Tonto and the Ranger Hit the Jackpot at 10,000 Feet, or, Diamond Jim Cleans Out the Moffat Tunnel

TO GET THERE you follow Sixth Avenue out of Denver to Interstate 70, wind through Mount Vernon Canyon and up Floyd Hill, where the VWs wheeze up the steep grade, through Idaho Springs and Empire, then right at the fork onto U.S. 40. Forty takes you over the Continental Divide through Berthoud Pass at 11,300 feet, and from the summit of the pass it is just a matter of not doing anything stupid on the hairpin turns that slither down the mountainside like a resting rattlesnake.

This past Christmas Jim Bredar and I drove that route to Winter Park Ski Area in his old Toyota Jeep, as he had done hundreds of times before. The sky was overcast and it was freezing inside the jeep because the heater was busted and the windows didn't close all the way. We got to Winter Park around 8:30 a.m.--early, before the lifts started, because Jim was a senior ski patrolman and had to get instructions from the patrol leader before the mountain opened--and I was so numb I wondered if I could ski at all.

But the clouds broke. In fact, it was a beautiful day, the sky an unmarred shell of deep blue, the sunlight too bright, etching the dark green outline of each pine against the snowfields, the air so cold and so clear that the sight of the Indian Peak mountains to the northeast took your breath away. I skied with Jim and Mary Lyn Chapin and Nancy McKey, both friends of Jim's from the time in high school when he joined the Winter Park Junior Ski Patrol. Mary Lyn was a fast skier, as fast as Jim, and she looked the part, with blonde hair that fell past her shoulders and teeth that dazzled, when she smiled, like the reflecting sunglasses she wore.

That night the four of us dined together in Jim's cabin, drank wine, ate peanuts and watched the pine and spruce wood fire while we ran our bare feet through the deep shag rug. Jim and Mary Lyn did most of the talking. They talked mainly about the Junior Patrol, to which they had both belonged, and about some of the people on it: Peter Fader, who saved a man's life once, Joe Ward, the hottest skier at Winter Park, and Bob Patterson, the patrol leader before Jim, Jim's best friend on the patrol, and Mary Lyn's lover for a year. Bob is dead now. He died at Colorado General Hospital very early on the morning of June 9, 1976.

JIM BREDAR was born in February, 1957. His parents moved to Colorado that year and got interested in skiing. "As we grew up," Jim says of his brothers and sisters, "they started each one of us. I messed around on skis when I was five and six; it was hardly skiing. I think the first time I rode a lift I was seven. I loved it right from the start." Jim and his siblings got pointers from their parents and friends, skied scared, skied out-of-control, skied cold, but skied. Gradually, Jim's skiing improved, and he began to ski with his older brother and his friends.

Some of them were on the junior ski patrol at Winter Park, and when Jim heard about patrolling and its responsibilities--watching for fallen skiers, providing first aid, packing the snow on unskied runs so they could be opened, and performing a painstaking "sweep" at day's end to make sure no one was hurt or lost on the mountain--he knew he wanted to join, too. He was 13 at the time; the minimum age for junior patrolmen is 15.

Two years later, a sophomore in high school, Jim had enough confidence in his skiing to attempt to join the patrol. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it," he said, "and I knew they would only take 15 people." After passing an endurance test, he took a written exam on first aid and ski patrol regulations, and passed with the second highest score. This qualified him for the skiing test: Jim had to demonstrate every technique of skiing, from stem christie to parallel to snowplow on a very steep slope, and ski every kind of snow--packed, powder, ice and crud--at high speed. He passed the skiing test with a low score, but not too low. Of the 65 people to tried to join, Jim's total score placed him in the top 15. He got on.

Jim spent almost every winter weekend patrolling. "My life really changed my sophomore year in high school. I just started living for the weekends. I started calculating everything in terms of how far it was from Friday night."

