Sarah Steinwand, the backcountry snowboarder killed in an avalanche near Ophir Pass on Feb. 20, is being remembered as a talented athlete and a warm, engaged member of her community.
“She was super easy to love,” said Steinwand’s partner, Matt Mielke.
Steinwand was caught in a medium-sized slide that broke up to 1,300 feet wide and ran 1,400 vertical feet down an east-facing feature known as “The Nose” in the Mineral Creek drainage northwest of Silverton.
She was buried under 6 feet of snow at the bottom of the slide path, according to the final report from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. The 41-year old Crested Butte resident was with Mielke on a trip at the nearby Opus Hut when the two opted to ski the prominent feature. Both Steinwand, a snowboarder, and Mielke, a skier, each had spent 20 years recreating in the backcountry and had prior experience in the San Juan Mountains. Steinwand had ridden The Nose on a previous trip to the area.
Both Steinwand and Mielke had read the avalanche forecast for the day, which put the danger level at moderate (level two of five) at all elevations, and they spoke with another party that had skied a feature near The Nose and reported good surface conditions. The couple had also toured on other east-facing features near Ophir Pass that day.
“It seemed pretty green light,” Mielke recalled.
When they reached the top of the wind-scoured ridge, Mielke and Steinwand took a photo and enjoyed the view before they started picking their way down the rollover to a point where one person could wait and watch the other descend. Steinwand waited as Mielke dropped in.
“I don't know exactly when it broke underneath me, but maybe five to 10 seconds into my ski descent I noticed I was caught in an avalanche and things were starting to break apart on me,” Mielke said. “Adrenaline just kicked in.”
He was able to stay atop the moving deluge of debris and ski to his right, out of the slide. When he stopped in a safe spot and looked back, the slide debris was still in motion below, with trees cracking from its force. It was unclear to Mielke and CAIC investigators whether the avalanche had broken above the safe zone where Steinwand was waiting, or whether she had moved lower onto the slope in order to keep visual contact with Mielke.
When Mielke didn’t see Steinwand above him, he took out his avalanche beacon and began a sweeping search down the fall line of the slope he’d been skiing.
“I thought maybe she hiked up the ridge to get off of the hangfire, if she was nervous about what she was standing on, or maybe she had skied down the other aspect a little further to the north, and I just hadn't seen her,” Mielke said. “(I thought) maybe she was looking for me, I don't know.”
When he didn’t pick up a beacon signal, Mielke transitioned back into uphill mode and in 15 to 20 minutes skinned back up about 1,300 vertical feet and stopped about 230 feet – the reach of a beacon’s signal – from where the slide had broken loose. At that point, he realized how far to the north the avalanche had propagated. He transitioned into ski mode once more and descended the slide path, this time about 330 feet to the north of his initial sweep. At the very bottom of the debris, he picked up a signal and quickly honed in on Steinwand.
After pinpointing Steinwand’s location with a probe, he dug furiously (prompting an asthma attack) through 6 feet of snow in an attempt to uncover an airway. He uncovered Steinwand’s head just as two workers from the hut, who had seen the slide and responded, arrived at the scene. Steinwand had been buried for approximately one hour, according to the CAIC. Her cause of death was asphyxia, San Juan County Coroner Keri Metzler said.
Studies have found that critically buried avalanche victims have a high rate of survival if they are rescued within 10 minutes, but that rate plummets to 31% if they are rescued in 10 to 30 minutes, and drops even lower after that.
CAIC investigators found that the avalanche broke on a facet-crust combination about 115 centimeters deep. The face of the avalanche crown was generally 2 to 3 feet high and up to 5 feet in some spots. Debris split around terrain features and funneled into gullies, leaving piles as deep as 20 feet deep in some places. CAIC classified the slide as 2.5 on the destructive scale, meaning it was on the high end of the class that is large enough to bury, injure or kill a person.
Steinwand was the second person in Colorado to die in an avalanche this winter. The first death occurred on Jan. 7 in the Red Mountain Pass area where a slide killed backcountry skier Donald Moden Jr., 57, of Ridgway. A third person died in a slide on Berthoud Pass on Feb. 22.
Nick Couts, a friend of Steinwand’s, said the accident is a reminder of the seriousness of backcountry travel. Steinwand was a conscientious, risk-averse athlete, he said.
The two met through a mutual friend about a year ago and connected over a mutual love of fly fishing. She was driven, Couts said, not by traditional metrics of success, but by the study of fishing. Steinwand would excitedly bushwhack to cast flies for small fish in small streams.
“Whatever she would get into, she would chew her arm off to find success,” he said.
In Jackson Hole, where Steinwand lived for a time, she founded an organization to reduce waste from single-use straws. In Crested Butte, she volunteered at the local animal shelter.
In her absence, Mielke said he finds himself subconsciously performing “Sarah-isms.”
“Anytime you're eating a piece of pie or a piece of cake, she would always cut off the tip and save it for last, and then make a wish when she would eat it,” he said. “Little stuff like that – there's just a bunch of examples of that I keep catching myself doing … and every time I realized that, it makes me smile.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
