Bill Jennings: One wrong turn is all it takes

Sometimes an exact sequence of events must spool out in order to share a cautionary tale, rather than a tragedy. With just one out of place, you might have heard a different story in December. But what didn’t make it newsworthy still makes it worth telling.

Christmas break brought a ton of snow to the mountains, followed by extreme cold. The conditions were right for Mark Moore and Theron Vanhoff to get in shape for the season, skinning sidecountry northeast of Mount Spokane. Both men are former ski patrollers, own condos on the mountain and know the terrain surrounding the state park like their own backyards.

They ventured out on the skid road that passes just outside of the dogleg on the Lamonga Pass piste. This is a well-known portal into a system of trails that serve a lot of backcountry traffic. The convenient exit also makes it easy for the curious and unprepared to get in trouble.

“We had been out there quite a while, probably three or four hours,” said Moore, 49, co-owner of the Trackside Studio Ceramic Art Gallery downtown. “It was early afternoon, very cold. Our kids were skiing. We were coming back in.”

Moore and Vanhoff noticed postholes in the deep snow. It’s not uncommon to see postholes out there. But that early in the season, a base had not yet developed. Someone on foot would sink to the bottom. There was another cause for concern.

“It struck me that the prints were small,” said Vanhoff, 47, co-owner of Vanhoff’s Garden Center in Coeur d’Alene. “If we would have seen a big boot with the small ones it could have meant a family out there. It was probably a little kid alone.”

The evidence suggested the kid would fall, get out of the skis and wander around struggling. The men planned on telling the ski patrol what they saw. They encountered a group of patrollers responding to an injury when they returned.

“It was it was a busy day for them,” Moore said. “We thought it could literally take hours before they could respond.”

Getting an injured person out from that part of the ski area is arduous. A special rack mounted on Chair Four must bring them to the top, where they can be tobogganed to the base. Finding a missing person is time consuming. The entire ski area and both lodges must be covered before sending a team out of bounds. The patrol had no objections when Moore and Vanhoff decided to conduct their own search.

“We sideslipped down a trail we had just skinned up,” Moore said. “Our hearts sank when we saw those little tracks leave the trail, heading north toward Blanchard in the wrong direction.”

Vanhoff said the irony was that this person “wasn’t that lost.” Gravity was just drawing them away. In that location you can still hear activity at the ski area. Who ever it was probably thought they were doing the right thing. The men feared the worst.

“We followed the tracks and started yelling,” Vanhoff said. “About 150 yards off the trail, we heard a little voice, ‘It’s me I’m here in the forest!’ A seven year old boy was stuck up to his waist in snow, tangled in buckbrush, shaking and shivering.”

The men carried hot tea, snack food and extra layers. Vanhoff blazed a trail while Moore rigged a tow rope to pull him back to the ski area.

“Once the patrol had him, we realized nobody knew he was gone,” Vanhoff said. “That was when the gravity of situation sank in. What if we hadn’t have been there?”

The ski patrol read the boy’s family the riot act. Moore and Vanhoff don’t blame the parents, although its unclear how he ended up alone.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Moore said. “We trust our kids enough to turn them loose for the day. This kid just took a wrong turn.”

That’s all it takes.