(Note: This story originally appeared in The Lewiston Tribune on Tuesday.)
As a financial planner, Lewiston's Ryan Skinner doesn't relish the thought of burning money.
But on Monday Skinner, 31, said he would have gladly given up everything just to survive the night he spent lost in the Idaho backcountry after a snowboarding trip went awry.
"I burned at least $30 worth of money," Skinner said. "Two tens, three fives and a couple ones, just to try and get the fire going."
Skinner drove to Tamarack Resort west of Donnelly on Thursday to board and watch the U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix.
"It was supposed to be a fun trip," Skinner said.
And until Saturday afternoon, it was.
After the day's competition, he and a friend went up the mountain for one last ride around 3:30 p.m. But they were met with foggy, windy conditions when they got to the top, and Skinner got disoriented.
He was trying to traverse back to the one landmark he thought he could find, the chairlift he'd ridden up Tamarack's slope, which faces east.
But it was nowhere to be found.
"My sense of direction just totally betrayed me," he said. "I went off the backside of the hill, which is not even patrolled."
Skinner was heading down the mountain's western slope toward Indian Valley and Council, not toward the resort. And he soon got bogged down in several feet of wet snow. "I couldn't snowboard downhill, I couldn't stand up, I couldn't do anything."
Using his board as a cane, Skinner plunged it into the snow and pulled himself forward, a few agonizing feet at a time. He didn't know it, but by that time three dozen searchers from Tamarack, Valley County Search and Rescue and the Valley County Sheriff's Office were looking for him.
But on Saturday the people he called heroes were looking in the ski area, and not on the west slope where Skinner was lost.
He hiked for more than four hours Saturday, including two and a half hours in the dark. "I realized that I couldn't get out of there," he said. "I couldn't see anything in front of me."
Once he knew he would be spending a cold night in the woods, Skinner dug a snow cave, crawled in and waited, wet and hypothermic, for the sun to rise.
"I wasn't thinking right, I was hearing stuff, seeing stuff," he said "I was thinking I was seeing cat tracks and ski tracks that weren't there. It was the toughest night that I've ever been through."
His attempt to start a fire failed, but Skinner said he didn't care about the money he burned. "I would have given away every single thing monetarily that I had just to get out of there," he said. "It doesn't matter."
Skinner started hiking with renewed determination as soon as day broke.
He soon spied a solitary snowmobile track about two miles in the distance, and spent the next couple of hours hiking over to it. He was relieved to find it was packed enough that he didn't have to slog inch by inch through the snow anymore.
"I stood up for the first time in a day and a half," he said of the track that led to his rescue. "I was just so glad to not be in that heavy snow"
He followed the track for about five miles and ran into a member of the Tamarack ski patrol on a snowmobile around 11:30 a.m. Sunday, nine miles from the resort.
Skinner said he didn't realize what a huge effort had been made to find him until they ran into another rescuer who had been searching the area on skis.
"He just threw his poles down," when he saw Skinner on the back of the snowmobile. "That guy actually put his boots in every boot mark I made. He said "I'm so glad you stopped."
And while the searchers recommended that people lost in the woods stay put so they can be found more easily, Skinner said that wasn't an option for him.
"I wasn't going to just sit there and wait for them to come get me because I was so cold," he said. "The only thing keeping me warm was moving."
That, and a desire to see his loved ones again. "If it was just about me, I don't think I would have been able to fight as hard," he said. "But my two kids, my wife and everything I've got going... . It was all about the people that I really cared about, and that I knew I needed to get back to."
Skinner finished his story by saying he's never faced as steep a challenge as his night lost in the wilds of Idaho.
"It was a classic example of a guy that thinks he knows what he's doing," he said. "I just didn't have any respect for the amount of risk involved going into an area you're not familiar with."
