Ian Steger is 40 and works for Ohana Real Estate in beautiful Bellingham. He’s proud that Ohana has strong community ties, and that 10% of proceeds are donated to local nonprofits.
He’s a hometown kid through and through. Born and raised. And, he lives to snowboard.
“I don’t boast about my abilities,” he said when I asked him how good he is. “I’ve just been doing it a long time. I’ve snowboarded 31 years, almost all at Mount Baker.”
Francis Zuber is 28. A few months ago he moved to Bellingham from New York. He’s a carpenter who’s been carving out a new life in a new place.
And, he’s been a skier his whole life.
“As long as I can remember,” he said. “My parents took me up my first time I think it was Mt. Snow or Smugglers Notch in Vermont when I was 4 years old.”
They are friends now. More than friends, really.
In fact, there is a bond between them that they will carry to their graves.
But on March 3, they’d never met.
Both were drawn to Mt. Baker that day by reports of glorious, virgin powder.
Francis was skiing alone. “When you ski deep snow it’s just, I mean it’s truly like nothing else,” he said.
Lan was snowboarding with three buddies, between them they had more than a hundred years of experience. “We’d ridden in this area hundreds of times. It’s called the side country so you get off the chairlift and you cut out of bounds,” he said.
Francis, on the chairlift before his first run, randomly saw a guy he’d met on the mountain a few days earlier. They’d skied together that day, and the guy yelled to him, “Meet me at the top!”
So they met up and took some runs together. And because he was with a friend now, he was willing to go into the backcountry.
“Yeah,” Francis said, “because it’s out of bounds. So I wouldn’t even consider going there by myself.”
“But because you coincidentally run into this guy on the first run of the day, you decide to go back there…” I asked.
“Yeah, exactly,” he replied.
Ian was having what he called an “epic run.” The snow was fresh and deep. The kind that guys like Ian dream about.
“We went into this little grouping of trees,” he said, “and they’re really narrow, tight trees.”
He’s sitting on a log at a waterside park in Bellingham as he tells the story. The sun is out and sailboats are going by in the distance.
“And, I bobbed when I should have weaved I guess, like I didn’t notice anything was going wrong. I went through these really tight trees and as I went through, I was going so fast that I wanted to make a turn to slow down. Soon as I made that turn everything collapsed behind me, and because all my weight was on my back foot turning, I fell backward into it.”
The “it” was a hole. A tree well.
“It was pitch black. It didn’t matter if my eyes were open or my eyes were closed. Same amount of darkness. I’m realizing then that I’m totally upside down and stuck. Then I realized I’m probably in trouble,” Ian said.
His arms were pinned to him, one elbow against his body with his hand by his face.
Ian said, “Initially I thought, ‘OK I’m stuck, I can’t get myself out, but my partners are right behind me, so I just have to wait, stay calm and they’ll find me.”
He tells the story matter-of-factly. “And then I heard on my radio they’re asking where I was and if I’m ok. And at that point, I knew I was in trouble because they don’t know where I am, and they were likely below me.”
It feels claustrophobic just to hear Ian tell it. You can imagine a sense of desperation coming over him. It’s chilling and horrifying.
“And then realizing I was on my own and if I was to live I had to get myself out of there, and that’s when the thought process started to change and the panic mode and survival mode, I was trying to wiggle myself free, do anything I could to get myself loose, and closer to the surface.”
It didn’t work. He couldn’t “And I noticed as I was flailing around in that panic moment that I was just sinking deeper and the snow was like encasing itself tighter around me. So at that point, I just stopped and was waiting.”
Ian knew that it takes about 15 minutes to suffocate under snow.
In fact, just a couple of months earlier, a close friend of his, Bill Kamphausen, had died at Mt. Baker the same way: he suffocated after falling into a tree well.
Ian thought of Bill down there in the darkness.
“At that point I was like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening and I’m going to die down here, on my own mountain.'”
“You started to think you were going to die?” I asked.
Ian said, “Oh yeah I was convinced. 100%. Yeah, I didn’t think I was going to live, so the first thing I thought was that my fiancée’s and our will was sitting on our table. Unfinished.”
He’d seen it just that morning. Because of what had happened to his friend Bill, he and his fiancée Jordan Richardson had started the process of getting their wills in order. The paperwork was on the counter when he left to hit the slopes that morning.
Meanwhile, Francis was navigating a path through the dense trees. He was wearing a Go-Pro camera on his helmet, and the video shows that he could have gone in any direction, with the hundreds of trees before him leaving only a couple of feet between them.
