Chapter 11 The Whiteout
Liza POV
Dominic’s hand found the back of my neck in the gray light before dawn, thumb pressing the knot where my muscles had seized from sleeping on a cabin floor. I let myself lean into him, then pulled on my boots and started packing.
We didn’t talk about last night. It mattered too much to name while we were still gathering scattered clothes and coiling the rope we’d knocked from the table. His scent was all over me, cedar and woodsmoke ground into my skin and hair, and mine was on him. Any wolf who came close would know.
The plow had come through before first light, shoving walls of snow to either side of the service road.
I left the lodge truck at the cabin for the next patrol up to drive back.
I wanted the ride with him. Dominic drove us down the mountain in his truck with the heater roaring and the windows fogged, and when we reached the junction where the resort road split from the lodge road, he pulled over.
“I’ll handle the downed trees on the north access,” he said. “Zeller’s got a crew already staged at the base.”
I pulled my pack out of the rear footwell. “I’ll check in with Kristen.”
He looked at me across the cab without asking or claiming anything, those dark eyes steady on mine.
“Be careful up there,” he said.
“Always am.”
I shut the door and walked toward the patrol base through deep snow. Looking back would have made it harder to leave him there, and I had a mountain to work.
? ? ?
The storm had buried the resort overnight and wasn’t finished. Snow fell sideways in curtains so thick the upper lifts faded and vanished. Wind scoured the ridges and pushed drifts across roads soon after the plows cleared them. Most of the mountain was shut. The rest should have been.
Kristen met me at the patrol shack with a radio and a look that said the day was already ugly.
“We’ve already pulled people off the east glades,” she said. “More went into the trees off a groomer that’s barely open. Zeller’s running triage at the base.”
“Tourists?”
“Who else.” She handed me a thermos. “Coffee’s hot. Drink it now because you won’t get another chance.”
I drank it standing in the doorway while the wind tried to rip the door off its hinges. The coffee was terrible and exactly what I needed. My legs ached from last night in ways that had nothing to do with the cabin floor, and I shoved that thought down hard before my face gave me away.
The morning was a blur of closures, rope checks, and tourists who’d ignored every warning posted before the storm hit.
I helped Kristen dig out a rental SUV that had slid off the access road into a drainage ditch.
I reset boundary ropes the wind had torn loose across the lower glades.
It was standard bad-weather patrol, one task after another without a break.
As the day wore on, visibility dropped to nothing. White above, white below, white in every direction. The horizon disappeared, and my inner ear couldn’t tell which way was up. I’d worked days like this on East Valley’s upper mountain, but its shorter runs offered fewer places to disappear.
The radio crackled against my chest.
“Liza, we’ve got a missing skier.” Zeller’s voice, clipped and flat the way it got when something was actually wrong. “Last seen near the marked glade on the east traverse. His buddy came down alone. Says the guy went off-trail a while ago.”
“Description?”
“Adult male, dark blue jacket, gray helmet. First name’s Neil. Buddy says he’s intermediate at best.”
“Copy. I’m on the east ridge now. Heading to the glade.”
“Kristen’s en route from below. Don’t go past the marked boundary alone if you can avoid it.”
“Understood.”
I couldn’t avoid it. The glade’s marked trail was a gentle run through spaced aspens, harmless in good weather, but in a whiteout a skier who drifted off its edge could be funneled toward the steep terrain above the avalanche chute.
If an intermediate skier lost the trail and kept moving, he’d end up on a pitch he couldn’t handle, and pitches like that killed people.
I found the glade entrance by feel, using the lift towers to hold my line until the trees thickened on my right. The marked trail was buried. I stopped and listened.
Wind. Snow hitting my goggles. My own breathing.
I pulled the goggles up and let the snow hit my face because I needed my wolf’s senses, and plastic lenses weren’t helping. The cold bit into my cheeks, and I breathed through my nose until the world sorted itself into layers of scent and sound beneath the white.
There. Faint disturbances in the snow, no more than shallow troughs beneath the fresh powder. I probed with my pole until I found the paired grooves again. They veered left, away from the marked route and toward steeper terrain.
I followed the track into trees I couldn’t see until I was under them.
The slope steepened beneath my skis, and I checked my position against the terrain I’d memorized since joining the crew.
