It was a workout day for Don Moden Jr.
For the 57-year-old Ridgway athlete and adventurer, that could take many forms — a gravel bike ride along County Road 24, a run on one of the countless ribbons of trail etched into Ouray County’s plateaus and mountain sides. This January day found him skinning up and skiing down a slope above 11,000 feet in elevation on Red Mountain No. 3, stacking fresh lines next to each other.
He and his wife Brenda knew this area well. They skied an adjacent slope the day before. He had criss-crossed the slopes around Red Mountain Pass for 16 years.
Don headed out on his own around 8 a.m. Jan. 7. As they always did when one went on an adventure without the other, he let Brenda know where he was going.
She tried to convince herself not to get nervous when the check-in call didn’t come as expected just after noon. Maybe he damaged his phone while skiing. Maybe he was assisting with a rescue.
Another hour passed. She called the sheriff ’s office, wondering if there had been an accident on Red Mountain Pass that delayed his return. No, there was no incident on the pass. She asked a sheriff ’s deputy to look for his truck. She knew something was wrong when he found it in the same place Don had parked it. She grabbed her gear, including an avalanche beacon and probe, selecting snowshoes over skis because she figured it would be easier to move around on the steep slope.
Brenda told the deputy to have the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team follow her in. She started climbing a slope in an area known locally as Bollywood, knowing Don could get longer runs in there than other nearby slopes.
The trees initially prevented her from getting a clear view, but then she spotted the slide. She immediately cut across to the debris field.
She turned on her beacon and got her first reading about 180 feet away. Within 3 feet, she started probing the debris. Punched through to rock. Began digging. Hit a boot.
She began yelling for the rescue team so they could find her faster. Other backcountry skiers arrived, followed by rescue team members. One of them quickly finished digging.
The air pocket Brenda hoped for wasn’t there.
***
They met accidentally at a bar in Arizona 35 years ago.
Brenda had graduated from college a few years earlier. Don was still working his way through Arizona State University. Her friends begged her to meet them for a night out. He and his friend were there, too, and had asked a couple of other girls to dance. They got shot down.
Brenda witnessed the rejection and felt bad. She convinced one of her friends they needed to ask Don and his friend to dance.
“That was all she wrote,” Brenda said. She had no interest in dating at the time. Four months later, though, they were discussing marriage. They moved in together, saved money, got engaged and married in 1993.
They talked for years about moving to Colorado. They purchased a custom-converted van and spent time camping at Molas Lake near Silverton and four-wheeling over Cinnamon Pass. They started looking for property in Ouray County, thinking they would buy a place they could use for vacations, then later retire and move into permanently.
But then their jobs allowed them to work from home — long before remote work became commonplace. And the San Juans fueled their passion for adventure and permitted them to do most anything right outside their back door. They bought a home and moved here in 2007.
“I always tell people, we never knew how much we needed to move here,” Brenda said.
Don made a living out of information technology. But he made a life from the outdoors.
When Chase Bank informed him in 2016 that he had to return to work in an office in Delaware or take a severance package, the choice was easy.
Send the severance package, he told them.
He retired at 48.
***
Born in Salina, Kansas, Don developed his love of sports and the outdoors before most kids can read. He competed in his first BMX bike race at 5. He built his first bike at 7. He made the high school varsity wrestling team as a freshman. His coaches instilled in him a mental and physical toughness that pushed him to excel well past the point most others stopped.
“He could dig in and work through pain and stick with things,” Brenda said. “This is a guy who would gear up and go for a 100-mile bike ride just because he liked it.”
His athletic prowess ran a wide gamut. Biking. Running. Swimming. Mountaineering. Ice climbing. Hunting. Deep water scuba diving. He summited all but three of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. He completed more than 1,000 backcountry ski tours. He finished three Ironman triathlons, the legendary long-distance race consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run.
“Don is the kind of person that every single thing he did, he did to the utmost of his abilities, and his abilities were considerable,” said Ouray resident Mike Gibbs, who met the Modens shortly after they moved to the county. He volunteered for years with Don on the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team.
