Photo courtesy Jim Krueger

Photo courtesy Bob Frauson

Top, a rescue pilot leaves the west face with two body bags; months later, a ranger stands 18 feet below the surface after days of trenching.

The Mount Cleveland team camped the first night at St. Mary. The next day, Saturday, December 27, they made their way across the Canadian border to Waterton Townsite, a humble collection of uniform white wooden buildings that served as headquarters for Waterton Lakes National Park. Here they checked in with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and hired a local named Alf Baker to ferry them back across the border by motorboat to Glacier's Goat Haunt ranger station. Eight miles away, at the other end of Waterton Lake, Mount Cleveland dominated the southern horizon. That day, the temperature would never rise above the high teens, and as the boys scanned the gray skies and the snow-dusted slopes, their enthusiasm for the trip must have been tempered by the cold. Although there were only a few inches of snow on the shore of the lake and on the lower slopes, how much had accumulated at higher altitudes was impossible to guess.

They docked at 11 a.m. Jim Anderson was the first ashore. Spinning around, he snapped a photograph of Clare Pogreba, in an orange slicker and baggy pants, pulling the aluminum boat ashore as Jerry Kanzler handed out wooden snowshoes. (Under his balaclava, Kanzler wore a full beard, but his thin mustache gave away his youth.) Protruding off the bow were three sets of metal ski poles, their baskets pointing outward like a bunch of flowers. Ray Martin knelt on the dock, arranging backpacks and long wooden skis.

These first moments of organization were hasty, the boys stamping the cold out of their feet and rubbing their hands. Once they had hauled out their gear, Alf Baker motored away, the flag on his little boat's bow snapping in the winter breeze. Perhaps because they were hiking off-season, with no rangers to check their progress, the boys did not sign the Goat Haunt registration book. They did not plan to get lost.

An hour or two later Anderson snapped another photo, this one looking back toward Waterton Lake. From this vantage point, perhaps 500 vertical feet above the lake, the boys could see that despite the relatively light snowfall thus far in the season, there was in fact considerably more snow above the tree line than below. More snow than they had planned on seeing, period.

Removing his pack while arriving at a break in the woods, Pogreba gave Martin his camera. Whether the boys were still skiing is impossible to tell from the photo. Kanzler and Pogreba were both wearing high lace-up leather boots; although they'd packed snowshoes, the snow was not deep enough, here under the trees, to merit their use. Levitan had a heavy coil of climbing rope strapped to his green pack. Kanzler carried a double load, his own orange pack strapped atop his father's old green Kelty like a koala cub clinging to the back of its parent.

Rather than following Camp Creek to the west face, the boys followed another line—along Cleveland Creek—to the north face instead. They were apparently still planning to make some first-ascent history.

By the end of the day, after a four-mile walk, they reached the bottom of the north face and set up a base camp. What they saw could not have been inviting: Snow clouds covered the mountain's summit, and loose powder avalanches were scrubbing the north face clean as quickly as the snow built up. Out of reach of any avalanches, the boys decided to build three snow caves in case the weather turned much colder. There, beneath the frigid stone of the north face, they spent the night.

The next day, Sunday, the 28th, with snow still falling up high on the mountain, they discussed their options. The north face would demand their most exquisite technical climbing skills, skills that two of the team, James Anderson and Mark Levitan, did not possess. The chill of the rock would be unforgiving, the footing slick, and the handholds, where they existed at all, unreliable. A far more tenable route would be up the base of the northwest ridge and out onto the west face. Ropes would have to be fastened not to climbing protection, but to each other in case someone slipped on the ice.

Their decisions were not casually made. With the weather threatening to turn, the boys knew they should get up and down the mountain without delay. Step by step, they checked for settling and cracking snow underfoot, to gauge the tension in the snowpack. Their cheeks picked up any shifts in the wind, determining which angles in the mountain would be covered in deeper, windblown snow. They listened as their footsteps fell for sounds of sudden settling, the ominous whoomph of a weak layer of invisible depth hoar, buried like ball bearings deep in the snowpack, giving way under their weight.

Meanwhile, Bob Frauson began checking the skies. He drove to a vantage point near Cardston, Canada, to look at Mount Cleveland. Even from a distance, he could see the unmistakable plumes of avalanches cascading "all over."