We met at a restaurant on the shore, and I thought they looked remarkably fresh for having just driven 1,500 miles from Saskatoon. We watched the sun set over the lake, and marveled at the beauty of the vista, which Mark Twain described as “the fairest the whole world affords.” Bob remarked that it was a glacial lake, like Lake Garda. As the sun dipped below the western peaks, the air temperature plunged, so we grabbed our beers and moved to a table inside. As soon as we sat down, the talk turned to Duncan.
“So you think Dick Penniman can help us figure it out?” Lynda asked.
“I think if anyone can, he can,” I replied.
The next morning we drove to Dick’s house in Truckee, about twenty miles from the lake. We all immediately liked him and felt confident we’d come to the right place. He was deeply intrigued by Duncan’s case, he said, and had a personal reason for wanting to help Lynda and Bob.
“My brother was in the navy and disappeared at sea under mysterious circumstances. His body was never found, and my family could do nothing but accept the story we were told by the military, so I know what it’s like to live with that terrible feeling of uncertainty.” Because of his interest in the story and his sympathy for Lynda and Bob, he waived his fee. In lieu of payment for his services, he asked us to make a contribution to the SnowSports Safety Foundation—a non-profit organization for which he is the chief research officer.
Seated at a picnic table in his garden, basking in glorious Indian summer weather, we listened to his account of why he’d started working as expert witness in cases of ski resort negligence.
“Many ski operators—though not all—want to have their cake and eat it too,” he explained. “They aggressively market to city-dwellers who have little or no knowledge of the winter mountain environment. They sell lift tickets, clothes, equipment, food, and lodging to masses of inexperienced people, but they don’t want to do what it takes to make sure their visitors understand what to look out for and avoid on the slopes. When a skier does get horribly injured or killed, the resort operator almost always tries to argue that the victim should have known better. To the general public, they present their resorts as amusement parks; in the courtroom, they argue that the “mountain” environment is full of uncontrollable risks. In fact, most severe accidents are preventable with simple signs and safety measures. Trouble is, there are few, if any, laws or written standards enforcing such efforts, and sometimes resort personnel just can’t be bothered. When severe accidents do happen, I’ve found that they often try to cover up their negligence.”
Over the next three days, Dick, Bob, and I did a systematic analysis of everything we had. By the end of our stay, we had assembled overwhelming evidence (presented in Appendix 1) that Duncan’s left leg and arms went into a grooming tiller, as did his snowboard. The disaster occurred on the ski slope, and the resulting wreckage was either scattered on the slope or tangled and jammed in the machine. How, then, did his body, amputated lower arms, amputated left leg, broken snowboard, clothing, and ski boots all end up together in a crevasse?
Chapter 39: Duncan’s Death
Bob and I had both failed to grasp it because our minds hadn’t been open to the possibility that anyone was capable of doing such a thing. He had imagined a hit and run scenario in which Duncan was mortally injured by the Snowcat and at the same time pushed into a crevasse. Though skeptical of Bob’s hypothesis, I had been at a loss to explain the strange condition and position of Duncan’s body and equipment. But after systematically analyzing the facts with Dick Penniman, we realized that only one conclusion could be drawn: Someone had intentionally concealed Duncan’s body in the crevasse.
It’s safe to say that only the Snowcat driver and perhaps some of his co-workers know exactly how the disaster happened. Though there can be no doubt that Duncan’s limbs went into the grooming tiller, and that someone then buried his body in a crevasse, how exactly it came to this is impossible to reconstruct with certainty. The best one can do is build a hypothesis based on the facts we have assembled.
Dick Penniman concluded that the disaster had most likely begun with a bad crash caused by a crevasse opening on the slope during Duncan’s afternoon snowboarding session. Drizzling rain on August 9, 1989 accelerated the melting and compacting of snow bridges, greatly spiking the risk of their collapse. Sometime after 2:30 P.M., flying over an open crack, Duncan’s board dipped into it, slamming into its downhill wall, and breaking his left femur. Another possibility—heightened by Duncan’s dysfunctional equipment and extreme toe drag—was that one of his boots came out of its binding, exposing the other leg to the board’s twisting force, which tore one or more knee ligaments.
Because of the poor weather and snow conditions, the other visitors called it a day around lunchtime, leaving Duncan—who was eager to practice after his lesson—alone on the slope at the time of his crash. With one or both feet still locked in the bindings, his injured leg was twisted in a painful way, so he freed his boots from the bindings and tossed the board onto the slope next to his legs. To get more comfortable, he took off the heavy, tight-fitting ski boots, but with his left leg injury constricting normal circulation, his left foot ached with cold, so he pulled the liner out of his left ski boot and put it on his foot. Unable to snowboard or walk down the slope, he could do nothing but wait for someone to find him. He probably assumed a semi-fetal position on his right side, with his left leg stretched out straight, and then used his hands to support his injured left leg.
Sometime in the late afternoon, the grooming machine driver commenced his daily run. As a basic precaution, he probably asked the chairlift operator if anyone had gone up for a while, and because no one had, he assumed that the slope was clear. This made him complacent, even though visibility was highly reduced by fog. As the bottom of Duncan’s board and his boots were white, they blended in with the snow. If the driver was wearing yellow-tinted glasses, as many Snowcat drivers do, Duncan’s yellow rain jacket didn’t stand out. Seated on the left side of the cab, concentrating on the grooming line to the left, the driver didn’t see the man lying on the slope to the right. Duncan was unable to see the approaching vehicle because he was facing upslope. If he heard it, he assumed it was coming to rescue him.
Because the tiller stuck out beyond the side of the tracked vehicle, the outer edge ran over Duncan’s extended left leg and snowboard. Alternatively, the driver may have seen the person on the slope as the tractor drew alongside, and reacted by swerving hard to the left, thereby causing the tiller to swing open and towards Duncan. The driver heard a loud bang from the board running through the tiller and stopped to see what happened. Climbing out of the vehicle, he saw a young man tangled up in the tiller. If Duncan was still alive, the spectacle of a living man whose limbs had just been mangled by the machine was horrifying in the extreme. Even if he was already unconscious or dead as a result of hypovolemic shock from a broken femur, this was not readily apparent to the driver, who could only assume he had just killed the young man.
Dick Penniman has seen reports about the behavior of two grooming machine drivers involved in accidents. The first happened at the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Alberta, Canada, when the doctor of the Austrian national ski team—a man from Innsbruck named Joerg Oberhammer—collided with another skier and was thrown down in front of a groomer, which crushed his skull. The second was the accident in Michigan in 2008, when the boy’s leg went into the grooming tiller. In both cases, upon seeing what their machines had done, the drivers went into a state of mental shock in which they were virtually incoherent.