HAINES – Mark Kelly, 50, manager of the Funny Farm lodge north of Haines relied on a weak Wi-Fi signal and his iPhone’s Siri voice command app to call for help after he was buried and pinned underneath a pile of snow, ice and firewood on Jan. 4.
Kelly was listening to a podcast and collecting firewood to feed the boiler of the lodge on Mosquito Lake Road, 30 miles north of Haines, at around 11:30 p.m. Several feet of ice and snow had collected on the woodpile to the point that a cornice had developed. Kelly, a former heliski guide who has been buried in avalanches several times, recognized it as a hazard, but said he ignored his better judgment.
“It was late and I just needed one more log,” Kelly said. “There were a couple of loose logs under the dangerous snow overhang that I had been up to now, purposely avoiding.
“The pile suddenly collapsed and I was smashed flat, pinned under a blue tarp with several feet of snow, ice and wood on top of me. It was nearly midnight, quite cold, and I was completely trapped and unable to move the slightest bit.”
He said he tried his best to remain calm and think about how he could unbury himself, searching for a “key to the room,” a difficult task despite his previous experiences of being buried alive.
“It’s an entirely different mindset when you’re going through this turbulent ride in an avalanche. You know there’s a plan set in motion to come and get you,” Kelly said. “But with this, in an instant, I was just trapped. I fly solo out here. There’s no reason anyone would be looking for me.”
Kelly was wearing indoor clothes and said he remained buried for nearly 45 minutes before he remembered his phone was in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He was unable to reach it with his hands, which were stuck at his sides as he lay in the fetal position. His firewood was stacked on pallets, which allowed air to flow into the space he was buried.
“It was hard to breathe because I was on my side and my shoulders were pushed together and my chest was compressed,” Kelly said. “Fortunately, after a while I realized that my phone was in the chest pocket of my flannel shirt and eventually, I was able to voice dial a couple of neighbors for help.”
Kelly said he misdialed a few times, but after several tries he reached neighbor Linda Huber who missed his first call because she was showering.
“He called up (late) at night. I thought, ‘That’s kind of strange.’ I called him right back and he said this is Mark. I said, ‘Mark who?’ His voice sounded very, very different.”
Huber called 911 and by the time she arrived, neighbors Shelby Flemming and Charles Peep had also responded after receiving Kelly’s call.
Flemming said she initially thought Kelly had been buried under snow that had fallen from the roof, but couldn’t see any obvious berm. She said Kelly’s dog, Dude, was frantically running around and howling. Kelly heard Flemming trying to calm his dog and began shouting to alert them to his location. Flemming said once they realized where Kelly was buried and removed the snow, she knew they would need a knife to cut through the tarp.
“I had to run inside to get a knife because he was pressed under a tarp and there was three or four feet of snow on the tarp. There was no way of digging out all the snow. He was cocooned in the fetal position under the tarp, totally pressed down by it,” Flemming said. “He had no way of moving. It was pretty scary. I don’t think anybody would know where he was if he didn’t have his cell phone on him.”
Kelly said he emerged pretty banged up with few scrapes and bruises, and what he thinks are a couple cracked ribs.
When he was initially trapped, he said he not only assessed his situation, but also his life and day’s events, which to him reinforced the idea that helping others is essential to living a good life. Earlier that day, he housed and fed a homeless person who had been camping in the area.
“He showed up at the (Funny Farm’s) coffee shop. He was wearing cotton that was all wet and had chunks of ice stuck to him. He was cold and was having a little bit of a hard time breathing. I made him some food and got him warm. I gave him a room with a bed, washed his clothes.”
Kelly said as he was buried, he wondered what he would be thinking, in what could have been his last moments, if he had turned the man away.
“As I lay there trapped and hurting, my mind was free of guilt and regret which enabled me to sort out a solution,” Kelly said. “Be helpful. Be kind. The rewards may not be immediate or apparent until a moment like this, but they are there.”
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