** Search for Avalanched Snowmobiler, Bountiful Peak, Davis Co., Utah ** Date sent: 30 Dec 1996 09:02:43 -0700 From: "Tom Moyer" Subject: FWD>>Utah Avalanche Search To: "Martin Colewell" Date: 12/20/96 2:58 PM From: Tom Moyer 12/7 ~12:00 Avalanche Victim, Bountiful Peak - Davis County I got the page for this call while hiking up Beartrap Fork in Big Cottonwood Canyon getting ready for the first run on a beautiful day. I battled with my conscience for a bit before reluctantly peeling off the skins and heading down. On the way down, I ran into Bruce Tremper from the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center, who also happened to be skiing Beartrap Fork, and we headed out for the hour-long drive to Davis County. Four snowmobilers had been high-marking the East face of Bountiful Peak, known locally as "Tree Bowl." When the slide broke, one snowmobiler was finishing a high-mark run, two were standing by their machines at the base of the slope, and the victim, Rick Adams, was somewhere on his own high-mark run. The rider finishing his run saw the wall of snow and yelled a warning to the others as he gunned his machine past them. He managed to outrun the oncoming slide. The two who were next to their machines were both caught and partially buried. They managed to extricate each other, but they found no sign of Rick Adams, and no one had seen him as the slide started. We flew to the site by helicopter and began a hasty-search. Tree bowl is a two-gullied system with a low rise and trees in the center. The South gully curves around and joins the straighter-running North gully just above the toe of the debris. I later paced the slide off at about 200 feet wide and 1000 feet long. The slide broke as a two-foot slab on a 40 degree slope. The hasty search was centered around dogs from Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs and probing around all the trees in the path. We dug at dog alerts and coarse-probed part of the North gully before calling it quits for darkness. Bruce Tremper's more detailed account of the slide can be found at http://www.avalanche.org/accidnt96.htm#December 7 12/8 7:45 Avalanche Victim, Bountiful Peak, Part II On Sunday we brought in all the resources. We had about ten dogs, from Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs, Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, and Alta ski resort. We had about 60 people on the mountain from Salt Lake and Davis County Search and Rescue teams, the US Forest Service, Davis County Jeep Posse, and friends and family members. Most of the rescue team members were flown to the site by Salt Lake Sheriff's helicopters or by Lifeflight. Avalanche control work was done early Sunday morning by the US Forest Service and Classic Helicopters. This has now become by far the most expensive operation I have ever been involved in. I would guess that by the end of the day Sunday, over 20 hours of helicopter time had been logged. We continued investigating dog alerts. We fine-probed all of the North gully, and much of the treed island in the center and the South gully. We also went over much of the slide path with metal detectors supplied by the local utility company. Numerous pits were dug at dog alert sites and suspected probe hits. We found nothing at any of those locations. We had no significant metal detector hits other than an occasional shallowly buried marker wand. The deposition in the North gully had been increased significantly by the avalanche control work. In many places it was deeper than 15 foot probe poles. By the end of the day it was felt by many rescue team members that the victim was most likely to be buried deeply in the North gully or to be under his machine and shielded by it from our probing. 12/19 8:00 Avalanche Victim, Bountiful Peak, Part III Several factors combined to officially reopen the search for the missing snowmobiler. One was unrelenting pressure on the Sheriff's office from the victim's family and friends. Each day since the search was cancelled, about 15 friends had been at the site probing and digging. A second factor was the willingness of the geology department at the University of Utah to come help out at the site with a magnetometer. We drove a snowmobile up Guardsman's pass in Big Cottonwood Canyon a few days ago and took magnetometer readings around it to determine if it would cause a big enough anomaly to be detected. We found that we could distinguish the signal from the surrounding magnetic noise from a distance of about fifteen feet. Yesterday, we met again in a smaller group to return to the site. We learned just before starting that the victim's friends had found a significant clue a few days earlier. On one of the upper trees in the slide path, in the center of the treed "island", they had found snowmobile tread marks in the bark. We looked at the tree and confirmed that the bite marks matched the spacing on the tread of the snowmobiles that all of the victims were riding. We readjusted our search strategy accordingly. Instead of concentrating first on the deeper North Gully, we paced out a 50 foot wide swath, centered on the tree and following the fall line down to the toe of the debris. We started one magnetometer search working down from the tree and a second one up from the toe. Both walked the width of our 50 foot path back and forth with a six foot spacing between passes. Within an hour, the lower search group hit a huge magnetic spike and dug down five feet to find the snowmobile. It was 100 feet up from the toe of the slide caught in trees. We continued the magnetometer searches to try to locate the smaller signal from the body and began a fine-probe line working uphill from the machine. The body was found by the probe line thirty feet uphill from the machine, under four feet of snow, lying horizontally with the head pointing upslope. -------------------------------------------------------------