One Certain Thing

Thinking about the unthinkable

Dr. Terry O’Connor and friend

On the morning of May 10, 2024, a friend of mine, Dr. Terry O’Connor, was killed by an avalanche while backcountry skiing on Donaldson Peak of the Lost River Range in Idaho.

Those are words I have avoided writing for two months now. For writers, there is something about the writing down of things that adds a certain finality to the thought or event. It’s as if the writing of them makes them real and true. And this truth pains me.

At Terry’s memorial, Drew Hardesty, a forecaster for the Utah Avalanche Center and a long-time friend of Terry’s, said that there are two questions one tries to answer in the aftermath of an avalanche accident. The first—“What happened?”—is usually easy to answer, he said.

In this case, according to the Sawtooth Avalanche Center accident report, Terry and his ski partner—both very experienced backcountry skiers—summited Donaldson Peak the morning of the 10th. To get to a skiable line, Terry was downclimbing with crampons and ice axe when he triggered a slab avalanche on the east side of the ridge and was carried downhill out of sight. His partner immediately initiated an SOS via an inReach device, then transitioned from crampons to skis and began a beacon search. When she found Terry, he was buried 5 feet deep. After extricating him, Terry’s partner performed CPR for over three hours until a rescue helicopter arrived. But Terry was gone by then. I’m not sure anyone could have saved him; he was just too far afield. That’s no comfort for anyone but perhaps the reality we are left with.

The second question, Hardesty continued, the really hard one, is not what happened, but rather, “How could this have happened?”

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Terry was 48 when he died, but if you read his obituary, you would think he was 98. Terry was a ski patroller, climbing ranger on Mt. Rainier; E.R. physician; professor of wilderness medicine; ultra-runner; climbed Everest; directed the EMS system for Blaine, Camas, and Custer counties in Idaho; led the county’s COVID response; wrote academic papers for peer-reviewed medical journals; donated time treating people in Tibet and India; studied, brought attention to and attended global conferences on the effects of climate change on global public health … the list goes on.

I don’t know what Terry thought about death. I imagine that being a doctor, he faced it more often than most people, even having lived only 48 years. Most of us barely give a glancing thought to death through the early part of our lives. At least in Judeo-Christian cultures, death is one of those life events that isn’t talked about much until, of course, it happens and takes everyone by surprise. The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone, as death may be the only true certainty in life. We just don’t know exactly when our dance card will fill up.

I can say with some personal authority, however, that, as the years go by, thoughts about death—one’s own and others’—trickle into the mind’s eye. It’s not really a welcome happening but perhaps inevitable. People around you begin to get sick, sporadically at first, then more often as life marches on. Some die, some just fade from sight.

The other day, I realized with some alarm that I am now older than my dad was when he died. Clearly, we lived different lives—he smoked for much of his, I didn’t—but as someone who spent a good chunk of time as a scientist, it is hard to dismiss genetics altogether. Alternatively, one can look at what is on the surface an unsettling realization and see it as a good thing. After all, every day from here on out could be considered a bonus. There is certainly no guarantee that any one of us will get the average life expectancy—73.2 years for men and 79.1 years for women in the U.S.—handed to us like a ham at a Christmas party. And keep in mind, averages can be cruel; for every person that makes it to 94, like my grandmother, there are going to be others who die at 48 or younger. Not happy math, I know, but math, nonetheless.

Buddhists, on the other hand—and I suspect Terry had some leanings this way—“expect” death rather than life, accept it as a stop along the way of a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. The only thing that endures is our consciousness, or spirit, if you will. While I can’t know or say that I’m a Buddhist, for reasons I won’t bore anyone with here, I’ve always had this lingering suspicion my dad’s spirit found its way into a bald eagle’s form. Sounds kooky, I know, but it’s one of those inklings that brings comfort every time I see an eagle swooping through my life, which seems curiously often.

Terry was, at heart, a man of the mountains, someone who was always at peace in the wilderness. But he was also a caregiver and went to great lengths to teach many first responders how to care for those who happened to get hurt in the wild places he loved. In particular, he taught me how to teach other ski patrollers ways to navigate a myriad of medical and trauma events in the mountains. He was a patient and thoughtful teacher who freely offered his wisdom on the many not so black and white medical situations that arise on a mountain, those that happen far from clean, well-equipped hospital rooms and staff.

A particularly cruel irony of Terry’s manner of death is that over the last few years he was the driving force for a small number of us in the Wood River Valley—ski patrollers, firefighters, heli-guides, and climbing guides—in building an avalanche rescue team. He motivated us, taught us, helped us get helicopter time, used his contacts to bring expertise to our efforts, critiqued our trainings. He was, in short, our inspiration to keep training, to keep getting better.

As it turned out, due to the particulars of the situation, our group wasn’t part of his rescue. The hard truth is that rescuing someone from an avalanche is incredibly difficult. It requires a wide range of skills, coordination, physical stamina, and, most importantly, speed. The window for survival is usually minutes not hours.

And perhaps one of the bigger obstacles is psychological. Faced with such long odds, giving up—retreating from the absolute chaos of disaster—can be seductive. Terry taught us to resist that seduction and, rather, to embrace the difficulty without second guessing yourself.

To that point, years ago, he talked to me about his medical training, in particular, his residency during which he worked 80– to 90-hour weeks. “You get used to continually having to perform in the most adverse of conditions, and you take pride in that,” he said. “It’s the same philosophy of why you want to do an ultra-endurance race. You do it to push yourself to a limit, to maximize what you’re capable of doing.”

Terry O’Connor was smart and caring and full of adventure. I will miss him dearly. But that notwithstanding, I suspect I have more to learn from him. Sometimes those who leave us early work their way back into our lives when we most need them.