What are you worth?
By Dick DorworthA Dozen More Turns: An Avalanche on Mt. Nemesis
A film on DVD by Amber Seyler
On the first day of 2005, five experienced, competent and intelligent backcountry skiers were caught by an avalanche in the Centennial Mountains of Montana. One of them, Blake Morstad, was killed. Another, Sam Kavanaugh, came within minutes of losing his life and was lucky to have only lost his left leg below the knee.
Morstad had earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He had studied avalanche dynamics extensively with the Snow Studies Department at Montana State University in Bozeman. Just over a month after his death, his wife gave birth to their first child, a son, Blake Samuel.
Morstad’s death and Kavanaugh’s near death and subsequent crippling injury were the result of giving into the temptation every backcountry skier knows and, in most cases, has succumbed to: the desire for a dozen more turns in terrain and conditions that, in avalanche terms, were questionable at best and, in this case, at worst. It is an enticement that every skier and boarder has encountered. Some give in. Others do not. Some escape unscathed. Others are injured or die. All know the same lure of the next great turn.
After the avalanche, the survivors made a series of decisions that clearly almost killed Kavanaugh (he spent three days nearly bleeding to death in the hut) and perhaps cost him any chance of saving his leg. These decisions and actions (and inactions) are easy for those who were not involved — who have the inestimable benefit of hindsight, a warm, clean, well-lighted place to sit and drink tea and write upon computers, and not facing the rigors of hauling a seriously injured friend eight miles through snow-covered mountains to the nearest road and access to medical care — to criticize.
But for most backcountry skiers I know, such criticisms would be akin to throwing rocks in glass houses. Still, examining those decisions and the events and people that led to them is an exercise in education. As always, there are lessons to be learned from the mistakes of others, and Director Amber Seyler’s A Dozen More Turns is a well-told story that may very well save lives and injuries and immense grief among an impossible to determine percentage of people who see it.
This is a video EVERY backcountry skier and boarder would do well to see.
Seyler, a graduate student at Montana State University Science and Natural History Filmmaking Program, had never made a film before. She told Montana State News that she set out to make “ … a very sciency film about snow and avalanches.” She teamed up with Doug Chabot, director of the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center, and began photographing him digging snow study pits, teaching classes and other scientific perspectives of grappling with avalanches. She planned on filming a few vignettes and interviews with avalanche survivors.
Then she interviewed Kavanaugh.
Seyler intended to parse Kavanaugh’s interview to a two-or-three-minute segment of her “sciency” film. But Kavanaugh is a man not afraid to express his emotions, and it would be a cold viewer who would be able not to care about those emotions as he expresses them in the film. As Seyler told the News, “Almost immediately, it became apparent that the story Sam had to tell was too big, too powerful, to be relegated to a small part.”
And right about then, some of Kavanaugh’s friends re-visiting the scene in the late spring were walking across the debris from the avalanche when they found a video camera with footage taken the day of the avalanche as well as the night before in the hut at their New Year’s Eve party. Using footage from the video mixed in with interviews with Kavanaugh, Chabot and others, Seyler created a 30-minute adventure/cautionary/educational tale that will, alternately, break your heart and make you think about your own decisions the next time you’re in the backcountry contemplating a few more turns of your own.
“People who recreate in the backcountry need to watch this film,” Chabot told the News. “All of us that watch this movie will see ourselves in it. We’ve all made similar mistakes — the difference is we got away with it.”
The only hero in this film is a helicopter pilot who isn’t even in the film, but everyone else is just like most backcountry skiers we all know, just like you and me. Kavanaugh, a civil engineer, has returned to backcountry skiing on a prosthetic leg of his own design and has become an accomplished paralympic bicyclist.
A Dozen More Turns is available through Friends of the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center, Box 6799, Bozeman MT 59771 or through the Avalanche Center at www.mtavalanche.com