At first, the patrol appealed to Jim because of its image. "I liked being the guy on the hill who knew what he was doing. I liked giving people first aid. But I was always going in for dramatic things, and that was dramatic work," he says. So was the Alpine Rescue Team, a rock-climber rescue group Jim joined in the spring of his sophomore year. "It was really neat stuff. Neat equipment to work with, and it's really slick to pull someone off the rock. It's a gas to be hanging out there, with your ass over everything. You're all roped in, so nothing's going to happen to you, and it looks cooler than hell.

"But membership in those two organizations didn't do very much for me socially, because I became less and less involved with anyone who wasn't involved with one of them. It was something that was cool not so much for everybody else but for myself."

Weekends were great. Saturday morning Jim and some of the other patrollers would drive up to Winter Park in Jim's jeep. There was real incentive not to be late; the last two arrivals had to sweep and mop the patrol room floor. They spent the day skiing with friends, free. "We had to wait in lift lines unless we skied with a senior patrolman, then we could cut the lift lines. The way to do that was to start skiing with a real foxy looking female junior. Then you'd get one of the 50-year-old seniors whose wife was giving him shit all the time, and he'd ski with you all day long; you could cut lift lines all day."

"Or sometimes if they were administering a test at the area they would want us to be dummy accident victims, so we'd fake crackups, pile ourselves around trees, and they'd test senior trainees. We used to have fun really wrapping ourselves around things, to make it a tough accident."

At the end of the day the junior, senior and professional patrolmen swept the mountain--skied every trail, open or closed--looking for injured skiers. Then the senior and professional patrolmen filtered out to their homes for the night, and the juniors had the patrol room to themselves. "We'd mess around. Sometimes people would do homework. A lot of grabass went on, a lot of dope smoking and some drinking. No adult really had too much control. There was a caretaker who lived up there, but he didn't give us any shit if we behaved ourselves as far as noise. Around 5 p.m. we'd all pile into a car, go down to the highway somewhere and eat dinner. Then a lot of the guys who were 17 and 18 would go into town and try to sneak into bars. But I was usually content just to sit around and bullshit; and crash out around nine.

"It used to get a little exciting sometimes when the sheriff would pull into the parking lot. These guys would all be in the patrol room smoking like crazy, and somebody would have to go out and say 'How you doing Sheriff Henderson? Howseverythingtonight?' He'd say, 'Hi, you guys staying up here again?' 'Yeah.' 'Well, everything okay in there?' And you'd say, 'Yeah, no problems.' Then he'd get back into the car and leave, and you're sweating, dropping bricks, afraid he's going to come inside and look around, and that would be it for everybody."

Sunday morning everyone got up and patrolled. The weekend was often capped by a grand prix of sorts that evening: the six or seven cars carrying junior patrollers raced each other over Berthoud Pass, drove into Empire and stopped in a restaurant for ice cream or shakes together. Since the patrol drew people from all over Denver, the group split up there. "And you'd start looking forward to next weekend."

Despite, if not because of, such Bacchanalia, the Winter Park junior patrol was the finest in the country. At the annual National Ski Patrol Jamboree, the Winter Park juniors took first in the competition for best overall junior patrol in 1972 and again in 1973, the year Jim joined and the year Bob Patterson was president. In 1974, when Jim was president, they didn't compete. They'd raised so much hell partying in 1973 that they were asked not to return. By that time, though, the tradition of an annual group trip was established. In 1974, with money raised through raffles and equipment sales, they went to Aspen for a week. In 1975, Jim now a high school senior and a Senior Patrolman, they went to Telluride, where they hit the big time.

"When we got there, there were signs that there was going to be this world-class freestyle tournament, the last day we were going to be there. We thought we were pretty hot, so we decided we'd enter two or three people. We entered Baldwin [the patrol advisor], Joe Ward and Bob. Baldwin got sick and couldn't compete, but Joe and Bob did.

