshoes and had chosen to hunker down for the night after two
avalanches occurred nearby. Temperatures were well below zero
during the night and into the early morning.
Lake County command directed the SCRG team to drive up to the top
of Tennessee Pass and deploy on snowshoes from there, retracing the
route that a skier might have taken from the Tenth Mountain hut to
Uncle Bud's hut. The SCRG team followed a winter trail from the
Crane Park trailhead to Tennessee Creek, then followed the creek,
searching for tracks. About four hours into their search, they
received word from command that the skiers had been found, and they
returned to the command post.
The two skiers, a man and a woman, were found and transported out
of the field by a Kiowa helicopter from the National Guard High
Altitude Training Center in Eagle County that had been requested by
the Lake County Sheriff's Office that morning. Despite the freezing
temperatures, they were uninjured.
"We were amazed when we saw all of this," said one of the skiers,
referring to the resources that had been called out for the search.
"We still thought that we were going to have to ski out."