Investigation Follows Avalanche Ride Report Says Men Triggered Slide For Thrills

Greg Linja’s heart beat fast when he was chased by an avalanche in North Idaho’s mountains.

But on Friday the snowmobiler was even more revved up. He was mad at rumors that the avalanche was some kind of snow job, staged for videotaping and profit-making.

“It was an accident that got caught on film. It was life-threatening,” he said. “It was not a hoax. I don’t know where that came from. I’d like to shoot or hang someone who made that up.”

The video of the Feb. 23 drama has been been sold to several national TV programs. But a less flattering news report, suggesting that the avalanche may have been triggered by thrill seekers, got the attention of U.S. Forest Service officials.

The agency got the nod Friday from the U.S. attorney to investigate the incident. Linja and his snowmobiling buddies could end up charged with reckless endangerment.

A spokesman for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests noted that Bob Sharp, who shot the video, did not react with horror when he was filming Linja racing in front of the avalanche.

“His comments weren’t ‘Ohmigod, get out of there!’ It’s ‘Go! Go! Go!”’ said public affairs officer Carl Gidlund.

Sharp said he was shaken, so much so that he stopped filming at one point. He scoffs at community scuttlebutt that the snowmobilers were hot-doggers who intentionally started the slide.

“I never, ever heard of anybody starting an avalanche so they could ride it,” he said. “That would be like trying to commit suicide.”

Snowmobilers do sometimes go out for the game known as high-marking, he said. It involves seeing who gets highest on a hill before running out of power.

Two days before the avalanche chased Linja, a Thompson Falls man was crushed while high marking in Montana’s Beaverhead Mountains. His machine apparently got bogged down, triggering two big avalanches.

“Every snowmobiler knows what ‘marking the hill’ is,” Sharp said.

In a separate interview, Linja said he’d never heard of high-marking. He did allow that some competition was under way on Feb. 22, near Cemetery Ridge.

It was brilliantly sunny. Sharp was filming Linja, Neil Houn and Dean Swan as they made runs up the side of a bowl.

It was 800 feet deep, Linja said.

“We go down in these holes, and we want to be the first one to come out,” said the 35-year-old Kellogg man.

“Me and a few of the guys I ride with are pretty extreme riders, jumping off cornices and overhangs, 50-60 feet,” he said. “It’s just a big adrenaline rush.”

This time, the rush came looking for the riders. Tons of snow started sliding from above.

Houn and Swan avoided the main part of the slide. But it came headlong after Linja.

“I had to do a double take. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing,” he recalled. “I know I was doing a good 70 miles an hour. There were chunks of snow that were bigger than me and my machine. If they’d hit me …”

At one point in the video, Linja’s snowmobile disappeared into the rumbling whiteness. He reappears as the wall of snow comes to rest. It was 20 feet deep, he said.

Linja said it was the second avalanche he’d experienced in 17 years of snowmobiling. The first one occurred just the weekend before, in Montana.

That time, he’d helped dig out friend Lori Jamieson, who was trapped in the snow for 15 minutes.

“He never would have planned an avalanche. He saw what happened to me,” Jamieson said of Linja.

Jamieson said she regretted making a “smart-aleck” comment to a KREM-TV reporter that Linja might have been going out to try to make another avalanche. She said the report didn’t include her follow-up comment that “that was just a joke.”

KREM’s Thursday report started with the words; “Was it purely coincidence? Or was it planned for profit?” It said Sharp has made thousands of dollars selling the videotape.

Sharp won’t say how much’s he’s made. But he swears the avalanche wasn’t planned. He said he didn’t even know he owned the rights to his film until he called KXLY last week to ask if it wanted to use the film.

KXLY offered him $50, and suggested he try to sell it elsewhere, he said. The Pinehurst retiree attributes the rumors of a set-up to jealousy over his “once-in-a-lifetime” shot.

“I think they’re mad at me for making money off it,” he said.

Producers of the show “Hard Copy” were reportedly debating Friday whether to use the video.

Ron Comings, station manager at KREM, said “Our own network was unhappy that they may have purchased video that was misrepresented.”

Linja noted that Sharp has not offered him any profits from the video sale, despite their longtime friendship. All he’s made is a few hundred dollars for granting an interview to the program “Inside Edition.”

So he’s left mostly with what he fears is a tarnished reputation. Plus the memory of a ride that got a little too extreme.

“You couldn’t pay me enough money to run through that again.” , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo