I wrote about my friend Phil back in January. He and two others went snowboarding and never came back. Well, today I saw on CNN that the bodies had been found.

I had been expecting this, but not living in the mountains I didn’t realize that snow could hang around this late in the year, and while I was pretty much resigned that Phil was gone, some small part of me was hoping it was some elaborate joke and he was off in Tahiti or somewhere. Since he hadn’t been found that small part of me was getting more and more hopeful.

But there is another part of me that is happy to know – one way or the other. I can only imagine what families of soldiers gone “Missing In Action” go through, perhaps for their entire lives. Plus he was found by friends. Dave Wesley writes:

I went out looking for them 3 weekends ago with Jerry and my girlfriend Erika and a couple of other friends and was planning to go again this weekend, when I heard that a group from a backcountry website were offering to help. Eleven volunteers, Devlin’s girlfriend Megan, and I went out yesterday. Luck played a big factor in finding them, though the person-power sure helped.

There are still questions to be answered, but the big ones have been resolved. They were bivying in a thickly wooded area when a massive avalanche swept through the trees from open slopes above them and buried them in their sleep. Normally, the area where they camped would have been considered safe, but that weekend was not normal, with 50 year slides taking out old trees. Looking at their campsite, it does not look like they were in distress when they set up camp. They were still under three feet of snow when we found them and I’m grateful to say that we were the first to disturb them.

He will be missed.