Joe Yelverton was on a rocky outcrop in the Chugach mountains, near Anchorage, Alaska, when he saw a wave of snow cascading towards him. The terrain was so steep that “it would be like looking up at a 10-storey building and seeing a truck falling off the top towards you”. He knew he would be hit within seconds, but he hoped that, if he could hang on to the mountainside, the wave would pass over him. He dropped down, swung his ice axe into the rock and held on as tightly as he could.
The snow piled on top of Yelverton, then started building up underneath him, “catapulting” him off the outcrop. Caught in the wave of snow, he tumbled down the face of the mountain, colliding with rocks. He felt the bones in his legs snap. “It felt as if my body was being ripped apart.” At the bottom of a cliff, where he had come to a stop, the snow continued to pile on top of him. “I was certain I was going to die,” he says. “You become entombed in snow, [and] as weight starts to pile up, the snow gets solidified. I couldn’t move, my mouth was packed full of snow and I couldn’t breathe.” It was a feeling of pure panic.
There was another explosion, he felt the snow shift, and suddenly he could see daylight as another wave churned him up to the surface and he continued down the mountain.
It was April 1984 and he was out climbing with two friends, Steve Campbell and Barry Silver. All three were in their early 20s and worked at an outdoor equipment store. Campbell was with Yelverton on the outcrop when the avalanche hit but “a bit further out, in a more vulnerable position”.
“We got strained out in a big boulder field,” Yelverton says, about 600 metres (2,000ft) from where they had been hit. He spotted Campbell – he would soon work out he hadn’t survived – but he couldn’t move or cry out to him.
Yelverton saw Silver, who was unharmed, making his way down the mountain, going first to Campbell. “He just became a machine,” remembers Yelverton. “He carried me through very steep terrain, very challenging conditions.” Once he had moved him to a safer place, Silver took off most of his own clothing to wrap around his injured friend , left his provisions, then, wearing just his base layers, set off on the six-mile trek back.
On the side of a mountain for several hours, unable to move and severely injured, Yelverton tried desperately to stay awake. “I knew that if I went to sleep, I probably wouldn’t wake up,” he says. He had hypothermia and kept going in and out of consciousness. “What would wake me up was the pain from the fractures. It was excruciating, but I think pain is what helped keep me alive.”
Yelverton remembers the hallucinations – Campbell’s body was visible on the slope above him, but he sometimes looked and thought that he had gone. “I would frantically start looking around for him, thinking he was next to me somewhere. Then I would ‘wake up’ and see his body.” In those lonely hours, he says, “I didn’t have any profound epiphanies, or people I wanted to say goodbye to, I just remember fighting [to survive], every minute. In some ways it mirrored the decades-long process I was in after the accident. I just had to take it minute by minute.” He remembers being dragged by Silver and a mountain rescuer to a waiting helicopter, then passing out. It had been about seven hours since the accident.
He was in hospital for a week, then it took about six months to heal from his physical injuries: broken bones, knee injuries, torn ligaments, fractured hands, deep cuts and a back injury. He returned to work on crutches and people around him – particularly his climbing community – were supportive. But he felt dazed and guilty that he had survived when his friend had not. “It was just shell shock. I was completely unfamiliar with that sort of trauma and ill-equipped to deal with it.”
Yelverton and Campbell had climbed together three or four times a week. A couple of weeks before the climb, they had fallen out – Campbell didn’t like the way Yelverton had been treating his (several) girlfriends and told him so. “I certainly wasn’t abusive, but I didn’t have the level of respect I should have had for people who let me into their lives,” says Yelverton, now 59, speaking on a video call from his home in Anchorage. “We hadn’t climbed together for about two weeks; he was pissed off at me,” he says. As a bit of a peace offering, and seeing a window of good weather opening up, Yelverton asked Campbell if he wanted to join him for a climb.
“On the mountains, we were back into our comfortable routine together,” says Yelverton. “It was very healing.” They had climbed the north face of this peak before, although using a different route and had always wanted to do a winter ascent. They thought they needed a third person on the two-day climb, which is why they invited Silver, a colleague and fellow climber. “It’s one of the more challenging peaks, but it was especially challenging because the avalanche conditions were not the best,” says Yelverton. “That’s something I’ve had to live with for my entire life.” Campbell felt some uncertainty about the conditions, “but I assured him we would turn around if things got too dangerous. I had concerns, but I thought we could deal with the conditions. Of course, that turned out to be a false assumption.”
The full weight of his trauma didn’t hit Yelverton properly until about 10 years later – it was unexpected, he says, “like a storm”. He had gone back to climbing a year after the accident, and in 1994 he went with a group of friends, including Jeff, the brother-in-law of one of his close friends, who hadn’t climbed a mountain before. It was a beautiful day and Jeff was overwhelmed at reaching the top.
A week later, Jeff was killed in a plane crash. Yelverton went to the memorial service and, when everyone had gone home, he stayed behind to collect up the chairs. “All of a sudden, I just got hit with a flood,” he says. “I was so incapacitated, I dropped to my knees and broke down.”
