Men caught in avalanche experienced, prepared

HATCHER PASS — Mountain rescuers and specially trained search dogs were able to find the body Sunday of James Helling, 65, of Palmer, who died in an avalanche there the day before.

“My first thought is those guys are really good skiers because that’s a big, steep mountain,” said Dean Knapp of the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group about Hatch Peak, the easternmost peak of Bald Ridge in Hatcher Pass where Helling’s body was found. “Alaska Mountain Rescue Group will rescue all kinds of people, some are pretty inexperienced and some are world-class athletes.”

In this case, Knapp said, Helling and his skiing partner, 34-year-old Jerry Kallam, of Palmer, were experienced mountaineers and did a lot of things right.

By most accounts, they seemed to be aware of how to spot potential trouble spots and they had avalanche beacons and shovels. Still, the snow let loose at around 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Knapp said that late afternoon is a more dangerous time than early morning to be out skiing on a south-facing slope since by then the sun has had time to warm the snow. Knapp said there wasn’t an inordinate amount of snow on the mountain either.

“It was a shallow, like 2 to 4 feet at the crown, but it deposited into a gully” and took Helling there with it, Knapp said.

There was another group of three skiers in the area who saw the slide and witnessed Helling get trapped. Two of them stayed to dig him out and keep an eye on Kallam. Rescuers responded to the scene and dropped the group supplies from a helicopter, but ran out of daylight before they could get on the mountain. A military helicopter eventually plucked Kallam from the mountain and the rescuers went home for the night.

But they returned at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday and started digging. Knapp said that the two skiers with shovels had actually gotten pretty close to Helling. They’d started digging where the signal from his avalanche beacon was strongest, but that wasn’t quite where he was.

Vikki Gross with Alaska Search and Rescue Dogs said that two dog teams from her group were able to get a better fix on Helling’s location.

“Both dogs did alert on exactly where he was,” Gross said. “It’s kind of a nod to the dogs and their capabilities and also to the handlers for training them.”

They also helped with the digging. Knapp said that 10 to 12 people dug for two hours to find Helling. While they worked, spotters kept an eye on the mountain — one from the top and one from further down. They were wary since Helling had wound up in a gully, one of a number of terrain traps mountaineers know to be wary of. It would have been especially dangerous for AMRG’s volunteers.

“You’re digging in a deep hole and you can’t see,” Knapp said.

Knapp’s role in the operation was to run the helicopter landing zone in the nearest parking lot. It was the same parking lot where mourners met in June 2006 to memorialize Brendan Smart, the last person to lose his life in an avalanche at Hatcher Pass. Unlike Helling, Smart wasn’t found until the snow had melted in the spring.

Without an avalanche beacon, Knapp said, none of it could have happened. Helling was beneath 15 to 16 feet of snow, Knapp said. Probes — long poles used to find things buried in the snow — aren’t that long.

Even if they were, “We would not have sent a team of 20 people to run probes all up and down that gully. It’s just too dangerous to be out there that long with that many people,” Knapp said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.