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After four hours, Canadian Warden Peter Fuhrmann had climbed partway up the chute of Mount Cleveland's north face without finding tracks. Over on the northwest ridge, the other Canadians did see a few tracks and what appeared to be human urine marks. Meanwhile, on the west face, the day grew late for Kanzler, Lev, and Callis. Working their way up the bowl
from the northwest ridge, they searched into the early evening, climbing up past a scree field and then up a ramp to the left of a ledge that in summer supported a waterfall. Physically and emotionally wrung out, they peered into the diminishing light, looking for the tiniest protrusion from the snow cover, for anything that might turn out to be the tip of
an ice ax, the end of a climbing rope, a piece of discarded clothing. Initially there was little snow—just a few inches of light powder under their feet. But then they encountered something that left them with a sense of horror: a series of "crown faces," or fracture lines, two to three feet deep, that extended all the way across the bowl. A massive
slab avalanche had broken off above them, causing the entire bowl to release. Kanzler, Callis, and Lev could now see why there had been so little snow on the way up. Everything in the bowl—nearly a half-mile across—had slid down the mountain.
After radioing down to Goat Haunt, the three dug a snow cave and spent a long night on the mountain. In the morning they began to search the avalanche path. Finally, frustrated by hours of fruitless combing, Callis was walking down the west face when suddenly, in the surface debris of the avalanche, he saw a small backpack. In that moment, the entire
search changed. The main party had been concentrating on the wrong side of the mountain. At least some of the boys had been here, on the west face.
The Callis team reconstructed what could have happened. Although it was possible that the boys had triggered the slide on their way down—perhaps by glissading down the slope—the avalanche had probably released on their way up. Most likely they had crunched through to a layer of depth hoar and sent a fracture line running uphill. Eventually it
would have reached a weak spot in the terrain—a dip in the face, a rock outcropping—and broken off completely. All this would have happened in an instant, without their ever seeing it.
Years later, an accomplished technical climber named Terry Kennedy, with whom Jim Kanzler had made a number of first ascents, would offer an analysis of what might have happened to the boys on the west face. "They follow a gully onto the ridge," wrote Kennedy, "ascend it a ways, then begin a long but easy traverse to the middle of the west face under
several thousand feet of cliffs. The logical thing is to keep traversing to the center of the face and do the standard route. They go. The snow becomes deeper.
"They look up and what do they see? Answer: dry cliffs. At some point the series of short cliffs disappears and they find themselves on even easier terrain that only warrants plodding through it. Maybe they recognize soft slab and maybe they don't.... The day is probably waning quickly just a week after the solstice and they are going to have to keep the
pace stiff to get up and down by nightfall. Up they go, breathing hard, their attention on the summit, not the plates of snow fracturing underfoot."
If the boys on the west face had somehow heard the avalanche bearing down, they might have tried to leap on top of it before it bowled them over. Or perhaps they tried to run out of its track but found the flow moving too quickly. Once they were knocked down, they likely tried to grab their ice axes and self-arrest. Perhaps they tried swimming out of the
slide, furiously waving and kicking to thrust themselves out of the surging snow. Or barrel-rolled sideways, in an effort to move faster than the snow and get out of its teeth. Nothing they did, it now appeared, had allowed them to escape.
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