From the Talkeetna Mountain slopes just above the Independence Mine State Historic Park, the lights that brighten the Hatcher Pass lodge at night looks so close you could almost reach out and touch them.
It was within sight of these lights and the comfort they promise that 18-year-old snowboarder Royce Morgan from Wasilla died Wednesday.
What killed him remains unknown. Alaska State Troopers say state medical examiners are still awaiting toxicology tests and won't say anything until after they have those in hand.
Morgan's half brother, 25-year-old Matt Theodore, started out thinking the cause was hypothermia, but now he is not so sure.
Precious little time passed between when he and Morgan split to ride a slope and then reunited for the first time on this fateful night. Morgan was fine when Theodore left him. He was on a spiral into death only an hour later.
"Forty minutes maybe,'' Theodore said. "An hour max, tops."
The two brothers had started off the end of their day of snowboarding by hiking not all that far up a slope above a place everyone calls Eldorado. They were getting ready for the last run before making the drive back down to the Valley.
"We could see the (Independence) parking lot down there," Theodore said. "We could see right to it. At that one split second, I said, like, 'follow me!' "
Theodore jumped off downhill. Morgan did, too, but he didn't follow exactly. The little knoll above which the brothers had stopped had two faces.
"I went to the right," Theodore said. "Obviously, he went to the left."
At the bottom, Theodore realized Morgan was missing. He called out for him but got not response. It was getting dark. Snow was blowing, and it was hard to see. Theodore didn't see anyone moving on the slopes above and got worried. So he went on down to the lodge to call for help. He made a quick 911 call, and then headed back to begin a search himself.
The distance to the hill from the lodge is probably less than a mile. Theodore started hiking back up toward where the day's last run had begun, yelling for Morgan as he went. He found him less than an hour after leaving.
"When I first found him, he was hollering at me," Theodore said. "I'm not sure (what), and then he progressively got worse after that.
"When I found him, he was trying to walk down the mountain, but I thought he was on his snowboard. I had to hike over to him."
Theodore was surprised to find Morgan missing the board. Where or why the younger man had taken it off, Theodore doesn't know.
"His hat was missing too," Theodore said, "but he wasn't bleeding."
Morgan generally looked OK but clearly wasn't.
"By the time I got there, he wouldn't walk or stand up anymore," Theodore said. "He said a couple sentences that made some sense when I first got to him. Then he progressively got worse after that."
Some of what Theodore describes fits with the classic symptoms of a descent into severe hypothermia. Most Alaskans are familiar with hypothermia. It's what causes us to shiver when we get cold. The shivering is the body's attempt to warm itself.
As we get colder, there are other metabolic changes. Circulation to the fingers and toes decreases as the body tries to protect its core. The result is that the extremities start to go numb. Eventually, the muscles of the arms and legs and face are also cut off from full circulation, and people start to mumble and stumble.
Somewhere between 95 and 90 degrees body temperature -- four to nine degrees lower than normal -- people also tend to begin shivering intensely, even violently, as the body makes one last, desperate attempt to shake itself warm.
At between 90 and 86 degrees, according to the medical literature, that ends and there begins a slide into something of a metabolic icebox. People lose consciousness. Their breathing slows or stops. Their heart rate may drop to one or two beats a minute.
They are, at that point, in a very sensitive state. Their heart is extremely vulnerable to shock. Move them roughly or begin CPR, and you can kill them.
And yet they are not dead.
Even beyond this, in a state at which the heart actually stops beating, they are not dead.
Some whose hearts have stopped have been revived as long as 312 hours after their bodies were rewarmed, which is why Anchorage Dr. William Mills Jr., an authority on hypothermia, has always preached that no hypothermia victim should be considered dead "until they are warm and dead."
At this point, it is unclear what attempts were made to rewarm Morgan in an effort to bring him back from near death after the accident at Hatcher last week. Equally unclear, however, is whether hypothermia is what killed him.
Though Theodore repeatedly hugged his brother to try to warm him, he never noticed any severe shivering. And the period between when the two healthy snowboarders split up and Theodore returned to find his half-brother in dire straights is frighteningly short, as is Morgan's subsequently slide into unconsciousness.
It's not impossible to go from mild to moderate to severe hypothermia in a little more than an hour, but the speed at which things spiraled downward at Hatcher does make one wonder if maybe there was something else going on.
"He was walking toward the lights when I met him," Theodore said. "He pointed at them and referred to them or something like that. I told him, 'Yeah, that's where we need to go.' "
Morgan stumbling in confusion toward the lights would fit well with someone in a state of moderate hypothermia, but in Theodore's telling, Morgan slides into the next stage of hypothermia almost within minutes.
"He was sort of delusional," Theodore said. "I was trying to talk to him, and he didn't really talk back. He'd look at me, and sort of focus, and then he'd stare back at the lights.
"He wouldn't follow directions."
Theodore tried to get Morgan to sit on a snowboard to be dragged down the mountain. Morgan wouldn't keep his feet in.
Hypothermia will cause people to act like this. So will traumatic brain injury, or what we all used to call "concussion."
Morgan might have taken off his hat because he was hypothermic and suffering a symptom known as "paradoxical undressing," although what people usually take off is their pants. Morgan might also have fallen, hit his head and lost his hat.
Any sort of trauma could, in turn, increase the risks of deadly hypothermia, as could any number of other things from hypothyroidism to dehydration to various kinds of drugs. It may be sometime yet before anyone knows what, if any of these factors, might have played a role in Morgan's death.
In the meantime, it is a reminder of how fragile life is here in the land of cold and the snow -- even if civilization seems so close.
"When we were about halfway (down), a truck left the parking lot," Theodore said. "Its lights were shining right up at us. I waved my arms and screamed for help, but he just turned around. It was just kind of a sinking feeling."
The driver of the truck probably never saw the snowboarders. He or she would have had to look up the mountain. People seldom do that. They are focused, and rightly so, on the road.
Morgan's death is not the driver's fault, nor is it Theodore's, though he is haunted by his half brother's passing.
There are things now that he wishes he had done differently. He wishes he hadn't spent so much time in a futile effort to drag Morgan back to safety after first finding him. He wishes he would have gone back to the lodge immediately to get help. He wishes that when he first went there he'd have grabbed some extra warm clothes, maybe even a sleeping bag in which to put Morgan, and some hot fluids.
He wishes, as all of us who have been in crisis situations wish, that he had been thinking more clearly. But the reality is that unless you train for these scenarios, you seldom think clearly.
Mainly, Theodore wishes that Morgan were still alive.
"I can't help but feel like in some way I could have done more," he said. "It's a pretty helpless feeling too."
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
CRAIG MEDRED
OUTDOORS