After the Avalanche

It's easy to armchair judge to distance ourselves. A therapist explains why it's empathy we need. Plus a reposted story from survivors and the trauma they've experienced.

Mar 18, 2026

After the Tahoe avalanche, it took me a long time to read the coverage of it. As a skier, I knew it would be devastating. Of course it was—but not just for the tragedy and loss and grief. So much of the coverage was dripping in judgment for the actions that led to those skiers being killed. And little of it seemed to offer empathy for those who survived, who had to try to find and dig out any they could, then spend a horrific night in the mountains before help came. Few pieces acknowledged the trauma those survivors will have to experience.

I wrote a piece some years ago for Adventure Journal, when the mountain community was just beginning to come to terms with the emotional trauma avalanches exact after the 2017 tragedy in which we lost Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy. I’m pulling out a few highlights from that story from Jennifer Fiebig, a therapist practicing out of Durango, CO, who was one of the first therapists to counsel people for outdoor trauma, for comfort and context. Fiebig is also an outdoorswoman, with an intimate knowledge of how accidents can affect people.

And below her quotes is the full story, The Reckoning, which follows the journeys of a few skiers who were willing to share their stories after surviving avalanches, often when others didn’t, should you care to read it.

May we have empathy, at all times.

Comfort from a Counselor

Jennifer Fiebig, a therapist practicing out of Bozeman, regularly treats avalanche survivors and rescuers. She says it’s common for survivors to present symptoms associated with PTSD, along with dual diagnoses of anxiety and depression. In addition to flashbacks and recurring nightmares, Fiebig says, it’s common to dissociate and not remember the event itself.

The other common emotional response that Fiebig notes among her clients is shame.

Backcountry snowsports require mastery of an enormous amount of expertise: knowledge of snow science, weather, terrain, technical equipment, and companion rescue. Triggering an avalanche represents a gap in that knowledge or a failure in its execution—a mistake of sometimes fatal proportions. The result is a shameful experience that many survivors don’t want to reveal to their peers.

“There’s a culture of analyzing all the data after an accident that takes the humanity out of the survivors,” says Fiebig. “They’re already thinking ‘I killed my friend’ or going through other grief, and then descending into a shame spiral on top of that. We need to know what happened, but we also need to make that space for the survivor to feel cared for, to feel validated that they did the best they could do, and recognize the pain that they just went through.”

The Reckoning

A Reeling Mountain Community Begins to Face Avalanche Trauma

From Adventure Journal Volume 11

It is important to affirm, and prove, that we go to the mountains to live and not to die, that we are not fanatics but firm believers, and that the few accidents which occur are hard but not useless lessons.

– Guido Rey, Italian alpinist, 1861-1935

ONE year after an avalanche swept her over a cliff, the day she nearly died came back to haunt Melissa Hornbein.

The ghost of the memory gripped her in May 2012, just as she and her partner Aaron Gams crested a ridge on Taylor Mountain, on the western side of Teton Pass. It was a bluebird morning, and the snow was bulletproof after a hard freeze the night before, still hours away from warming into prime spring corn. They were traversing under a cornice cemented to the mountain when the panic hit Hornbein like a punch to the gut.

Unable to breathe, heart pounding, suddenly soaked in sweat, she froze. She was certain that the snow was about to slide out from beneath them, swallowing them in its violence. She knew it was irrational, that the snowpack that morning was as stable as it gets—but terror was real, made even more frightening in its disembodiment from the circumstances.

“I didn’t know if the fear was completely visceral or if it was rooted in actual danger,” she recalls. “What that avalanche took away from me was knowing how to trust myself.”

Most avalanche narratives deal with the accident itself: the science behind the snowpack and the factors, both human and natural, that led up to the mountain releasing itself, while avoiding the impact on the psyches of those involved. But the truth is that many avalanche survivors suffer from lingering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other emotional trauma. This is partly a result of a North American culture that struggles to deal with mental health issues in general, and partly a result of a unique loop of shame and survivor’s guilt.