The memorial, he says, brought him “face to face with all the loss and grief I had been suppressing”. In the 10 years since his own accident and Campbell’s death, Yelverton had lost many other friends – about half his circle – to climbing accidents and suicide. The memorial unleashed it all. “That was the first time I realised I had some major issues.”
He called his father, who came to sit with him during the night, and two days later he was in his first therapy session, where post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was mentioned as a possible diagnosis. He didn’t stick to therapy, leaving after a couple of months. “I think it helped me not kill myself, but being young and stubborn, I thought I could figure it out myself.” To get away from his memories, he thought, he needed to get away from Anchorage.
Yelverton moved to Seattle and began working in mountain rescue. It was an obvious enough career choice for a good climber, and one who was tormented by a past accident and wanted to somehow put it right, but, unsurprisingly, it was also triggering. Not everyone he tried to rescue survived. Yelverton started drinking and taking drugs to cope. “I cut myself off from all my old friends, my family. I just immersed myself in this rescue job, but I think I knew that it was going to be the end of me if I continued.”
He left to go to college, then started working in litigation management for a large company, which was another stressful job. “That’s when I became a full-blown addict,” he says, taking mostly prescription painkillers. “It was affecting my job, I had really poor relationships with women. I was trying to outrun my past the whole time.” He was also having suicidal thoughts.
The flashbacks he occasionally had started morphing into violent and vivid hallucinations. He would leave his desk at lunch and go into the city. “I would be standing on a busy street corner, tons of pedestrians and cars, and, all of a sudden, I would see a car bomb go off right in front of me and see body parts flying by. I would see people screaming and running, bloody.” Then he would come out of it, and notice he was standing by himself as the lights had changed and everyone else had crossed the road. “These hallucinations became so disturbing and they were happening once a day. Sometimes, they would happen in meetings, I would be sitting at a table and the building would ‘explode’. It got to be so common that I could have one of these flashbacks and I wouldn’t react physically. I was reacting internally, the anxiety was gut-wrenching, but I just thought: ‘You’ve got to keep your shit together, you don’t want people to think you’re crazy.’”
He went to the doctor who got him to start therapy again. “The first two sessions, I was inconsolable, I couldn’t even talk. I just broke down.” His therapist taught him meditation, self-hypnosis and gave him EMDR, the eye movement desensitisation reprocessing therapy that is increasingly used in treating trauma. It really helped, he says, to start viewing his flashbacks as a piece of driftwood floating by in the river, and as something that would disappear. “I hung on to that analogy, I still use that,” he says. “I realised that I wasn’t going to go crazy if I just sat with these visions and that all the years I had spent trying to repress this illness was really breathing more life into it. As soon as I started acknowledging that this was probably something I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life, the challenge became: how do I integrate it so that it doesn’t have power over me?”
The book Man’s Search for Meaning, written by the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, was something Yelverton turned to several times, clinging to the idea of “the difference between the pursuit of happiness and deep purpose. I’ve really struggled with happiness, most of my life.” But purpose he can do – honouring and remembering Campbell is one, and he also finds it in his work now as a carpenter, and in discovering a love of art, photography and writing. Yelverton moved back to Alaska, where he continues to climb the mountains he has since he was a young man, which provides, he says, joy and solace. “The mountains are the only place where I never have anxiety attacks, flashbacks or feel hypervigilance; I feel at peace there.” It’s also where he feels “the strongest connection to Steve, sensing his presence many times. I often see him in my mind’s eye, smiling and laughing.”
He isn’t particularly comfortable talking about his story. “But in some ways I feel I have an obligation, to show that if I was able to navigate this, you can too.” He has been able, he says, “to embrace this notion of vulnerability and being willing to take emotional risks. My relationships have improved, I haven’t pushed people away like I did when I was younger.” Managing PTSD, for him, is “really a minute-by-minute process. Part of how I deal with it is knowing what I can’t do – I can’t watch violent movies, I avoid putting myself in circumstances where I know that I might be triggered, I try to stay as present as I can.”
There was nothing heroic about him surviving that day, he says. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with adventurers sharing their survival stories, because we go into the mountains for recreation, it’s not like we’re going to war.” He would never discount the power of someone’s will to survive, but survival is often about luck, he says. “Steve went through the same circumstances I did … I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing that I had died alongside him – survivor’s guilt persisted for many years.”
He has arrived at a place where for the first time, he says, “I’m actually thankful that this is my life. I feel grateful that I’ve been able to experience the things that I have.” In the last few years, happier memories of Steve have replaced the painful ones: “I’m starting to recall the things I really loved about him, his mannerisms, the things that were very endearing. I didn’t have space for that before.”
Minutes before the avalanche, he and Campbell had been sitting together on the rocks, eating lunch. Yelverton had apologised for the rift and told Campbell he loved him. They had hugged. “I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t had that conversation with him,” he says. It really helped, much later, to “inform my philosophy on being open and honest with people”. It’s a moment he often returns to – two best friends, in the place they loved.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
