Swept Away

Truth is, Shifferly and Karinen say, they'd knowingly taken lots of what they thought were worse chances before and survived. That's part of what makes it so difficult to accept what happened that February day. "There's so many times in the backcountry that I think we should have been killed by an avalanche," says Karinen. "And to be killed by such a small slope--600 vertical feet of like a 35-degree pitch--and we're at tree line. It's insane."

Two days after the accident, Shifferly went back up to Cumberland Pass with a friend. "I needed to go up there. That day after it, so many people talked to me about it, it was unreal," he says. "Everybody wanted to know everything. When you talk about things like that for a while, you sort of lose track of what you're thinking about. I just wanted to go up there and see it again, you know, and make sure I had everything straight in my mind."

The two friends placed a wreath of evergreen branches near the slope. And Shifferly took photos. He keeps them in a small, black leather photo album. A circular cutout in the cover reveals the first photo in the album. That's where Shifferly put the picture of the wreath so that it's first thing he sees.