Author’s note: On the morning of January 4, 2017, a group of seven Salidans milled about at Uncle Bud’s Hut, a popular backcountry refuge near Leadville in the Sawatch Range. While most were finishing breakfast or gearing up, two members of their party, 46-year-old Brett Beasley and 15-year-old Cole Walters-Schaler, stepped outside, itching to commence the day’s skiing adventure. Brett’s daughter Brooke and Cole’s father and sister, Joel and Morgaan, remained inside, along with family friends Chuck and Melissa McKenna. Twenty-seven hours would pass before anyone saw Brett or Cole again.
The decision didn’t require much debate. It’s a rare morning to wake up with fresh snow at a backcountry hut and nothing to do but ski. The whole point of the trip was for dads to be with their kids, but that was overridden by powder fever. Brett and Cole had known each other for barely twenty-four hours, yet they fed off each other’s verve. Standing on the deck after breakfast, looking out at the Sawatch Range under milky skies, Brett flashed a grin. “You wanna ski a lap?” For a moment, Cole hesitated. Should I wait twenty minutes for everyone to finish gearing up? But he couldn’t resist. “Yeah,” he replied.
They headed north from the hut, up a gentle, forested, four-hundred-foot rise. Snow began to fall more steadily as they climbed. They pointed to their left with their poles at the mellow pitch they intended to ski, agreeing that it looked safe and straightforward. They would start from the broad, rounded saddle that separates that pitch from Porcupine Gulch and ski south, away from the much steeper drop down the north side into Porcupine.
Porcupine Gulch is shaped like a giant U, with an open eastern end and steep ridgelines rising on the south and north sides. A rocky headwall beneath 12,893-foot Galena Peak closes off the western corner—the bottom of the U, as it were. Porcupine’s belly looks like a bathtub and is cleaved by meandering Porcupine Creek, which starts under Galena and runs east. The entire drainage is about one mile wide, three miles long, and a thousand feet deep, with hundreds of acres of spooky, mossy, boulder-filled forest on its floor. In the summer, it’s a place to escape civilization, hike off trail, and camp in grassy meadows among elk, moose, and bears, miles from the closest human. But that same solitude and rugged topography make it a ruthless place to be in winter.
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Cole had never done a real backcountry ski run. Unlike the day before, when he’d taken the lead on the groomed road to the hut, now he was following Brett, the spirited Jedi, into a wild area, where they would ski some of the deepest powder of his life.
As they neared the saddle, they curled left into thicker trees to get out of the wind, stopping in a small clearing where they could remove their skins to begin their descent. The tall conifers prevented them from seeing the low-angle run they intended to ski. It also placed them on a flatter plateau, without clear north and south declivities like the saddle featured elsewhere—a recipe for disorientation. Brett tried to teach Cole how to peel his skins off his ski bottoms while keeping his skis on. Like an instructor, he balanced on one leg while lifting the other leg high enough to grab the skin and rip, explaining the technique as he went. Cole appreciated the lesson but failed to master the awkward motion. No matter. They transitioned in haste; both were itching to descend, to feel the thrill of bottomless snow.
Brett pushed off and then Cole followed, slowly picking up speed as the gentle pitch increased. Cole left Brett’s track to plumb untouched powder. The rush was unlike anything he had experienced—it filled his whole body. He and Brett hooted with joy as they snaked down the mountain in tandem, spraying rooster tails at the apex of each turn. This was why they’d slipped away: to feel suspended above the earth but below the sky.
Their bliss lasted for about a minute, and then Brett began to cut left, wanting to ensure he intersected the track that would lead them back to the hut. Brett could feel them trending lower, away from their perceived target. He stopped and pictured the loop, which was already taking longer than he expected. “Theoretically, we’re here,” he said, imagining them to the west of the hut. “So the track should be just over there. If we take this up, we should hit it.” The snow was starting to intensify. Cole fell in behind him.
