Star Valley mourns
By TOM MORTON
Star-Tribune staff writer Monday, January 14, 2008
[oas:casperstartribune.net/news/wyoming/top:Middle1]
Star Valley is mourning the deaths of three Afton-area men who died in a large avalanche near Cottonwood Lake in Lincoln County on Saturday, County Coroner Michael Richins said Sunday.
"They were well-known family men; all leave widows and children," he said.
"They went to the same church, they were all from the same community," Richins said.
The men -- Dr. Scott L. Bennett, Alan R. Jensen and Kim Steed -- were in their 40s or 50s and had about 20 children or more among them, he said.
Richins spent much of Saturday consoling the families, he said.
Citing members of the search and rescue team, Richins said the men were snowmobiling late Saturday morning or early afternoon in a branch canyon by Cottonwood Lake, which is about eight miles southeast of Afton.
Bennett, Jensen and Steed became stuck in a steep area in a bowl, and the search and rescue team came along to free them, Richins said.
The team returned to the same area later and saw the aftermath of the avalanche that buried them, he said.
The slide was about 700 feet long, 300 feet wide and 50 feet deep that uprooted trees, Richins said. "Essentially, it was a whole side of a mountain that came down."
Bennett, Jensen and Steed wore homing beacons enabling the search and rescue team to find them, but not save them, he said. "The sheer volume of that slide, it was too much."
In an avalanche, snow moves like a liquid and settles like cement when it stops, Richins said.
It traps people and they are unable to breathe, so they die of "compression asphyxia," he said.
Today, the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office plans to issue a press release about the men and the avalanche, an unidentified dispatcher said Sunday.