A part-time Aspen resident survived an hour-long ordeal after he fell into a mine shaft while skiing Aspen Mountain on Tuesday.

While riding up the gondola on that windswept
day, Kelley Guest, 59, was discussing the case of a man who died
earlier this week at the Homewood ski area in Lake Tahoe, Calif., who
fell in a tree well.

“Most of the time when you read about it, it’s the ones who didn’t make it,” Guest said.

The accident occurred near the top of Cone Dump 2, an expert-only run at the end of the Dumps that opens intermittently.

“We figured it was the best snow on the
mountain,” said Guest, who added he did not know until Tuesday that the
Dumps are so called because that’s where 19th century silver miners
would dump their tailings, not for the snow that piles up on the steep
slopes. The run through the gated terrain was Guest’s second lap in the
Dumps that day.

As Guest and his group negotiated the
technical top section of the run, Guest found himself at the top of a
cliff band, and was forced to make a difficult turn. He over-turned and
found himself falling over backwards. But instead of hitting the ground
and popping back up, Guest hit the ground and kept going down, sliding
at least 10 feet before coming to a stop. He couldn’t breathe at first,
but was able to clear enough snow away to get air flow.

He did not know until he was rescued that he
had fallen into a mine shaft. He believed at the time that he was
trapped in a deep tree well. His thoughts turned briefly to the
California man.

Some would assume those situations would cause one’s life to flash before their eyes, Guest said. But not in his case.

“My first though was, ‘How do I get out of
here?’” he said. “I’ll be damned if I am going to die this way. (In
those situations), every muscle, every thought is how to survive.”

He was hanging head-first down the hole that
went diagonally back into the hill at a 45-degree angle with his skis
caught across the beams at the shaft’s entrance. To get better
leverage, he released one of his bindings, but thought better of
releasing the second leg, as it was the only thing keeping him from
falling farther into the abyss. Guest said he spent a half hour trying
to wiggle, shimmy and wrestle his way out of the hole, but with no luck.

At some point after his fall, one of the
friends he was skiing with called Guest on his new iPhone. When he
realized it was hopeless to try and extract himself from the hole, he
remembered his phone. Using the earphone chord to locate it,  he
pulled it up to his head to call Paula Loud, the friend in his group
that called him after he fell. With his fingers frostbitten from being
out of his gloves for the last half hour, he credits not only the fact
that he had a cell phone, but specifically the iPhone’s touch screen
technology with saving his life.

He also credits Loud and members of the Aspen
Mountain Ski Patrol, who he said helped keep him calm and showed great
professionalism.

Patrollers tied ropes to each of Guest’s legs
and pulled him out of the hole. Still at the top of the run, when
offered a toboggan ride down to the base, Guest instead opted to follow
patrollers down the powder-choked run.

“You got me out of this hole. I’ll manage to get down this mountain,” he recalled thinking.

In what he calls pure fate, Guest said that
Tuesday, for no good reason, he brought his cell phone skiing with him
for the first time.

“Normally I don’t like the interruptions, or
using your cell phone on the gondola,” said Guest, who has owned his
Aspen residence since 1999 and lives in Carmel, Calif., and New York
City when he’s not in Aspen. “I’m up there for the recreation and
exercise and the cell phone doesn’t seem simpatico with that.”

Guest said he holds no ill will towards the
Aspen Skiing Co. and that he admires the way mountain personnel
responded to his situation.

“When you’ve gone through something like that
and basically gotten your life back, you don’t hold any ill feeling
towards anybody.” Guest said.

SkiCo spokesman Jeff Hanle said that while
there are hundreds of mine shafts on Aspen Mountain, an incident like
Guest’s is “very rare.” Most mine shafts are out of bounds or in closed
areas, Hanle added.

Wilder Dwight, an 11-year-old boy, died after falling into a mine shaft while skiing out of bounds off Aspen Mountain in 1986.

There was a rope closing off the mine shaft, but Guest’s initial fall took him through the rope, Hanle said.

Hanle said he is unsure if SkiCo fills in or
blocks off mine shafts that interrupt skiing terrain, but the amount of
mine shafts would likely make the job unfeasible, he said.

Particularly with this winter’s copious
snowfall making certain areas — such as lines in the Cone Dumps —
skiable that are not usually skiable, “You have to do everything you
can to exercise every bit of caution, especially in that kind of
terrain. The sign at the top of the gated terrain spells it all out.”

“We’re just grateful things turned out the way they did,” Hanle said.

Guest went skiing the next day, and again on Thursday, when he went back to the area where he fell.

“It was that get-back-in-the-saddle-again syndrome. I can’t think about being down in that hole,” Guest said.

curtis@aspendailynews.com