"It was just a bump run, about 300 yards long--a pretty tough run. The prize would go to 'the most exciting run' down this slope. And there were world-class people there.

"So Joe and Bob entered it. People were spread out all along the side of the run, and there was a normal level of noise, except all of us were sitting together, pretty drunk, screaming our heads off. Now, we used to call Joe 'The Ranger,' and Patterson was always 'Tonto.' So these people thought we were nuts, because we were yelling for the Ranger and Tonto.

There were two heats, and in the first one they were the last two guys to go, and in the last heat they were the first two guys to go. Joe came down, had a spectacular run, doing all these amazing stunts off the bumps. Patterson followed him down, skiing far better than he usually could ski.

"We built up a lot of excitement, and we kept it going until the next heat. They came down, and it was really a rush, they were terrific. Everybody else on the side of the mountain was cheering for them, too, even though they didn't know who they were.

"Then we all went down to the bar, hoping that they might have placed. The other skiers were all pretty hot. But Joe won first and Bob won second; I guess Joe got about a 100 bucks, Bob about 50. Now we'd been raising hell in this town for about a week, driving around sitting on top of cars and just carrying on. Anyway, in the bar, this guy stood up and made a speech about how they'd really appreciated it how the group of us had come down and really livened up their town and they just wanted us to know we were welcome in Telluride any day of the year. We should just introduce ourselves to any of the merchants, and they'd be happy to have us. When it was over, everyone in the bar stood up and applauded.

"BOB PATTERSON aspired to a lot of things," Jim says, but he didn't put much effort into things he didn't care about. "The goodness of the person is hard to evaluate on paper. He broke a lot of rules he had no business breaking, he was contemptuous of higher-ups, he got into a lot of trouble, and people who didn't know him very well didn't like him. The magic of the guy was his personality and what he could contribute to a group of people."

Patterson was the oldest child of a wealthy Denver executive, and a graduate of a private school south of Denver. Two years older than Jim, he was a sophomore pre-med at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) when he won the Telluride contest. Bob was a tremendous skier, and well-known in Boulder as an excellent hang-glider pilot. He was bright, and although he did not aspire to academic success, he respected it and sometimes achieved it.

As a patroller, he was unsurpassed. "On an accident," Jim says, "I would take him with me before I'd take anybody. He was an excellent skier, and he could handle a toboggan as well as anybody. Next to skiing, though, the most important thing in patrol work is how well you can relate to a person, especially a person in distress. All those people were very extroverted, and able to really communicate with accident victims, and help them through hard times--calm their fears.

"I'll never forget, we had an accident--it was the grossest thing I'd ever seen in my life--a guy took a spill and cut most of his balls off with a ski pole. Patterson handled that accident like he'd been through it 30 times in his life--putting the guy back together, and talking him through the whole thing."

His technical expertise matched his ability to communicate. "Bob was excellent at first aid. He was an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), and he took it very seriously. He had a very detailed knowledge of the field of emergency medical care--it was better than mine. I think I had more experience than he did, but in a weird case, you'd do better to have Patterson along, because he'd read the book. He'd read all of them."

Patterson smoked massive quantities of dope. Jim tells the story of the time Bob and four or five of his friends wanted to get high in the Moffat Tunnel, a six-mile-long railroad tunnel beneath the Continental Divide, its western portal across a bridge from the Winter Park lodge. They walked in about 30 yards, sat down in the middle of the tracks with a huge bong, and proceeded to get blown away. Jim, who does not smoke pot, stayed outside in the parking lot, looking at the stars, when from far down the valley he heard the forlorn 'woooooo' of a diesel train horn. He walked across the bridge to the mouth of the tunnel and said, "Ah, you guys, you better get out of the tunnel. There's a train coming." "Oh come on, Bredar," they shouted back, "stop being so paranoid."

Jim recrossed the bridge and watched the stars some more, then he heard the whistle again. He ran back to the tunnel. "Hey, there's really a train coming," he said, with fear in his voice, "you guys are out of your minds if you don't get out of there." "Bredar, will you cut it out!"

