It was a bright and sunny on Saturday when Travis Smith fired up his machine and took off into the mountains above Whittier. The 27-year-old thought he was playing it safe. The crew he was riding with that day planned to stay away from the steep terrain because they figured avalanche danger was too high. But by the end of the day Smith would ride home not on his sled but in the back of a medevac helicopter.
It wasn't an avalanche that landed Smith on that gurney, though -- it was an aggressive jump up on the glaciers above Portage Lake. Smith and his group found a nice flattop jump and started leaping it on their machines -- a huge flight that landed them on a sloped transition 40 or 50 feet from where they took off.
After Smith had taken the jump a few times, he accelerated towards it one last time. Smith said he was going too fast -- probably about 35 mph -- by the time he hit the jump, and as soon as he was in the air he knew he was going to overshoot the landing by about 30 feet and crash on the flats.
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He bailed off his snowmachine, and although his buddies watching thought he landed on the sled, Smith is pretty sure he got clear of it and landed just on the snow.
Smith hit the ground with the wind knocked out of him and he was pretty sure something was seriously wrong. Remembering stories about people who jumped up after a fall and ended up injuring themselves even worse, he stayed put.
"I was freezing my butt off because I was down in the snow and my friends wouldn't let me move," Smith said. "I couldn't move, couldn't take my helmet off. I couldn't do anything. It was horrible."
One of his buddies rode up to a higher point where they could get cell service and called for help. Smith was sprawled out in the snow, hurting pretty badly, until a medevac helicopter landed and the emergency responders gave him some drugs for the pain.
The copter took him straight to Providence Alaska Medical Center, where Smith said he was diagnosed with a broken vertebra. Smith said he should be getting out of the hospital in a week, wearing a full back brace, and is looking forward to getting back on his machine.
"Soon as I'm 100 percent better I'll be back up in the mountains," he said.
Contact Joshua Saul at jsaul(at)alaskadispatch.com.