Ridgway resident and friend Mary Aliota met the Modens through a workout group. She, Brenda and others went for a run. Don rode his bike. They all met up for coffee in Ridgway.
“Chances are if you were out on (County Road) 24 or Log Hill or County Road 1, (Don) was flying by you on a bicycle,” Aliota said. “He was always training for some ultra event and Brenda was right there with him.”
When Don helped her tune up her bike in his garage, Aliota was struck by how organized everything was — all the cabinets and equipment and appliances had a place and were meticulously maintained.
“Whatever he was passionate about, he was into 150%,” she said.
Don embraced new challenges, relished research, loved tinkering, whether it was figuring out how to make his and Brenda’s bikes run more smoothly or mounting bindings on Gibbs’ skis.
“If he picked up a hobby,” Gibbs said, “you could rest assured he was going to become a subject matter expert.”
He also cherished mentoring others, inspiring and nurturing their own passion for the outdoors. He and Brenda volunteered with the Ouray Ice Festival when they first moved here, and Don spent a couple of summers with the Ouray Trail Group removing downed trees from trails deep in the forest that hadn’t been cleared in years. A desire to help people, combined with being in top physical shape, made him a natural fit for the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team, with whom he volunteered for seven years.
There was one aspect to the job he struggled to accept.
“The recoveries were hard. He didn’t like the recoveries,” Brenda said, noting that she had to remind Don that finding bodies and returning them to families provided closure for them.
“For him it felt like he was starting out on something that, to him, felt like a failure to begin with,” she said. “It was an important thing. He wanted to save the people.”
***
The avalanche that claimed Don’s life was about 800 feet wide and traveled 400 vertical feet, according to an updated report Colorado Avalanche Information Center officials posted online Tuesday afternoon.
He was buried in about 3 feet of snow, too deep for a self-rescue, CAIC said in its report. Investigators concluded he may have been buried for more than four hours. He was wearing a rescue transceiver and an avalanche airbag backpack, but it didn’t deploy, according to CAIC.
Investigators found one track heading up the slope and seven separate downhill ski tracks made by Don and possibly other backcountry skiers as they skinned up the hill, then skied down. The downhill tracks moved south toward wind-drifted snow that eventually avalanched.
That fact suggested to CAIC investigators that there were possibly no indications of snowpack instability. The report noted Don skied an adjacent slope the day before with no signs of dangerous conditions.
The avalanche conditions that day were caused by a dry start to December, followed by two feet of snow between Dec. 24 and Jan. 5 that fell at a weather station a little more than a mile away from where the avalanche occurred.
“An unusually snowy November in the western San Juan Mountains was followed by a mild and dry December,” the report read. “The result was a very weak snowpack composed entirely of faceted snow grains.” Strong winds that accompanied the holiday snow “drifted layers of hard snow onto open slopes.” Eight more inches of snow between Jan. 5 and 7 covered the old snowpack with fresh powder.
The avalanche broke at the treeline at about 11,300 feet. Avalanche conditions were considered “moderate” — level 2 of 5 — in the area at the time of the slide.
***
Brenda said Don paid attention to CAIC forecasts and avalanche conditions whenever he contemplated a backcountry outing. But he also believed he knew the mountains well enough to steer clear of the most dangerous places.
“You can make all the best decisions and something can still go wrong,” Brenda said.
She said they often talked about how the activities they loved carried risk. They concluded they would rather accept those risks and enjoy the quality of life they did than be fearful and forgo those adventures.
“We talked about — we’ve already had so much in our lives that if something happens to one of us, we shouldn’t have regrets,” she said.
Rather than regrets, Brenda carries more than 30 years of memories. Memories of that chance meeting at the bar. Memories of coming together at the finish line at her first Ironman triathlon in Switzerland in 1996, raising their arms in the air and waving at each other. Memories of being so connected that they could finish each other’s stories.
“The two of us had a great life together and I hope I can just continue it and live up to what we’ve already started,” she said.
