A 55-year-old Steamboat Springs man was riding a — essentially a dirt-bike converted into an agile, easy-to-ride snowmobile — becoming the second person ever to die in a snow slide while riding the next-generation vehicle in Colorado.
Routt County Undersheriff Ray Birch said the man who died — Jesse Christensen — and his companion were riding the machines, also called timber sleds, through the backcountry at the time of slide.
Sean Searle, 41, of Franktown, survived the avalanche a few miles south of Vaughn Lake on U.S. Forest Service land and called to report the slide. Officials recovered Christensen’s body at about 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Robert Glassmire, the Garfield County coroner, says Christensen’s death is being investigated as an accident. An autopsy is scheduled for this week.
Christensen was a talented artist and musician, a devout Mormon and a genuine cowboy who deeply loved his family. The newspaper says he would play his guitar at Steamboat Springs restaurants and bars — often with his son, one of six children.
The death is the first from an avalanche this year in Colorado.
Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, visited the site of the slide Wednesday. He said the avalanche broke off on a layer of crystals that formed on Jan. 19 and was buried under new snow, creating very unstable conditions.
“This particular layer has been very active in the Steamboat area, with a bunch of human-triggered avalanches,” Greene told The Denver Post. “That was the culprit here. It was a very wide avalanche, but it only ran a couple of hundred feet. It was about 2 feet deep.”
Greene said Searle and Christensen were wearing avalanche airbags — devices that can be deployed to keep people swept up in snow slides above the surface.
Christensen was fully buried; Searle was only partially submerged in the snow, according to Greene.
Avalanche reported near Sheriff's Reservoir press release
— RIO BLANCO SHERIFF (@RBSODISPATCH)
The avalanche was reported to authorities about 12:15 p.m. Tuesday. First responders found the dead man and Searle, who was tired but uninjured, Rio Blanco County Undersheriff Brice Glasscock said.
Routt and Medicine Bow National Forests spokesman Aaron Voos said Wednesday that the men were in the Flat Tops Wilderness, where mechanized travel is prohibited. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center reports the slide happened at an elevation of about 10,500 feet.
The CAIC reported Tuesday that avalanche danger in the Flat Tops and Steamboat areas was moderate.
In the 2015-16 season, avalanches killed five people in Colorado, according to the CAIC. That number includes the February 2016 death of Ron Brabander, 58, of Woodland Park. Brabander was riding his snowbike alone near Lost Lake on Cottonwood Pass in Chaffee County when he was buried and killed in an avalanche.
Brabander’s death in Colorado and the second-ever in the country.
“It is a new challenge that we are going to have to spend some time on addressing,” Greene said. “Why people are being attracted to different places because of this new mode of transport?”
Snowbikes — off-road motorcycles that are easily converted into snowmachines with a narrow snowmobile-like track replacing the rear wheel and a ski up front — have been growing in popularity. They at the Winter X-Games in Aspen.
In the 2014-15 winter season, snow slides killed three people in Colorado.
The CAIC encourages backcountry visitors to stay up to date on avalanche conditions and to always carry appropriate safety gear — from beacons and shovels to probes and airbags.
“It’s been a really interesting and tricky winter in a lot of ways,” Greene said. “A little bit of training goes a long ways.”