"So I came back out," Jim says, "and I can't remember how many more trips I made in there, but the train was coming. You could hear the engines and everything. I couldn't convince them, and I was getting really worried, so I came out. I wasn't getting killed for those bastards.

"I went back over to the parking lot. Here came the train, I could see it coming up the tracks, to where it makes a big turn and goes into the tunnel. I was looking right down the spot light, and I'm yelling 'It's coming, it's coming.' I couldn't hear if they were yelling anything back at me.

"The train got about 200 yards from the tunnel, still going real slow because it has to climb a big hill, when the guy hit the whistle. Those guys later described it: they were just sitting there, and all of a sudden this 'WOOOOOOONNNN' came echoing into the tunnel. They saw the bright light making its sweep on the curve, and they went flying out of there like you wouldn't believe. They had about a hundred yards to spare, but there was this bridge they had to cross just outside of the tunnel portal, and they didn't have time to get across that. They had to go right down a steep embankment, which went underneath the bridge at about a 60-degree slope. None of them got hurt or anything, but it was pretty hairy."

Bob was something of a daredevil. During the junior patrol trip to Aspen in 1974, he was standing with friends on the last slope at the Snowmass-at-Aspen area, which runs between two lodges. He turned to Jim and handed him his parka. "Watch this," he said, and took off down the slope. He made a few quick turns, then headed for a bump, took a huge jump, and landed in the middle of a lodge swimming pool, which was unoccupied. He swam around the pool collecting his equipment, which came off when he hit the water, climbed out, put his skis back on, zipped down the mountain to the lodge where they were all staying, and took a hot shower.

EARLY IN FEBRUARY 1976, Bob wrote a letter to Jim, and mailed it along with the picture in the box above, to "Sir James K. Bredar IX, Mathews Hall #30." In part the letter read:

Jim,

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find a bottle of champagne of a 1966 vintage and sit down with the coed of your fancy and have one hell of a good birthday party! But beware of intoxicated, horny females. I am sure you are fully capable of handling the situation, but if you are caught or fail you know the consequences.

Well, much has transpired since I last saw you in front of Sports International. My trip to California proved to be great fun with a lot of flying to be had. I logged almost 12 hours of air time in less than 2 1/2 weeks. My traveling companion Rich Graham and I spent the first two weeks in the San Diego area, flying mostly at Torrey Pines, but did some flying inland at Lake Elsinore and Big Black Mountain outside of Ramona, Calif. Our stay in Torrey Pines culminated with a 11/2 hour moonlight cruise over the entire six miles of cliffs at about 400 ft. above the terrain. There were just two of us flying around with flashlights illuminating our sails to avoid any midair mishaps. We then moved on to the L.A. area for four days of flying at Point Fermin, an old lighthouse on top of a 175 foot cliff that was soarable at 2 p.m. every afternoon. We finished our trip to California with a spectacular hour flight into the sunset, just the two of us flying around watching a sailboat regatta with all its color and pageantry.

Linda Buckham has been racing for Colorado College this year and you ought to see the improvement in her skiing. It's phenomenal. She was in her first race last weekend at Winter Park and did quite well. She was so excited it was hard not to get just as excited watching. That girl is so full of life that it is catchy. Joe Ward is living in Frazier and skiing every day, and he is now the hottest skier at Winter Park. He is very quick and even faster than last year. We are planning to go to Jackson Hole and Sun Valley over spring break to see if we can do some helicopter skiing and maybe even win some money at some freestyle contest. Wanted to go to Telluride but Mary Lyn can't get away from school so I've decided to try these different areas.

Hope finals weren't too much for you. Sorry I wasn't in when you called last Thursday night but I am very hard to catch and not at home very often.

Have a happy birthday ol' Diamond, B.P.

