Alaska Heli Skiing: Safety Lessons from Chugach Tragedy Seven Months Later

Alaska Heli Skiing: Safety Lessons from Chugach Tragedy

The Chugach does not negotiate. For seven months it held three men in the deep snowpack of the Twentymile drainage’s west fork, held them in the kind of silence that exists only in places where helicopters become temporary intrusions and human decisions echo against geology. Then, on October 10th, volunteers spotted something in a logjam.

This is how it ends sometimes. Not with closure, exactly, but with proof that the waiting is over.

The body was identified as David Linder, 39, who lived in Florida. He was one of three childhood friends from Minnesota who traveled to Alaska last March for what the industry markets as the experience of a lifetime: heli-skiing in the Chugach. Linder, Charles Eppard, 39, who lived in Montana, and Jeremy Leif, 38, who lived in Minnesota, had all grown up together in Mankato. We covered the tragedy in March when rescue still seemed possible and the full weight of the debris field was still being measured. What has happened since matters more than you’d think.

The Arithmetic of Burial

When the slide released on March 4th around 3:30 p.m., a guide watching from above got on the radio immediately. Deploy your airbags, he said. The three men did. He watched them disappear anyway, swept into terrain that erased them as thoroughly as water erases stones. The subsequent beacon search returned three signals, spaced between 42 and 100 feet deep. Those numbers are worth understanding.

At two meters of burial, survival rates begin their sharp decline. Not because beacons fail or shovels break, but because time becomes the enemy and time always wins. Rescuers can move perhaps half a cubic meter of avalanche debris per minute if they’re fast, if the snow isn’t too consolidated, if they don’t hit ice lenses or rock. Forty feet down, you’re not digging to a person. You’re digging to evidence.

The guides knew this. When rescue crews and volanteers arrived to coordinate the response, working with avalanche experts and technical rescue specialists from the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group, everyone involved understood they were looking at a recovery operation. The terrain made even that impossible. A steep ravine. Unstable snow above. The kind of conditions that create the phrase “secondary avalanche risk” in incident reports.

In April, a presumptive death hearing in Anchorage formalized what the mountain had already decided. The three men were declared dead. Then came summer. Then came waiting. Then came a logjam and volunteers with sharp eyes and the quiet, unspectacular work of bringing someone home.

The Industry That Builds Itself

Alaska heli-skiing exists in a regulatory space that is, to be generous, complex. The helicopter part is heavily regulated. FAA Part 135 certification requirements are stringent: maintenance schedules, pilot qualifications, aircraft inspections, operational specifications. The skiing part operates under a different framework entirely. Permits from the Forest Service grant access to terrain. State business licenses confirm legal operation. But the actual safety protocols, guide qualifications, and operational decision-making systems exist largely within the industry itself.

This is not inherently reckless. The Heli-Ski U.S. Association (HSUS has maintained Safety and Operating Guidelines since 2003. Those guidelines are substantive. Professional Level 2 Avalanche Forecaster certification for all guides. Daily weather and snowpack forecasting by trained professionals. Required Safety Officers at each operation. Emergency Response Plans. Equipment standards. The documents run to dozens of pages and represent genuine attempts to systematize risk management in an environment where the variables change by the hour.

But here’s the thing about industry self-regulation: it works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, the only enforcement mechanism is liability insurance and the next renewal period. HSUS conducts performance reviews of its member operators. Firms that don’t score well get placed on corrective action plans. But HSUS membership is voluntary. Compliance is internal. When something goes wrong 9 miles northeast of Girdwood in terrain accessible only by helicopter, there’s no regulatory agency arriving to conduct an investigation. Alaska State Troopers coordinate the recovery response with volunteer technical rescue teams. Insurance companies handle claims. Families handle grief. And the industry handles the question of what, if anything, should change.

What Has Changed (And What Hasn’t)

In the months since March, the answer appears to be: some things, quietly, around the edges.

Some operators have enhanced their safety briefings. Some have added training days for guides. Some have invested in additional monitoring equipment: snowpack sensors, weather stations, remote cameras. These are not trivial improvements. In an activity where the difference between a good day and a catastrophic one can hinge on recognizing a persistent weak layer (a stratum of snow crystals that fails to bond properly with surrounding layers) or correctly reading wind loading patterns (snow deposited by wind, creating slabs that rest precariously on weaker layers beneath), better information saves lives.

But talk to people in the industry (off the record, because on the record everyone wants to emphasize how seriously they take safety), and what emerges is a more complicated picture. There’s been no unified response. No industry-wide reassessment. No external audit requirement. The Chugach avalanche was among the deadliest skiing incidents in recent U.S. history. It warranted presumptive death hearings and months of attempted recovery operations. And the industry’s response has been, largely, to continue doing what it was doing before, perhaps a little more carefully.