Floating on the powder, he squeezed between a couple of trees and continued down
“I was going faster than I would have liked,” Francis said, “so I kinda did that jump turn to stop and sort of reset, since I didn’t know what was on the other side of those trees, and I mean, had I not done that I wouldn’t have seen him.”
It’s true. Francis pushes up and turns to the left, and there on the left extremity of his vision something moves.
It was the bottom of Ian’s snowboard, wiggling on the snow. When Francis sees it he said, “Oh, s%$&!”
Francis sounds amazed, even now, as he tells the story. “There’s sort of that shock initially happens, then the realization like, I have to do something about this right now. There’s no one else here. You know, I don’t know how long he’s been in there for, but what I do know is that in 15 minutes if you’re underneath the snow you’ll suffocate.”
Ian was only 10 feet or so away from Francis. But the snow was so deep that it was incredibly difficult for Francis to reach him. At first, he tried to side-step through the snow, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
So, he used his pole to take his skis off and then used them in front of him to help stabilize as he pushed through. He breathes hard on the video.
He said, “That was the scariest part, climbing up to him.”
Six feet down, Ian heard nothing. Could move nothing. Buried alive, all he could do was contemplate dying.
“There was sadness there, but it was more acceptance. I just entirely accepted it, that that was how my life was going to end. And I was kind of OK with it. If I am going to die I want to die, not necessarily in that situation, but doing something I love.”
Francis was gasping now.
“Come on!” he grunted, trying to crawl to the snowboard. Eventually, he got close enough to grab onto Ian’s snowboard.
Ian remembers the moment.
“So I was kind of juggling between those thoughts and just wondering how long it was going to take to die. It was actually shortly after that that I felt Francis grab my board.”
In the video, we see Francis grab on. “Hold on, I’m coming,” he said.
At first, Ian thought he was imagining it.
“I was like, ‘That can’t be happening, there’s no way that there’s someone there,’ and then I felt him firmly grab my board. In the video, you see him firmly grab it to leverage himself to get to me. And I felt that and I knew I was going to live.”
Francis started digging down with his hands, deeper and deeper, gasping, as if he were digging to save his own life.
“You alright? Can you hear me?” he said.
Six feet down, he found goggles. He pushed the snow away from Ian’s mouth.
“You ok? You alright?” Francis asks. Then, “Ok, you’re good, I got you. Can you breathe?”
Ian answered, “Oh… yeah.”
“Alright, we’re both gonna catch our breath for a sec. Then I’ll dig you out ok?” “Thank you,” Ian said.
Francis got his shovel out of his pack and started digging again
Ian, still unable to move, knowing now that he would live, said, “Take your time, man.”
At that point, Francis remembered the Go-Pro camera on his helmet. Out of respect, he turned it off.
When Ian was completely freed and able to stand, the two of them shared a long hug. Ian said, “Thanks for stopping. You saved a life today. Thank you for saving my life.”
They met up again the other day. Ian told his new friend that he’ll be buying the beers forever.
They went back up on the mountain, too. Francis skied and Ian snowboarded. That will never stop for either man.
And, of course, they both think about March 3, 2023, and probably will forever.
Francis said, “There’s something definitely bigger in the universe and guess I was just a tool for it to play its part, essentially for it to run its course, or whatever it was.”
Francis has a new group of friends. Ian’s friends. Saving a man’s life is good for making friends.
Ian said, “I question the ‘why’ a lot, but sometimes the why is too big and there’s no answer for that, just have to be grateful that I did survive and that Francis was there and make the most out of every day that I’m alive after.”
What if Francis hadn’t moved from New York? What if he didn’t run into his friend and therefore didn’t go into the backcountry?
What if he’d looked right instead of left? Or had taken one of a thousand different paths through the hundreds of trees?
Ian said he’s different now. “I definitely am very grateful to be alive, I notice that everything is a little bit better. Even on a gray day, it’s a nice beautiful gray day. When I’m eating food everything tastes a little bit better. I have an appreciation for being alive. Breathing, I think about breathing every day now. The fact that I can take a breath without the weight of the snow keeping me from being able to breathe.” He pauses. “So, just the little things we take for granted.”
Francis is an understated guy. He seems a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but proud too. “He saved my life,” Ian said, “So, no one’s done that for me before. And I hope no one has to do it ever again. I’ll feel indebted to him forever. I mean he’ll never say that I owe him, but I feel like that. That’s why I want to show him everything about the town that I grew up in, you know, every bar, every restaurant, every secret spot so he can have the best experience possible. and then not leave, just in case I need him again.”
For every person, every minute of every day is built upon thousands of little decisions, tiny coincidences, and assorted flukes of fate and fortune.
Every instant, when you think about it, is a miracle of chance.
But some are more miraculous than others.

Credit: Komonews.com