That was the last letter Bob sent to Jim. Jim flew to Denver March 24, 1976, for spring break, planning to meet Bob in a few days and go climbing and backpacking in the Grand Canyon. But the next evening, Mary Lyn called Jim and told him Bob had had an accident on the 24th while flying his hang glider off Point Fermin, California.

The pilots who glide at Point Fermin launch themselves by running down the gentle slope that leads to the cliff edge, but long before they reach it, they are airborne. They head out over the water, lose altitude, and circle back to the beach, making long figure eights parallel to the cliffs, riding the natural updrafts that blow steadily from the sea. When they are ready to land they spiral up in the breeze to the cliff edge, turn towards it, and touch down.

Bob was soaring above the summit, trying to land on the slope that leads to the precipice, when the wind stopped. Caught in a rare, freakish downdraft, the kite plummeted. When he saw he would be unable to land he shifted his weight and thrust at the control bar, trying to turn away from the cliff, head out over the ocean, gain some altitude and try again. He didn't have time. Striking the cliff about 15 feet below the summit, he slid 25 feet down the stone face to a ledge. Then the inland wind resumed and pinned the kite and his body to the rock.

"Meanwhile, another guy on the cliff saw the whole thing happen," Jim says. "He rigged up a rope real quick and rappelled down to him, got to him about three or four minutes after it happened. Bob wasn't breathing, so he started artificial respiration. They called a rescue team, cut him out of the kite, dropped the rescue equipment to the ledge and lifted him up. His heart kept going, but he never breathed by himself after that. He was there in California for about three weeks, and then his parents had him flown to Colorado General."

Right after the accident, Bob lapsed into a coma, his brain showing a bare minimum of EEG activity. "He had so many serious injuries. He had a collapsed lung that couldn't be fixed until he was stronger, he had a skull fracture, and a subdural hematoma--a blood clot against the brain. His leg was mangled, a compound fracture in several places. He was just a mess."

MARY LYN is a physically powerful woman; she is strong emotionally, too. "I don't think she cried a teardrop until the day he died," Jim says. It devolved upon her to report Bob's deteriorating condition to Jim after he returned to Harvard from spring break.

"While he was in a coma for two-and-a-half months, she went to see him every single day. For about two weeks, she maintained hope that he would be back to normal. Then for about two weeks after that, she hoped he would live. And then, by the first week in May, he was very close to brain death. There was only enough of him left to perform very simple motor functions. At that point all of us realized that it would actually be much better for him if he were to die. We all came to expect it, because he was down to about ninety pounds.

"I talked to Mary Lyn about twice a week on the phone. I'd just call her up, and there would never be any change, he would have just lost more weight, and his features were more deformed. He'd gone into the position with his elbows bent and his toes and hands pointed in, typical of comatose people with serious brain problems." Bob had had a natural-death will drawn up in California the year before, requesting that his life not be preserved by artificial means if he were severely incapacitated. His parents refused to honor the will. Near the end he looked ghastly, the skin on his face drawn into a horrible sneer, his lips pulled away from his teeth, and his arms colored green from the intravenous tubes. He had been a very handsome man, with blonde hair cut at the neck, a jutting chin, and an easy, ready smile.

Jim remembers Bob that way. He arrived in Denver after finals just before midnight on June 8, planning to visit Bob the next morning with Mary Lyn. She called about 7 a.m. that morning and told him Bob had died of pneumonia about 3 a.m. There would be no funeral, Bob's father announced. The body would be cremated immediately.

Shortly after Bob's death, Mary Lyn and Jim decided to organize a memorial service. On July 11, about 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, they held a service in a natural amphitheater atop Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking Boulder. It was a beautiful day, the sky an unmarred shell of deep blue, the sunlight too bright, etching the outline of the city against the verdant farmland to the east. More than a 100 people, all Bob's friends, attended.

