Snowboard pioneer killed on mountain

Craig Kelly, the pioneering snowboarder who became his sport’s Michael Jordan, died just as he was tapping into the newest niche of a backcountry ski craze he helped create.

The four-time world champion and three-time U.S. Open champion snowboarder was killed in an avalanche along with six others Monday when a 100-foot wall of snow crushed them during a guided ski outing near Revelstoke, B.C. He was 36.

Kelly stumbled into boarding so early – the early 1980s – he once had to explain to Mount Baker Ski Area officials how the fat, wooden plank worked. He became so synonymous with the sport that a clothing line was named for him and he was photographed in magazines shredding mountains from Chile and Japan to Russia and Iran.

At the time of his death, he was living in Nelson, B.C., and training to guide tourists on the kind of backcountry adventures that had made him so famous that overseas visitors used to stop at Mount Baker hoping to photograph him.

“From the very beginning, he was the local guy at the hill who was better than everybody else,” professional West Seattle snowboarder Mike Ranquet said. He traveled the world snowboarding with Kelly. “I idolized the guy.”

But even two decades of experience and a reputation for being so avalanche-wary he would annoy ski partners with his meticulous snow testing weren’t enough Monday.

Led by Selkirk Mountain Experience, owned by famed guide Ruedi Beglinger, Kelly was among a group of 21 skiers who had been traversing a 30- to 35-degree slope in two teams, one above the other, on the Durrand Glacier, 34 miles northeast of Revelstoke. About 10 a.m., a slide swept some of the 14 in the upper group, and all seven of the lower group, 300 feet down the mountain, burying at least 11 of them.

The seven who died suffocated under up to 5 feet of snow.

In addition to Kelly’s death, the six others are Kathleen Kessler, 39, Truckee, Calif.; Dennis Yates, 50, Los Angeles; Vernon Lunsford, 49, Littleton, Colo.; Dave Finnery, 30, New Westminster, B.C.; Naomi Heffler, 25, Calgary, Alberta; and a 50-year-old from Canmore, Alberta, whose family lives in Europe and had not been notified.

Canadian authorities are still investigating what caused the avalanche.

“The irony was (Kelly) went over there to pick up pointers from this guide,” Rob Loughan said, owner of a Bothell-based software company who recently partnered with Kelly in a Nelson, B.C., backcountry snowcat skiing operation. “He was just going over to hang out for the day.”

The sport grows, Kelly grows

Kelly’s growth as a snowboarder mirrored the industry’s explosion.

He found the sport through bicycling, and through his hometown neighbor Jeff Fulton.

In the early 1980s, as inventor Jake Burton was still perfecting early boards, Fulton became perhaps the first in Washington to ride one. Fulton’s parents owned a bike shop and had sponsored Kelly, who grew up in Mount Vernon, Wash., as a rider.

“Craig was just a BMX rat who used to hang around,” Fulton said. “When I couldn’t get my ski buddies to try snowboarding, I just grabbed the BMX team and took them to the mountain. Craig took to it right away.”

The pair and a handful of others, including Ranquet, quickly became known as the Mount Baker Hardcores, carving arching lines in the snow and experimenting with tricks and jumps before most skiers knew boards existed.

“He was just so artful,” Loughan said. “And he was doing it on equipment unlike what we have today.”

Kelly’s style, with his knees unusually close together, was graceful, powerful and unmistakable. Amy Howat learned to snowboard by spotting Kelly from the chairlift and chasing him down runs at Mount Baker.

“I distinctly remember being able to spot him from a mile away, because he had such a distinct and strong style,” Howat said, who later toured the world circuit as a snowboarder.

Kelly dominated the growing world circuit of snowboarding in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He pioneered half-pipe tricks, turning some of the first back-to-back, 540-degree midair spins in competition. He starred in Warren Miller ski flicks.

Loughan recalled recently finishing an apres-ski round of beers at a B.C. pub, when the bartender stopped him from paying the tab by saying, “Oh, the guy in the Craig Kelly hat got the bill.” The bartender didn’t realize it was actually Kelly beneath the hat.

Kelly stuck with his original sponsor, Burton Snowboards, even as other opportunities emerged, and helped the company develop new products.

“When I started listening to Craig, my company took off,” company founder Jack Burton said at the annual TransWorld Snowboarding Industry Conference in June. “When the rest of the industry did, the sport also took off.”

But as equipment improved, so did the snowboarders. And as ski areas got crowded, old-timers started pushing for new terrain.

“It used to be that we could ride all day and find fresh tracks,” Fulton said. “But after a while, we had to start going higher and higher up the mountains to find fresh powder. And once you get a taste of it, there’s nothing like it.”

While backcountry skiing had been around for nearly a century, it wasn’t until the past decade that nearly every ski shop carried gear that could allow skiers and snowboarders to easily travel up the mountains themselves.

Kelly rode a split-board, which he could separate into skis, strap on synthetic skins for traction, and head up the mountain as if on free-heeled backcountry skis. Once at the top, he’d click the board back together, step into snowboard bindings and be off. He was hoping to be one of Canada’s first split-board backcountry guides.

“By then, he had the clout not to have to do contests any more,” Ranquet said. “And backcountry is where he wanted to be.”

Becoming a guide

Kelly’s decision to move to Nelson, B.C., to become a guide was indicative of the province’s growing reputation as a backcountry haven.

“Wilderness tourism” in British Columbia has been growing by about 10 percent a year for the past four years, to become an industry worth at least $2.5 billion a year in Canadian dollars, said Brian Gunn of the province’s Wilderness Tourism Association. Americans are the most common out-of-province visitors and complain that the growing number of guiding businesses are booked solid, months in advance.

Outdoor enthusiasts have watched that growth, in Canada and the U.S., with some concern. Nancy Coulter-Parker, editor of the Colorado-based Hooked on the Outdoors magazine, says aggressive marketing by soda-pop companies and others has glossed over an edge of risk.

Kelly himself was once filmed skydiving with his board for a Wrigley’s commercial.

“I think it’s become a whole phenomenon,” said Coulter-Parker, who has skied with Selkirk Mountaineering Experience three times. “They’ve really glamorized extreme sports. That’s made all these sports seem really accessible to people. They are, but there’s an element of danger that people forget about or don’t want to believe is there.”

Brian Litz, co-founder of Backcountry magazine, agrees, noting sports such as backcountry skiing rely on unpredictable conditions that even experts such as mountaineer Alex Lowe, killed in a 1999 avalanche on a Tibetan mountain, can’t avoid.

And Kelly’s colleagues describe him as so cautious that on world travels he would demand sponsors pay to bring along a guide from New Zealand, one of the few avalanche experts he really trusted.

“He was incredibly knowledgeable,” Fulton said. “He was smart, and he didn’t take stupid risks.”