But the narrative broadened, perhaps forever, in October 2017, when an avalanche on Montana’s Imp Peak claimed the life of 23-year-old Inge Perkins, a rising star in the backcountry skiing and climbing worlds. Her partner and well-known climber Hayden Kennedy, 27, survived the slide but couldn’t locate Perkins, who was buried with her transceiver turned off. After searching in vain for three hours, Kennedy drove home to their apartment in Bozeman, wrote a note describing where to find her, then killed himself. His father Michael, the former editor of Climbing magazine, later wrote, “Hayden survived the avalanche, but not the unbearable loss of his partner in life.”

The tragedy laid bare the magnitude of loss and trauma left in the wake of an avalanche and has spurred a reeling mountain community to begin to address the emotional aftermath experienced by those who’ve been involved in one, whether they’ve been swept up themselves, participated in a rescue, or lost a loved one to the volatility of the mountains.

Even as numbers of backcountry users increase (a snowsports industry study documents a staggering 4.1 million users who reported accessing the backcountry in 2016-17), avalanche fatalities in the U.S. have remained static over the past decade, averaging about 27 per year. The reality is that the vast majority of non-fatal avalanche accidents go unreported. A Canadian study estimates that only about 10% of non-fatal incidents are reported, which means that 90% of people who’ve been involved in avalanches are slipping by unnoticed—and so is their associated trauma.

THE last thing Hornbein recalls from Memorial Day weekend in 2011 is stopping at a grocery store on the way up Wyoming’s Togwotee Pass with Aaron. She doesn’t remember boot-packing the final pitch of the snowy chute, the skis strapped to their packs swaying with each step kicked into the steep face. She doesn’t remember the instant when the top layer of snow cracked and began to move, or being swept over cliffs. She doesn’t know how Gams got them out to the road with his ripped-apart knee.

The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital with a fractured pelvis, a fractured skull, and a dozen broken teeth, asking “Were we in an avalanche?”

But her body began remembering immediately. She would experience the sudden sensation of falling when her physical therapist did subtle movements to her head. That feeling of plummeting would continue to engulf Hornbein out of nowhere for years.

While her body slowly healed from the trauma, the gap in her memory played with her mind. “It messed with my sense of reality. I was constantly double-checking what was a real memory and what wasn’t,” she says. It also undermined her decision-making skills, particularly when she was in the backcountry—because she couldn’t remember how she and Gams made the calls that day that led to the snow cracking off the top of the couloir. Even in the safest conditions, she’d experience overwhelming panic responses and question whether to call off the mission.

The anxiety also spilled into her everyday life, especially after her daughter was born. “For the first six months or so, I worried so much about this little baby and having no control over her health and development,” Hornbein recalls. “All of these horrific things that I imagined happening to her were in reality very unlikely. I was hypervigilant, worried that if I wasn’t constantly on alert, something would happen.”

It was a classic trauma response, according to Fiebig.

“Sure, it seems like I don’t have dramatic symptoms in the aftermath,” Hornbein goes on to acknowledge. “But you never know what’s going to trigger it, until something does. And you think about the fact that this is a community that prides itself on being rugged, independent, and strong. But there are people who are walking around wounded. They’re putting up a good front, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to break tomorrow.”

The other common emotional response that Fiebig notes among her clients is shame—which is also one of the reasons why so many people fail to go public about their accidents.

AARON Gams remembers everything about that day on Togwotee Pass.

As the slide came to rest, he was only partially buried and scanned the debris for Hornbein. He spotted her immediately, only partially buried as well—but she was unconscious, with blood trickling from her ear. Their gear had been swallowed by the snow. With all three major ligaments torn in his knee and a separated shoulder, he somehow pulled Melissa out of the debris and wrestled them both the mile out to the road, where he flagged down a passing car.

Despite this heroic effort, he says, “I felt like I had massively screwed up—I was the one who was pushing for going higher. I was so worried that I had really messed up Melissa. I was feeling guilty right away.” That summer as the snow melted out, he returned to the site of the avalanche repeatedly to search for their lost gear, a dual act of healing and personal penance.

Professional skier Elyse Saugstad is deeply familiar with the shame phenomenon. She was part of the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche outside of Stevens Pass in central Washington that received national attention, mostly because it involved a group of more than a dozen highly knowledgeable people in the ski and snowboard industry. The avalanche swept up Saugstad, who pulled her airbag, and three other skiers—Jim Jack, Chris Rudolph and John Brenan—who were killed in the slide.

