From Buried to Brother-in-law: How an avalanche rescue in British Columbia led to a marriage in Minnesota

As Hansi Johnson—a former Patagonia sales rep who now works as Director of Recreational Lands for the Minnesota Land Trust—recalls, in March of 2004, he was on his annual backcountry ski trip to British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains with a group of colleagues and friends. His travel group, totaling about 10 individuals, was a team well practiced in avalanche rescue and wilderness first aid. And, after one fateful lap, Johnson put his skills to use when an avalanche buried the majority of his group. Thanks to his training and quick action, an incident that could have taken his friend Elmo’s life ended up leading to a marriage. Here is Johnson’s story in his own words.

I worked in the ski industry for a big chunk of my life for companies like Garmont and other backcountry brands. So when I was in my mid to late 20s, I was skiing a lot all over the world—that’s how I came be on this trip to British Columbia. The people who I was skiing with were other members of the ski industry, and we used to go on an annual ski trip to the Golden, B.C. area in the Selkrik Mountains. This trip was one of seven or eight trips that we’d taken at that point.

A group of about 10 of us were skinning over a pass on a high avy danger day. Because of that, we were looking for some really low-angle skiing and had made a judgment call early in the day to try to keep ourselves out of harm’s way. But on one climb, it was super socked in, really cloudy and hard to keep our bearings straight. While we were skinning up, a relatively small avalanche occurred on a hill on the other side of the valley we were skinning up, and it silently slid down out of the fog and hit the majority of our group. Myself and another guy, Kim Miller, head of SCARPA North America, had hung back to have a drink of water. When we headed around the corner to try and catch up with the rest of our group, we realized that the entirety of our group was buried either partially or fully.

Between Kim, myself and some other folks who were able to extricate themselves, we did a beacon search and realized that there were two people who were fully buried. One of them was close to the surface, so we got him out fairly quickly. The other one ended up being six feet down, so we had to probe him. His name was Mike Elmgren, who everyone called Elmo.

We got him out, but he wasn’t breathing. We performed CPR on him, and we got him alive and kicking, but he came away with the worst of it. Besides the mental trauma, he’d blown both knees; he was on tele gear and his skis hadn’t released.

We were all really good friends before this, and we’d practiced our rescue scenarios and possible avalanche scenarios so everything went as well as it could. Afterward, Elmo was flown to the hospital, but before he was picked up we were kind of just shooting the shit, and we found out that Elmo had gotten his reverendship out of the back of Rolling Stone magazine.

I don’t even know what the name of the church is, but he’d been a “reverend” for a while and had performed multiple outdoor weddings. He was known for marrying people hanging from a cliff, in the backcountry, paddling on a river, wherever. And as we were chatting after the avalanche, he was like, “Man, you really mean a lot to me, I’d like to come back to Minnesota with you and perform your wedding as a favor for digging me out.” I thought that was really cool.

And while he officiating my wedding the next summer, he happened to meet my wife’s sister, Kass Harstad. She was a skier as well and was interested in the outdoor sports that we like to do. So they hit it off quickly, and, within a year, they were also married. So all of a sudden, the guy I was ski bumming with, who I’d dug out of an avalanche, was my brother-in-law. They went on to have a child name Skadi, and now we all hang out together with our kids.

You never know what’s going to happen in one of those life-or-death situations, but the person we ended up pulling out of the snow is part of my family now.