This might be fine if what the industry was doing before was sufficient. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The Gap Between Experience and Systems

Heli-ski guides are, almost universally, exceptionally skilled. Many have been skiing Alaska’s mountains for decades. They understand snow metamorphism (the process by which snow crystals transform over time, affecting stability) and slope angles and aspect-dependent loading patterns (how different slope orientations receive and hold snow differently) in ways that would take paragraphs to explain and a lifetime to internalize. They carry rescue equipment. They practice scenarios. They make conservative calls far more often than they make aggressive ones. And still, people die.

The problem is not expertise. The problem is that human judgment, however experienced, operates differently than systematic decision-making protocols. A pilot, no matter how many hours they’ve logged, goes through pre-flight inspections item by item. These professions learned, through accidents that became case studies, that intuition needs scaffolding. That the most dangerous phrase in high-stakes decision-making is “we’ve always done it this way.”

Heli-skiing has not fully internalized this lesson. Critical go/no-go decisions still rest primarily on guide judgment, informed by snow science but not constrained by hard thresholds. There are few industry-standard decision trees. Few bright-line rules about when terrain is off-limits regardless of how much the clients paid or how good the snow looks. The technology exists: drone overflights could map terrain in real-time, avalanche forecasting models continue improving, standardized terrain assessment protocols could be mandated. The infrastructure exists: HSUS has the framework to require more rigorous practices. What’s missing is the will to admit that expertise alone isn’t enough.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which maintains the national database, an average of 27 people die in avalanches each year in the United States. Most are recreationists. Some are professionals. The 2024-2025 season numbers aren’t final yet, but the Chugach incident alone accounted for three deaths, and two bodies remain somewhere in that drainage, held until the mountain decides otherwise.

These numbers represent what statisticians call a low-frequency, high-consequence event. Most heli-ski trips end with tired legs and good stories. The overwhelming majority of guides make correct decisions under pressure. But when the system fails, it fails catastrophically, and the current approach to safety treats this as an acceptable risk rather than a solvable problem.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Aviation reduced its accident rate not by hiring better pilots but by building better systems around pilots. They recognized that humans, even highly trained ones, are predictably fallible in predictable ways. Heli-skiing could learn from this.

What Resolve Actually Looks Like

Independent safety audits, conducted by outside organizations with no financial stake in operations continuing. Public incident reporting that goes beyond “three people died in an avalanche” to examine decision-making chains, forecasting accuracy, and systemic factors. Client education that treats avalanche risk as quantifiable rather than mystical, that explains terms like “faceting” (the process where temperature gradients cause snow crystals to transform into weak, sugary layers) and “shear propagation” (how a fracture can travel through a weak layer) so people understand what they’re signing up for.

Mandatory terrain closures based on objective criteria. Not “considerable” avalanche danger (a term that encompasses a wide range of conditions), but specific thresholds: a persistent weak layer at a certain depth showing certain test results means certain slopes are off-limits until the snowpack evolves. This removes the pressure on individual guides to make the call that might disappoint clients who paid thousands of dollars and traveled across the country.

Technology integration. If drone mapping is too expensive for small operators, create an industry fund. If real-time snowpack monitoring sensors are cost-prohibitive, pool resources. The industry collectively generates enough revenue to invest in tools that make better information available to the people making life-and-death decisions.

These ideas are not new. Some operators already do some of these things some of the time. What’s missing is standardization, accountability, and the acknowledgment that voluntary guidelines for an industry where failure kills people might not be sufficient.

The River and the Waiting

The Alaska Mountain Rescue Group and the Girdwood Volunteer Fire Department continue planning search operations for the two remaining victims. Weather permitting. Conditions allowing. They’ll fly over the slide area, looking for what the summer melt might have exposed. If they find something that requires ground assessment, they’ll coordinate with the State Troopers to deploy teams.

This is the aftermath. The part that doesn’t make marketing brochures. The part where volunteers spend their weekends searching drainages and families wait for phone calls and one body, now recovered and identified, makes its way home while two friends remain somewhere in the Chugach, waiting.

The snow is falling again across the range. Heli-ski season is beginning. Guides are attending refresher courses. Operators are checking equipment. Clients are booking trips and imagining perfect powder days on mountains that promise the skiing of a lifetime.

And they will deliver that, most of the time. The odds are actually quite good. The mountains are magnificent. The guides are skilled. The helicopters are safe. The overwhelming majority of people who spend a day heli-skiing in Alaska will have the experience they paid for and go home with stories and photos and the peculiar satisfaction that comes from skiing terrain that would otherwise remain theoretical.

We owe them more than recovery. We owe them the resolve to build systems that don’t rely on the mountain being generous. Because it won’t be. And treating that as acceptable risk instead of preventable tragedy is a choice the industry makes every season when the snow begins to fall.

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