For Joe

Snowmass Mountain opens for skiing and snowboarding season this Saturday.  I was checking out my gear (making sure my ski pants still fit) in anticipation of a great season when my son Nick called me.

“I just got some terrible news,” he told me.

My heart stopped.

“My buddy, Joe was killed in an avalanche in Loveland Pass this April.  I didn’t know.  No one told me.”

“Oh, Nick, I’m so sorry.  That’s awful.  How did you find out?”

“I had emailed him in April and he never got back to me.  I didn’t think anything of it but with the mountain opening again, I wanted to touch base with him.  You know, Joe and I always did a trip to ride the back country every year.  Jackson Hole, Silverton, you remember.  And it was so great.  I didn’t hear anything back again and that was strange. So I googled him and saw it.”

I could tell that he was deeply shaken.  Sudden death is always shocking and Nick was stunned.

Joe Timlin was thirty-two years old when he died.

He left behind  his parents, Michael and Joy, two siblings, Chris and Kelly and his wife, Krissy.

And hundreds of friends.

He was a great guy, an intrepid snowboarder and he really knew his way around a mountain.  He and Nick had spent countless days riding uncharted terrain.  He wasn’t careless, reckless or fool-hardy.  It just happened.

Joe was killed- along with four other young men- in the worst avalanche disaster since 1962. According to the Colorado Avalanche Information report, the crown face of the slide was 500 feet wide and four feet deep.  All the men were wearing avalanche beacons. It didn’t matter.

One guy survived and called for help. That’s the only way their poor bodies were discovered.

My heart goes out to my son- and everyone who knew and loved Joe.

He was the Rocky Mountain rep for several snowboard companies and so this was his life’s work- as well as his life’s passion.  He died doing what he loved.

Out in Colorado we always say that when something like this happens.

Chip Johnson, my good friend from Aspen Sports, was killed in 2000 in a back-of-Ajax avalanche one beautiful day.  I saw him right before he headed out.

“Where are you going?” I asked him as I saw him loading his skis into his car.

“Going to the back of Aspen.  I hear the snow’s good there,” he said.  He smiled and he was gone.

He was thirty-seven.

My dear friend Weems Westfeldt lost his beautiful son, Wallace, in 2008.  He was killed in a snowboarding accident in the Tonar Bowl near Aspen Highlands.

Wallace was twenty-two years old.

You probably didn’t know any of these wonderful guys.  But you might have known someone special who died way too soon.

For them- and for us- I now turn to Robert Frost for help.

“Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower,

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day,

Nothing gold can stay.”

Take a run for Joe, Chip and Wallace this season, guys.

They were golden.