There are Easier Ways to Get to Auburn

At about 11am yesterday, Jon got off the lift at Crow's Nest to sample the fresh powder of the recent Tahoe blizzard. Skier's left at the top of Crow’s is the eastern boundary of Sugar Bowl Resort. Sometimes people like to dip under the boundary just a little, and then dip back in. The powder is always fluffier, deeper, and steeper on the other side?

On previous days, Jon had dipped under that line, albeit further down the run. Therein lay the potentially fatal mistake. If you dip under the left boundary at the very top, you can never ski back in; you have bought yourself a forty-mile hike to the town of Auburn.

According to Jon, from the start the problem was hubris. He was sure if he kept riding and turning right that the ski area would appear shortly. By the time he stopped and looked at the map, he had dropped about 300 vertical meters below the resort. His GPS and maps were spotty and he was distrustful that they were accurate.

After reaching Onion Creek bottom he started hiking, or, more accurately, wading through the waist-deep snow. He hiked for several kilometers along Onion Creek, looking around at the mountains and realizing he was in the middle of nowhere and no one would be able to find him.

Meanwhile, I was back at home working. At around 2:00pm I felt the urge to look up Jon's location. He was on an epic powder day after an epic blizzard and riding alone. I just wanted to make sure he was okay. What I found, on both Google Maps and Find My, is that he was last on seen off of Crow's Nest lift sometime before noon. This gave me a nervous moment before I started churning through logical explanations:

He dropped his phone.
He was back at the lodge working and never connected his phone to WiFi and the cellular service was weak at the base area.
He was doing epic pow laps of Crow's Nest, where there is no signal.

The screenshot I took at 2pm.

I sent email to Jon and asked his coworkers to reach out to him. He did not respond. Then I called Sugar Bowl resort operations. This call made the whole thing terrifyingly real.

I told them that Jon was last on the map at 11am-ish. They looked up his pass and he had last scanned at Mt Disney lift at 11am. They told me that they do not scan passes at Crow's Nest because you can only get there from other lifts. When I heard that I tried to convince myself he was just doing powder laps, off-grid and off-scan at Crow's Nest. Just in case, I gave them the last known coordinates, to which she said, “that is not at all on resort property.” Maybe the GPS was inaccurate, I thought.

At 3:17 I received a call from Tom Brunner at Ski Patrol to obtain information from me and verify that I wanted to activate Placer County Sheriff Search and Rescue. I gave descriptions of Jon and his vehicle. I told Tom how he was last seen on map at Crow's Nest and that he likes to sometimes hike above. I asked Tom if they could put out a whiteboard at Crow's saying "Jon Baker, call your wife!"

Tom replied they had closed Crow's Nest at 1pm. That sunk in quickly.

He called me back a bit later to say they had found a track off of Crow's Nest, leaving the boundary. He said he was sending the Nordic Team to investigate and that people who cross over there end up down at Onion Creek and the next civilization is Auburn (a town 60 kilometers away).

Meanwhile, Jon had decided to hike, through waist-deep snow, for 8 kilometers, in an attempt to reach Soda Springs Road. He ate snow and kept a bottle of it melting against his body as he hiked. He was not cold, but he had no food and was trying to keep his heart rate down to conserve energy. Eventually he came to a Forest Service cabin and an outhouse.

He saw this as a logical place to shelter for the night but could not break into the cabin. There were bars on the windows. He even tried getting into the crawl space to kick up boards. He considered trying 9,999 combinations on the padlock but, ultimately, it was going to have to be the outhouse. At least it had a toilet? He reports it was full of spiders and mosquitos, probably also caught out post-blizzard.

Unbeknownst to Jon, help was on the way. A couple had done the same thing he did last year and spent the night in that very same outhouse. Tom at Ski Patrol had activated the volunteer Tahoe Nordic Rescue to head out toward Onion Creek. They sent a snowcat and two snowmobiles. After about an hour, Jon heard the sound of motors coming his way. He was rescued.

At 4:11pm I got a call from Sage at the Placer County Sheriff. She asked, "Is this Cynthia?" but she sounded cheerful, which put me at ease. And then told me Jon was found safe and sound. The contrast of despair and joy was palpable.