Search for Snowshoer Postponed

John Hollenhorst reporting Dangerous conditions in Northern Utah's mountains forced search and rescue teams to postpone the search for a Salt Lake City snowshoer. He was apparently killed Saturday by an avalanche.

A searcher in a helicopter spotted a pair of snowshoes. But searchers decided more people would have been killed if they had gone in on the ground.

Snow conditions were a big worry as searchers contemplated going after the body of Marshall Higgins. The 31-year-old snowshoer was photographed by his companion, Jeff Frederick also of Salt Lake City, as they started their trek early Saturday morning.

The father of two was swept away and buried Saturday afternoon in a slide on Mount Timpanogos near Emerald Lake. Frederick was able to ride out the avalanche and call for help.

Search teams spent nearly five unsuccessful hours looking for Higgins Saturday, before heavy snowfall and high winds shut down their efforts.

Sunday morning, experts deliberately triggered four avalanches with explosives and debated whether it was safe enough for a ground search.

Sgt. Spencer Cannon of the Utah County Sheriff's Office said, "As we were sitting conferring on this, an avalanche came down naturally, right through the path where our rescuers would have been."

Around 3 pm they postponed the search for days, perhaps weeks or months.

"The question: Is the danger we're going to put rescuers in greater than the value of what we're going to find?" Cannon said.

In all, Utah County was involved in three Search and Rescues this weekend.

"You only have so much equipment," explained Sgt. Tom Hodgson of Utah County Search & Rescue. "If you try to stretch that equipment in three different directions, it's a pretty hard sale sometimes."

All three operations stretched overnight from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day.

"It's quite unusual," according to Sgt. Cannon. "It's not uncommon to have two things happen at once. But we don't very often get three at once."

"If it had gone on long-term with all three of them continuing, then it would have become more critical," said Sheriff James Tracy of the Utah County Sheriff's Office.

They say that did not affect the decision not to search in Aspen Grove. They had plenty of help from other agencies and from volunteer search and rescue experts.

"All of those people put in an incredible amount of hours," Sheriff Tracy said. "And all of their equipment and the time and training that they do is on their own dime."

The slide is in the same general area as a 2003 slide that killed three Utah County youths. But Higgins and Frederick had hiked farther into the backcountry -- five hours from the Aspen Grove trailhead -- and were in an area more difficult and dangerous for search teams to reach, Cannon said.

Meanwhile, one canyon to the north, a Salt Lake County search and rescue team recovered a 16-year-old boy also reported missing Saturday night after he left the boundaries of the Snowbird ski resort to snowboard in a backcountry area known as Mineral Basin.

Avalanche danger remained high across Utah's mountain ranges Sunday.

Reports from the Utah Avalanche Center web site say dozens of slides -- some natural and some triggered by humans -- were reported Saturday at elevations above 8,500-feet. The dangerous conditions are attributed to heavy snowfall throughout the weekend and high winds.

"While we might be psyched by with all the new snow, the snowpack is beginning to feel the affects of rapid load in such a short period of time," forecaster Craig Gordon, with the Wasatch-Cache and Uinta National forests, wrote in his Sunday morning posting. "The storm snow, water totals and strong winds have all conspired to make it downright dangerous out there."

Eight people died during Utah's 2004-2005 avalanche season, the highest death toll since the state started keeping records in 1951.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report)

Related topics