"Mary Lyn talked, and then I talked. It was all sort of extemporaneous. This was the first really close person that ever died for a lot of these people, and they didn't know quite how to deal with it. It was just an attempt to put it all in perspective. The fact that he was a great guy, but that he lived on the edge, and like a lot of these people who I had talked to said, he realized it was something you sort of bargain for a little bit. I said that Bob realized this was always a possibility, and that while it was a tragedy that he died, his life itself was tremendous, and that sort of thing should be celebrated."

"It wasn't the sort of group of people to be inhibited by somebody's being killed. I'm not going to try to take away from the tragedy of it; it was shocking and it was terrible, but it was believable. We had talked about the possibility of dying, and Bob would always say, 'You have to go for it. You have to live day by day. You can't live a boring life.'"

WHAT IF Bob had lived? What if there had been no accident? "I've thought about that a lot. Reality would have caught up with him pretty soon. All these years we'd talked about it, 'Oh, we'll both go to medical school, we'll both be doctors, it'll be a great life.' But I knew that he was not going to get into medical school. Maybe he would have gone to work as an EMT somewhere, kind of working part-time. Just sort of rolling along, I think that's where he'd be right now. But you have to be careful with Bob. I used to think he was always going down the tubes, and then he'd come up with something that was very ambitious, and do something I was pretty amazed at."

Jim describes the older professional ski patrolmen he knows as "rural, crusty guys," and he doubts Bob could have long tolerated professional patrolling. "Bob was not a rural, middle-class type guy. He had very expensive tastes, he was very cosmopolitan. He loved good food and he knew a lot about good wine. It might be something that he could identify with as a goal, similar to the 'move out of the East Coast, go to Colorado, get back to nature' type thing. But he wouldn't have been happy in a rural environment, he liked too many big-city things.

"Besides, I know some guys who have been professional ski patrolmen for about 12 years, and my honest opinion is that a lot of those guys are just going nowhere. There's nothing romantic about it. It's a job. You sit most of the day and play cards or backgammon or something, and by springtime everybody's on everybody else's nerves.

"BOB'S DEATH was the omega of that experience. If he hadn't died it would have been like everything else in life, it just would have faded away. That chapter of my life was notable in that it was very enjoyable, I was very involved, and it had a very definite end."

After the omega, the wind resumed and scattered the old Winter Park juniors. Joe Ward is an EMT and an ambulance attendant; he's also worked as a keypuncher, and for a while he sold peanuts and eggs wholesale. Barry Buckman is a construction worker and his sister Linda is a Bible freak at Colorado College. Paul Muffly and Lindy Moon are both pre-meds at CU; Lisa Norling and Bill Heiss are also at CU, where she is studying physical therapy and he is studying partying. Gale Lehman is a circus clown, Jim believes. Charlie Thompson, who was a professional ski patrolman at the time the Telluride picture was taken, is still a professional ski patrolman. On July 1, 1976, Jim Baldwin skied off a permanent snowfield atop Mount Epworth into a pile of rocks, fracturing his skull; he died half an hour later. Mary Ann McGerry, Diane Hanna, Jim Warner and Peter Fader are all in school. Debbie Moon is engaged to be married. New people spend their weekends in the patrol shack now.

Jim keeps in touch with Mary Lyn. He is still a senior patrolman at Winter Park, and he skis there every Christmas and every spring, taking injured skiers gently down the mountain, cradled behind him in an aluminum toboggan that whispers as it rocks through the snow. Mary Lyn and Jim talk late into the evening in his cabin sometimes, then hug and say goodnight. Mary Lyn drives off in her Vega. Jim trudges through the snow to his Jeep and connects an extension cord to the plug sticking out of the grille, starting a heater which will keep the engine warm all night. Without heat, the engine freezes tight in the bitter-cold thin mountain air. Jim puts his ear to the metal hood and stays very still, listening for the sounds that will tell him the heater is working. He knows that unless he is careful, he will not ski tomorrow, and he wants to, very much.