Frisco’s Jay Irwin shares harrowing backcountry experience to inspire adventurers to do good

There are many events in life that can shape and change a person. Some people’s lives forever change after getting married or having a child, while others are transformed by a harrowing and traumatic event.

For longtime Summit County resident Jay Irwin, his life was changed by the latter, when he was caught in an avalanche on Vail Pass back in 2008.

Featured as the second speaker in the Friends of the Dillon Ranger District’s adventure speaker series, which Irwin co-founded, Irwin stood in front of dozens of people inside Keystone’s Warren Station on Wednesday, Feb. 28, and told the crowd about how his misadventure in the backcountry gave him an extra chance at life. 

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In the talk, Irwin detailed the avalanche in extensive detail. Alongside his adventure friend Bill Petersen, Irwin traveled to the top of Ptarmigan Hill on Vail Pass in the waning afternoon hours of a late-December day.

Once reaching their designated drop-in spot, the duo completed a game of rock, paper, scissors to determine who would get the honor of dropping into the velvety layers of fresh snow and who would be tasked with circling back around to the bottom of the route with the snowmobile.

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Irwin beat Petersen at the game, quickly dropping into the powder, taking some of the smoothest turns of his life before skiing into a foreign area of the peak.

“I had skied it a 100 times, but somehow I had gotten off course,” Irwin said. “Of course, being a man with a high ego, I didn’t stop for directions or check things out. I kept on skiing.”

Soon Irwin sank deep into snow that traveled up and over his shoulders, weightlessly turning across the peak before the whole mountain behind him crumbled in an instant. 

“As the avalanche took me through, it ripped me into the first tree and knocked off my skis,” Irwin said. “It ripped through the second tree, it severed my nerves and arteries and broke my tib-fib. And then, as I am swimming to the surface, just trying to get air, I get to the top and I see a tree — I hit my pelvis, broke the tree, shattered my pelvis.”

Laying motionless in the snow due to the extent of his injuries, Irwin managed to wrestle an arm free and make a call to Petersen through his radio. Irwin got seven words out to Petersen before his radio died because of the cold, but after several minutes of warming the radio in his jacket, Irwin successfully got the dire message across to Petersen.

Hearing the message, Petersen then promptly called search and rescue and began the trek to find Irwin in the avalanche debris.  

Not knowing if he was going to survive the ordeal, Irwin began filming heart-wrenching videos to his family and friends not only describing what happened, but also apologizing for his decisions.

“I filmed videos to my kids,” Irwin said, “telling them I was sorry for making such a fool-hearty decision.”

Petersen and a group of mutual friends eventually tracked down Irwin, covering him in jackets, assessing his injuries and starting a fire to keep warm until search and rescue could extract them from the slope.

It was during the several-hour span waiting to be transported out of the avalanche chute that Irwin made a promise that would link the two adventure friends for iternity.

“I said, ‘Man, if you ever need anything, anything at all, you let me know,'” Irwin said. 

Search and rescue teams from Summit and Eagle counties did their jobs in rescuing Irwin from the mountainside that night, and, 11 years later in 2019, Petersen cashed in on Irwin’s offer after finding out he needed a kidney transplant.

Seeing Petersen quickly declining in health due to the failing kidney, Irwin swiftly donated one of his kidneys to his best friend on Nov. 1, 2019. Following the transplant, Petersen was in fair health for a period of time before dying by suicide at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020.

Irwin grappled with losing his best friend for several months before flipping his viewpoint and choosing to live life to the fullest extent.

Now viewing his near-death experience as a true “bonus round” at life, Irwin has dedicated himself to being a spokesperson for living kidney donors, hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro and pursuing the 50 U.S. states summit world record as part of the National Kidney Registry and Kidney Donor Athletes.

“If you look around, the ideas, the causes and the people that are so important to you are right in front of you,” Irwin said. “I want you to embrace them. It worked for me. Grab onto that other challenge because it is there for you.”

In the process of bringing awareness to living kidney donors through mountain adventures, Irwin has inspired many people to become living kidney donors themselves, saving numerous lives much like how Irwin repaid Petersen for saving his life in the backcountry nearly 16 years ago.

In addition to the public talk, Irwin announced that his story will be told through a short documentary titled “Ripple,” which is set to be released over the next few months. The film has been dedicated to Petersen.