February 10, 2023 started out like any normal day. Blue sky and temperatures that were supposed to be in the high 30’s.

I loaded up our 2 dogs and decided to do a little back country skiing. I grabbed my day pack, tested my ACR beacon, let my wife know exactly where I was going and off we went.

I was heading back to my truck but decided to do one more run. I had done this run earlier in the day without any problems. This time I came out of my previous tracks and crashed.

Unknown to me there was a tree stump under the snow where I landed. I suffered blunt force trauma to my upper right femur. I would later find out that it was broken.

This happened at 1:30pm. I deployed my beacon at 1:40pm. Emergency responders showed up around 3:30pm. At that point I had been laying in the snow for about 2 hours.

When they got to me I was shivering uncontrollably. I was going into severe hypothermia. They assessed my injury and immediately started warming me up.

They were able to get me on a sled and manually pull me off the mountain. I was loaded into the ambulance around 4:30pm and transported to the nearest hospital for assessment.

I was then transported to a larger hospital and under went surgery the following morning on February 11th.

I would not be here today if I wouldn’t have had my beacon. It saved my life.