Craig Kelly was snowboarding’s first true pro athlete. After a highly successful competitive career, he left the championship circuit behind in 1991 in favor of freeriding, the sidet of the sport he loved most. By the end of the decade, Kelly had decided to become a backcountry guide, a path that led him to an apprenticeship position at Selkirk Mountain Experience, a guiding company that operates from a helicopter-accessed lodge in the Selkirk Mountains near Revelstoke, British Columbia. There, on January 20, 2003, an avalanche would end Kelly’s life and the lives of six of his companions. The Darkest White, out February 27, is the story of Kelly’s life, death, and legacy. This excerpt details the moment the snow gave out underneath Kelly and a group of SME clients and staff when they were climbing a couloir called La Traviata on the west ridge of Tumbledown Mountain.

　　There is a deep, hollow, percussive “whumpf!” when a snow layer collapses. Then there is a silent “hope-filled” pause that might be followed by nothing more than the realization that a snow layer has collapsed. This can occur on flat ground, often on frozen lakes, with zero consequences, but on a slope—particularly a steep slope you’re standing on—the pause hangs like mute terror. Because in that split second, the snow crystals are conspiring, trying to decide if they will hold together the collapsing layer like Velcro, or let it rip down the mountain.

　　Up this high, with the wind blowing into the gully, that upper layer of snow could be five, ten feet deep. A slab that immense is going to rip down the mountain like a runaway freight train, taking anything and everything with it.

　　During that brief moment of purgatory, fully exposed at the bottom of the gully, assistant guide Ken Wylie had time to think, Maybe we’ll get lucky here. Then a voice from above cried out, “Avalanche!”

　　When Ruedi Beglinger, head guide and owner of Selkirk Mountain Experience, had topped La Traviata several minutes earlier, he skied immediately east—setting a traverse to the right, away from the top of the gully upon the gently sloping bench beneath Tumbledown Mountain’s west ridge. This was standard operating procedure for Beglinger, who didn’t stop until he was some hundred meters east of the gully, his standard regrouping area, not far from the ski route he used when coming down off the west ridge. It was a nice, protected area to have a sip of tea, enjoy the view, and wait for the other group to arrive.

　　The first to join Beglinger was Age Fluitman, with Rick Martin roughly 15 meters behind him, then Heidi Biber, Keith Lindsay, and Bruce Stewart similarly distanced—the line stretched back toward the top of the gully. As was his custom, Beglinger ripped his climbing skins off and quickly connected his split skis back into a snowboard, with Fluitman following his example. That was when Beglinger felt the snow drop beneath him, a massive settlement accompanied by that dreadful “Whumpf!”

　　At that moment Charles Bieler was just below the cresting summit of the gully, still sprinting upward, still uncertain of why he’d been spooked a couple minutes earlier into sprinting ahead of his companions up the skin track, but not letting up. He knew he was close when Rick Reynolds, the skier just ahead of him, disappeared over the summit. Bieler had passed Jean-Luc Schwendener 30 seconds before, Evan Weselake a minute before that, and Naomi Heffler he’d passed on a lower switchback after first feeling that sense of dread, but now, as he was within spitting distance from the summit, the entire group, including Craig Kelly and Dave Finnerty bringing up the very rear of Ruedi’s group, were only three or four minutes from the top. Wylie’s group was approximately 20 minutes from the top, so well below.

　　Some two meters behind Schwendener, Weselake saw a crack shoot across the snow above the ski track. At first he thought it was a bit of surface slough cracking off and sliding into the track, but then another crack opened up between his ski tips and Schwendener and the snow began to move down the mountain. Something was off: the snow wasn’t spilling down into the ski track. The track itself and Schwendener were moving, Weselake was moving, the entire slope was moving and he was on top of it. It was like the sensation when you can’t tell if the train or the train platform is the thing in motion. Only this time, he soon realized, it was somehow the platform that was moving—and he was on it.

　　On his side now, Weselake tried to reach for his bindings, knowing that was key to release his skis, at this point only anchors that would drag him into the depths. It was instinct. He’d thrown his poles away, the slab was breaking up around him, all of this in a matter of seconds. Rule number one from his training kicked in and, as he kicked violently, trying to jettison his skis, he screamed the loudest warning he could: “Avalanche!”

　　Bieler had just managed to finish his primal sprint, crest the summit, and get his first glimpse of Rick Reynolds when the concussive burst went off directly beneath the tails of his skis. “It sounded like the loudest clap of thunder you’ve ever heard in your life,” he says. “An explosion. I didn’t look back. I just rocketed forward, away from the downhill, and just kept going. I was in shock, just skiing for my life.”

　　Rick Reynolds shuddered when he heard what was, to him, a shotgun blast. He glanced back to see Bieler in full stride flying toward him. He could see the snow cracking behind Bieler, and farther down he could see just the top of Schwendener’s head, his body still beneath the crest of the terrain. Then both Reynolds and Bieler were thrust forward in a violent jolt that nearly knocked them off their feet. “I went down to my knees, had to put my hand out on the snow to steady myself,” says Reynolds. “I knew what happened immediately. I’ve seen a big avalanche at Squaw Valley, there was so much cohesion in the snow. The snowpack, it’s like a rubber band that was under so much tension, getting stretched, or pulled down the mountain, that once it released [cracked] the upper slope that we were on rebounded like a rubber band that had been stretched out to the max, and then cut or just snapped. It recoiled, sprung back, while the slab below slid down the mountain in the opposite direction. That rebound knocked us off our feet.”

　　Still in fight-or-flight mode, Bieler was scrambling on pure adrenaline trying to regain his footing and not certain if he was getting sucked down the mountain. Reynolds pushed himself back upright and came face-to-face with Bieler, who was breathing hard, wide-eyed and shaking.

　　“We just stared at each other for a second,” says Bieler. “I didn’t say anything—I was in shock. I heard people screaming ‘avalanche’ behind me and I realized I hadn’t said a word. Not that it would have mattered, but I wish I had.”

　　The acoustics in the mountains and the energy from the collapse were heard and felt differently depending on location. The skiers closest to Beglinger only felt the collapse and heard the “Whumpf!” while those closer to the gully heard the concussive thunderclap when the snow cracked.

　　Yelling “Avalanche!” Reynolds waved his hands toward Beglinger, roughly a hundred meters away. Not sure if Beglinger was getting the picture, he became more vocal: “There’s a fucking avalanche! The whole thing went! It’s big!”

　　Beglinger began moving their way almost immediately. Reynolds crept forward to the fracture line. Once there, he peered over the edge, which was no less than a small vertical snow cliff, five feet tall where he stood. He looked to the right, saw that it spanned across the entire gully, getting shallower, but still had to be three feet deep, and to the left, right up to where that wave had shot down the slope, the fracture line was even deeper—maybe a six- or seven-foot drop to the avalanche bed surface, where several “blocks of snow the size of Volkswagen Bugs were sitting there on this polished surface, this icy surface the whole slab slid on.” He scanned the flanks, thinking maybe somebody had been able to ski to the side, but there was nothing but white between him and a massive field of rubble he could see thrust out from the bottom of the gully far below. The depth and width of the fracture line, the size of these automobile-sized hunks, and the silence, the utter silence told him: this is a catastrophe.

　　“The only thing I could see were two little dots in the debris field,” recalls Reynolds, who stepped back and ripped the climbing skins off his skis so he could get down there and help, but steeled himself for what he knew was coming: There are too many people buried, he thought to himself. We aren’t going to get them all. There isn’t going to be enough time.