The ridge was to my left, the drainage below and to my right, and beyond that lay the avalanche chute I’d flagged during my assessment.
I was well past the marked boundary when I heard a low, pained sound from below and left, muffled by wind and snow.
“Neil?” I shouted.
The sound again, louder. Trying to respond.
I sideslipped down through deep powder, keeping my weight back and testing the slope before committing. The trees thinned, which meant I was approaching the open face above the chute. My wolf wanted to flatten her ears.
He was crumpled against a small rock outcrop below the tree line, one ski gone somewhere into the white. His dark blue jacket was half-buried in snow, and blood streaked the skin below the right edge of his gray helmet.
“Hey.” I slid to a stop beside him and bent to touch his shoulder. “I’m ski patrol. Can you hear me?”
“Fuck,” he said, which told me he was conscious, oriented enough to swear, and probably in a lot of pain. “My leg.”
His left leg was bent wrong below the knee. The bone hadn’t broken the skin, thank God. A gash at his hairline below the helmet bled freely, mixing with melted snow and running down his neck.
“Okay, Neil. I’m going to get us out of the wind, stabilize your leg, and stop the bleeding on your head. It’s going to hurt. I need you to stay still.”
“Where—” He tried to lift his head and groaned. “I can’t see anything.”
“Whiteout. That’s why you lost the trail. Don’t move.”
I looked upslope. The line I’d followed in had already vanished beneath fresh snow.
The outcrop gave us some protection, but the wind curled around both sides and stripped heat from him.
I took off my skis, drove them upright into the drift along the exposed edge, and packed snow between them and the rock.
The low wall diverted the worst of the gusts and left us a narrow pocket of relative calm.
I pulled the splinting kit from my pack, stripped off my outer gloves, and released his binding without moving his boot.
Aligning the leg made Neil scream through clenched teeth.
I splinted it, packed gauze against the gash, and looked at his pupils.
Equal and reactive. He knew his name, where he was staying, and what day it was.
“I’ve got you,” I told him. “Your lower leg is splinted, and the bleeding is slowing.”
“My foot’s freezing.”
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
He did. I pulled the emergency blanket from my pack and wrapped it around him, tucking the edges under his body. “Better?”
“A little.” His teeth chattered. “How do we get out of here?”
Good question.
I keyed my radio. “Zeller, I’ve got him. East face, below the tree line and past the marked glade boundary. Suspected lower-leg fracture, head laceration, conscious and stable. I need a team, but visibility is zero.”
Static. Then Zeller’s voice, tighter than before. “Copy, Liza. Rescue team is staging. We need a route. Can you give us landmarks?”
I looked around. White. Nothing but white, falling snow, and the dark blur of the rock outcrop we were sheltered against.
But I knew this mountain now. I’d spent every shift memorizing the drainages, ridges, and stands of trees. I closed my eyes and rebuilt the terrain in my head.
“We’re on the east face above the upper boundary of the avalanche chute.
There’s a rock outcrop just below the tree line.
Send the team down the east traverse, have them enter the drainage past the marked glade, then cut south through the aspens and follow the slope contour to the outcrop.
Do not come straight down from the ridge.
The snow load above us is heavy and the chute is active. ”
“Past the glade, south through the aspens, follow the contour. Confirmed.”
“Tell them to call out when they’re in the trees. I’ll guide them from here.”
“Copy.”
I put the radio down and turned back to Neil. He’d gone pale beneath the blood and cold, his eyes glassy. Shock was settling in. I checked the splint, tucked the emergency blanket tighter around his core, and talked to keep him focused.
“What made you go off-trail?”
“I saw—” He coughed. “I thought I saw a run through the trees. Like a gap.”
“That gap leads to a cliff.”
“Yeah. Figured that out.”
“Where are you from?”
“Denver.” He nodded carefully. “First trip up here.” His eyes closed, then opened again. “Thanks. For finding me.”
“Thank me when you’re at the base lodge with a cast and a beer.”
A gust hit us hard enough to push snow against the rock like a breaking wave.
I leaned over Neil and shielded his head until it passed.
Wind swept across the open face above us.
A low, deep whump came from somewhere upslope, the sound I’d dreaded since dropping below the tree line.
A buried weak layer had collapsed under the new snow.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Wasn’t planning on it.”