“I had to talk about it because I was thrust into the spotlight, but embarrassment is one of the main reasons people don’t talk about their avalanche accidents,” Saugstad says. “Especially among the pros, you don’t want people thinking you made a mistake. But even highly professional people in the industry make mistakes. You can be really well-educated, but we’re human, and to be human is to err.”

To channel her emotional trauma after the accident, Saugstad threw herself into education around avalanche airbags. She didn’t want her friends’ deaths to be in vain. But some people leveled accusations that she was using her accident to promote a product. On top of that, she felt judgment from the many people who felt compelled to scrutinize the mistakes the group made that day in Tunnel Creek.

“I understood that people would judge what happened, so I did my best to shut out the negative criticisms,” she says. “I had already lost my friends and that was bad enough. Just as long as I was honest with myself about the mistakes we made and could objectively go over what I personally did wrong alongside the group, that was enough.”

Saugstad believes that bringing avalanche trauma into the open—and taking judgment out of the equation—starts with professionals telling their own stories publicly. She’s joined in that belief by well-respected experts in the snow safety industry, including Dave Richards, director of the Avalanche Office at Utah’s Alta Ski Area.

If the avalanche community sets the standard for safety mechanisms like beacons and rescue techniques, he says, it makes sense for the same group to set the standard on dealing with the mental trauma that inevitably follows an avalanche accident. “It’s not as sexy as explosives—there’s nothing cool about it—but it saves as many lives as your beacon skills. And even if it only saves one life, then it’s all worth it.”

Richards is leading by example in beginning to tell his own story publicly. His nightmare began with pulling the broken body of a young man from the snow during a response to an avalanche in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. The hard, sad, and sometimes gruesome rescues came one after another over the next 14 years, while Richards attempted to play it tough. In 2016, visions of these tragic accidents began flooding his brain in an overload that caused him to shut down. His co-workers finally intervened and urged him to seek therapy.

“I’m willing to stand in front of the whole Wasatch community and say that this is the real deal,” Richards says. “I think the rest of the professional community is as well. You just have to be willing to say, ‘I’m a little broken.’ When things go bad, it hurts, and you just have to admit that it hurts. That’s the first step.”

This is the saving grace in facing trauma: the mountain community is already a uniquely strong one for processing it together. “We’ve chosen a lifestyle in which loss is inherent, so a support structure is organically part of the community,” said Christian Beckwith, founder of Alpinist magazine. “It’s a tribe, and its members understand the deal, and one another. There’s no shame in the trauma. It’s the price we pay for living in such close proximity to life itself.”

Beckwith is intimately familiar with how high that price can be. His own earth-shattering accident happened in 2013, when he was skiing Prospectors Mountain in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park with good friend and fellow Jackson Hole resident Jared Spackman. An avalanche broke above them as they were ascending the Apocalypse Couloir, and the slide carried Spackman 1,000 vertical feet down the narrow chute, claiming his life. Beckwith was unscathed.

“The bomb goes off, shattering all equilibrium,” he said, speaking quietly of the aftermath of such an event. “Eventually, the ringing in your ears begins to subside, the dust begins to settle. You realize you’re in the bottom of the crater, and you do your best to crawl out of the bomb hole, stagger to your feet, and begin walking in the direction you think is right.”

HORNBEIN and Gams have found their way back to the mountains in the years since Togwotee Pass. It didn’t happen overnight. They eased back into skiing, navigating the twists and turns of their emotional and physical responses—like one day on the Sphinx the following winter in Montana’s Madison Range, as the weather warmed and Hornbein struggled with whether to call off the mission.

But the irrational fear and the panic attacks gradually disappeared, edged out by that unequaled sense of elation that any snow devotee can recognize, even if they can’t always name it. For Hornbein and Gams, the backcountry is where they met, where they fell in love, a vast wild they hope to share with their daughter, and their love of it is brighter than the fear left behind by the avalanche.

“I remember skiing off Teton Pass a few years after in waist-deep snow and thinking, I love this,” Hornbein says, the passion spilling through her voice. “That accident isn’t a reason to stop going to the mountains. It’s just a reason to think.”

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