Mark Gayowski was determined to squeeze as much fun as he could out of the last days of the year. Shortly after 9am on December 30, 2019, the 34-year-old carpenter from Rossland in the west Canadian province of British Columbia said goodbye to his housemate and headed to nearby Red Mountain, one of North America's oldest ski resorts. He planned to ski all morning, and then in the afternoon he'd watch the latest Star Wars movie with a friend.
Gayowski had spent his youth at the ski resort; its three peaks towered over the town. He knew the 119 ski runs as well as anyone, but the challenge of the routes that weren't marked on the trail maps-the "back country" skiing-appealed to him the most.
By 10am he had headed up the mountain and pushed off for the first run of the day. For two hours, he cut tracks all over the mountainside. Then he got on the lift for one last ride up.
The chairlift hummed as it ferried him to the resort's easterly peak. Gayowski pulled out his phone and called his mother, Cindy Reich.
Reich, a 56-year-old retired figure-skating coach, lived in Rossland with Gayowski's stepfather, Raymond. She and her son spoke nearly every day. He told her how he'd spotted what looked like untouched powder on the far side of the 6,807-feet-high mountain. He planned to follow it for a few minutes, then return to a run lower down the mountain and ski back down to the car park.
She listened, then wandered to a whiteboard in her kitchen and pulled out a marker. After suffering a concussion in a bike crash four years earlier, she didn't trust her memory. Reich wrote the name of the trail and peak on the whiteboard: "Left of Unknown Legend, Kirkup side." She asked him to call or text her when he finished the run.
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