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Guardians of the slopes
Ski patrol assumes some policing duties but safety is still its prime directive
By GREG JOHNSTON 
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Ski Patrol members hold the glamour job of the slopes and adopt a lighthearted, joking persona while working. It probably helps balance the reality of the job: mostly hard work, occasional hilarity and sometimes heartache.
Like hauling out kids with broken wrists and extricating skiers wrapped around trees with bones sticking out of their legs.
Or finding lost people frozen stiff, or digging out young snowboarders buried by avalanches, blue in the face from lack of oxygen.
Or treating a skier who broke his arm when distracted by a woman skiing out of the woods ... pants-down.
"We see it all up here sooner or later," says Jack Soukup, a 10-year veteran of the Stevens Pass Ski Patrol. "It is actually work. It's not just skiing all the time. People do get hurt."
Most Ski Patrol members are bona fide mountain people, and the primary reward is life on the slopes, since the job is not financially rewarding. They get a season pass but are lucky to make $10 an hour after 10 years on the job.
Their main mission is safety: ensuring that skiers and snowboarders play safe, taking away lift tickets from the unruly, and rescuing the unfortunate. But they also forecast avalanche conditions and control slides by triggering unstable snow with explosives.
To clear the way for the grooming machines that crawl the slopes in the wee hours, they set area boundary fences and markers each morning and lift them each night. They "sweep" the slopes at closing to make sure all skiers are off the mountain.
Ski patrollers are the people on the slopes you never want to meet, but whom you're sure glad to see when you need them.
Take, for example, 19-year-old Lisa Watts, a snowboarder from Seattle who was near death when the Mount Baker Ski Patrol found her buried beneath an avalanche one day last December. Longtime Baker employees say her rescue illustrates an almost intuitive sense Ski Patrol members develop after years on a mountain.
Most credit 20-year patroller Jack Bengen of Bellingham for saving her.
After hiking into the Baker backcountry and riding fresh, deep powder late one day, Watts became separated from the friend she was with and found herself atop a 30- to 50-foot slide chute she knew was beyond her ability. While trying to hike out, the snow collapsed under her and down the chute she went.
"All of a sudden I was free-falling," she recalls. "All the snow I had pushed out of the chute was all around."
She landed in soft deep snow, immobilized and buried except for one finger. There she lay in a dreamlike state for more than an hour.
Fortunately Bengen was on duty and found signs of a slide at the top of the chute. He skied down to where he could approach the bottom of the chute on foot.
"At that point, it was slogging through chest-deep snow," he says. "First I found a snowboard and kept clawing my way up. It was very steep and very deep. I found a pair of goggles next, about 100 feet up the hill. I started thinking I was going to find a body. It had been about an hour and half since she was last seen. I found a hat 50 feet above that."
Another 50 feet up, he saw the tip of a glove. The slope was so steep he could not quite get to it, however, so he began digging sideways into the slope and uncovered a leg.
"At that point, I saw a finger very slowly move in the glove. It was very dramatic."
Bengen finally uncovered Watts.
"There was what we call an ice mask over her whole face and she was cyanotic, blue. I dug her face out and within seconds she was breathing."
By this time more than a dozen other ski patrollers, ski area employees and Watt's friend were at the scene assisting. No one is sure how she survived more than an hour under the snow, but she may have had a small air pocket.
She is now eternally grateful to Bengen -- "I owe a lot to him" -- and says the patrol operated with the utmost professionalism.
"I just almost don't know what to say to them; it is so amazing what they accomplished," she says. "The whole time, when they pulled me out, they were moving at such a fast pace -- orders everywhere, boom, boom, boom. 'We've got to wake her up, we've got to get her out of here.' They were on it and they knew what they were doing."
The stories don't always end so happily. Ask Soukup about his most nightmarish situation and he replies, "You mean, besides the people who died?"
Bengen also tells sad stories of finding frozen people. Fortunately, fatalities are the exception. Most injuries are minor, though complicated by the situation.
"We had one guy with a broke tib-fib (lower leg bones)," Soukup says. "He had about five inches of bone hanging out, and it was on a real steep slope and kind of in a tree. The tree was the instrument of injury. That was probably the gnarliest."
Ski Patrol members say the most peculiar incidences occur after dark, such as the night at Stevens Pass when patrollers treated a man with a broken arm and a woman shivering cold and wet.
"The man said he saw this woman ski out of the trees with her pants down," says longtime night patrol supervisor Joanne Stanford. "He said he slipped and broke his arm. She was the one who was all wet."
Apparently the woman had skied into a patch of trees to accommodate an urgent need. Part way through the process, however, she lost her balance and slid out of the woods.
Another night Stanford was doing a sweep just before closing.
"We came down and this man and woman were having sex -- right in the middle of the run," Stanford recalls. "I skied up and sprayed them (with snow) and said 'Hey, you might want to get a motel.' I guess they just couldn't wait."
Most of the job is decidedly more mundane. On busy days, ski patrollers spend a lot of time sitting at their "bump stations" -- huts at the tops of key runs -- where they wait to respond to incidents. When a patroller is radioed to action, another comes up to "bump" her/him and take over the station.
"On busy days we spend a lot of time being snow cops," Soukup says. "Nobody likes that. But in 10 years here, I've only pulled two (lift) tickets."
Patrol members point to statistics showing that skiing and snow-boarding are much safer than, say, driving or riding bicycles, and they blame most accidents on people doing dumb things. Like racing through slow zones and beginner runs, or jumping off lifts when the chair passes a low point, which can derail the chair.
An increasingly common rescue is from the cliffs around skis areas, the result of the growing numbers of people heading into the backcountry in search of powder.
"It's like people come up here and say 'What should I do with my brain,' " Soukup says. "So they leave them in their underwear drawer."
The most important single tip Soukup can give, he says, is that skiers and snowboarders should be more aware. Look uphill often, particularly where runs converge. Slow down in crowded areas. And don't ski runs beyond your ability.
Watts, a person who has been there, advises powder-seekers to avoid out-of-bounds areas late in the day, always ride with someone else, stick together and never venture into unfamiliar territory.
"Pick out a line (before you descend) and if you do get into trouble, don't panic and make a rash decision," she says. "Just sit down and wait. They'll find you."
Ski Patrol members, accustomed to 12-hour days in ski boots and working in all manner of weather -- rain, frozen rain, whiteouts -- won't mind a bit if you make their job a little less dramatic.
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