Empire snowmobiler Kaleb Timberlake was playing it safe Sunday.
Still, he was swept away in an avalanche he’s sure would have killed him had he not been wearing an Avalanche Airbag System, or ABS, backpack.
“That thing put me from slamming along the bottom like a rock to being on top of the snow, and I was able to swim out,” he said. “It was unreal. I had no idea that thing would work that well and that fast.”
Timberlake, 36, was crawling along at a couple miles per hour across a low-angle slope Sunday. He was carefully avoiding anything big or steep after two nights of heavy snow and high wind had buffeted the bowls around Jones Pass, just west of U.S. 40 and Berthoud Falls. A burst of wind blinded him. He ended up in the wrong place. He started to turn his snowmobile around.
Then, he says, a massive avalanche ripped him from his vehicle and shoved him to the rocky bottom of a snowy maelstrom.
The veteran backcountry rider yanked the ripcord on his ABS backpack. Two giant balloons inflated on his back, and he squirted to the surface of the roaring snow.
“I was getting pounded,” he said.
Body armor, a full-face helmet and a neck brace saved Timberlake from anything worse than a few bruises. He was carried about 100 feet, crawling from the moving snow just above a cliff.
Up the slope, the avalanche was the biggest he’d ever seen. A wall of wind-deposited snow, 12 to 15 feet deep, marked where the snow had ripped to the ground.
The avalanche debris below the cliff was filled with bus-size blocks, he said. His snowmobile, buried beneath several feet of snow, was a tangled ball of aluminum, he said.
“I made a mistake. I made a wrong turn. I was in the wrong place and I knew it and I was trying to turn around. And I got thumped,” Timberlake said. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Timberlake credits his survival to the buoyant pair of 75-liter balloons that inflated in 2 seconds after he pulled the ABS ripcord, enabling him to “swim” out of the avalanche.
The company’s website — abssystem.com — charts 122 avalanche victims swept away while wearing their ABS pack since 1995. Of those, five died and four of those skiers did not activate the system.
The Colorado Avalanche Information Center ranked avalanche danger for the Jones Pass area Sunday as “considerable,” meaning natural avalanches were possible and human-triggered slides were likely. So far this season, the center has counted 11 people caught in Colorado avalanches; two were killed.
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
Timberlake report
See the Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s report on Kaleb Timberlake’s lucky ride:
http://avalanche.state.co.us/acc/acc_report.php?acc_id=232&accfm=inv
