February 10, 2023, started out like any normal day. The blue sky and temperatures that were expected to be in the high 30s.

I loaded up our 2 dogs and decided to do a little back country skiing. Grabbed my day pack, tested my ACR beacon, let my wife know exactly where I was going and off, we went.

I was heading back to my truck but decided to do one more run, I had done this run earlier in the day without any problems. This time I came out of my previous tracks and crashed.

Unknown to me there was a tree stump under the snow where I landed. I suffered blunt force trauma to my upper right femur. I would later discover that it was broken.

This happened at 1:30pm. I deployed my beacon at 1:40pm. Emergency responders showed up around 3:30pm. At that point I had been laying in the snow for about 2 hours.

When they got to me, I was shivering uncontrollably. I was going into severe hypothermia. They assessed my injury and immediately started warming me up.

They were able to get me on a sled and manually pull me off the mountain. Loading me into the ambulance around 4:30 p.m. and transported me to the nearest hospital for assessment.

They transported me to a larger hospital, where I underwent surgery the following morning, on February 11th.

I would not be here today if I wouldn’t have had my beacon. It saved my life.