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On January 4, 2017, Brett Beasley asked Cole Walters-Schaler a question that countless powder hounds had posed before: “Wanna ski a lap?”
Beasley, a U.S. Forest Service ranger, and Walters-Schaler, a 15-year-old who was friends with Beasley’s daughter, had traveled with their families from their hometown of Salida to Uncle Bud’s Hut, part of the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association, near Leadville, for a backcountry skiing trip. They figured they’d take a quick spin, then meet up with the rest of their group. Instead, the pair became trapped in Porcupine Gulch during a massive snowstorm. Only one of them survived.
The loss reverberated through Salida, as friends and family tried to make sense of what happened. No one alleged foul play, but with the survivor seemingly apprehensive to divulge in-depth details about his experience, how exactly that tragic day played out remained a mystery—one that haunted Devon O’Neil after he learned about it from a friend in 2019. The Breckenridge writer spent the next six years investigating the incident. What started as a narrow look at two Coloradans lost in a blizzard grew bigger, eventually becoming The Way Out: A True Story of Survival in the Heart of the Rockies (set to be published by HarperOne on November 11).
O’Neil, a 5280 contributor, centers much of the account around Beasley—a consummate Colorado adventure-seeker who filled his days fishing, skiing, and dirt-biking when he wasn’t serving as the safety officer for the Salida Ranger District. Considering Beasley’s extensive outdoor experience, many simply refused to believe he could have been caught unprepared for the worst. O’Neil’s depiction presents a man both enlivened and tortured by adventure: He never wanted to miss an opportunity to chase a thrill, but that often meant missing time with his family. “To understand the singularity of Brett Beasley,” O’Neil says, “you have to see him in full.”
The same goes for the Porcupine Gulch tragedy. O’Neil interviewed more than 100 of Beasley’s and Walters-Schaler’s friends, family members, and rescuers to find out why the search took so long to begin, how trauma gripped not only the survivor but also the town, and what actually transpired on the mountain. “That became part of my charge,” O’Neil says, “so everyone knew everyone else was going through their own hell.”