Standing outside Uncle Bud’s after Brett and Cole left, Joel and Morgaan decided to try to catch up. Joel wanted to ski with his boy. That was why they’d come. He and his daughter followed the first ski track they saw, heading northwest from the back of the cabin, but quickly concluded it couldn’t have been Cole and Brett because too much snow had accumulated on it, indicating it hadn’t been used that day. They returned to the hut after fifteen minutes. The next track they found was fresher. They climbed for about half a mile before bumping into the trio who were also staying at the hut and had gone out earlier. Those people said only that they had seen Brett and Cole skinning toward the saddle, by now just a short distance away. Joel and Morgaan continued their ascent in that direction, where they came to a small clearing. The snow indicated someone had stopped there and begun a descent into sparse trees. They saw two ski tracks headed north, farther into the wilderness and in the opposite direction from where they’d come.
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They’d now been looking for Brett and Cole for two hours. At 12:47 p.m. Joel snapped a pair of photos of Morgaan, smiling in a purple and pink jacket with the hood up. Behind her, what appeared to be Brett’s and Cole’s tracks led down an almost flat pitch that gradually steepened as it continued out of view. Joel and Morgaan didn’t know it at the time, but just beyond where they could see, the saddle rolled into an abrupt ravine entering Porcupine Gulch. Fifty-foot-tall spruce trees towered over the clearing, their branches caked by fresh powder.
It was now snowing harder. Joel knew from forecasts he had seen before their trip that the weather would likely deteriorate.
“Looks like they went this way,” Morgaan said, staring at the trenches. “Should we follow them?” She was still hoping they could all ski together.
Joel, who had a black shovel strapped to his backpack, blade up, as well as goggles to shield his eyes from the falling snow, thought the route looked risky. It would take them farther from the safety of the hut. He took out his compass and oriented it with a map of the area. They were standing at 11,600 feet. All he could see were trees and clouds.
“I don’t think this is right,” he said, visualizing the run described by D-Bone. He looked at his map and then back at the tracks. “It doesn’t seem like it drops down to the cabin. I just don’t feel comfortable doing it. Let’s head back and see if we meet up with them there.”
Morgaan, still curious, skied down just far enough to peer over the edge of the saddle. The tracks disappeared into a heavily treed gully. The route worried her because she couldn’t see where it led. She climbed back to her dad.
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Joel was now irritated by the turn of events. His plan to spend time with Cole had crumbled. Still, he figured Brett knew where he was going, and they were strong. Maybe Brett had another route in mind that would lead back to the hut. Joel didn’t want to chase after them with his daughter in a worsening storm. Cole was safe with Brett, who was experienced and a father himself. At least, he trusted that much.
Joel and Morgaan removed their skins to descend. Instead of following their track, they decided to make turns in the powder. But the pitch was too moderate, and the snow too deep, to maintain speed. After a short run they put their skins back on and returned to the hut, a slog that felt almost as strenuous as the climb.
Brooke and Melissa, meanwhile, had traveled just a couple hundred yards from Uncle Bud’s on their cross-country skis before stopping. Brooke was used to her dad rushing off and thought little of it. She and Melissa spent the next two hours making snow angels and building a fort and snowman off the front deck, while watching pretty flakes float down from the sky.
Chuck also turned around not far from the cabin because of pain in his ankle and shin, a result of not skiing much before the trip. He skinned back and went inside to take his boots off. Their plan to stick together had splintered.
When Joel and Morgaan returned to find the rest of their group at Uncle Bud’s, it was almost 1:30—three hours after Brett and Cole had left. Joel asked if anyone had seen them. Nobody had. The snow was now coming down sideways.
Excerpted from “The Way Out” by Devon O’Neil and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2025.
Devon O’Neil is a freelance journalist based in Breckenridge, Colorado, and the author of “The Way Out: A True Story of Survival in the Heart of the Rockies.” He has worked as a daily newspaper reporter, a staff writer for ESPN.com, and a correspondent for Outside magazine. O’Neil’s stories have been anthologized in “The Best American Travel Writing” and noted in “The Best American Sports Writing.” During the winter he moonlights as a hutmaster, helping to maintain a network of backcountry cabins above 11,000 feet.
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