Stratton Matteson was killed in an avalanche near Anniversary Glacier on Tuesday. Photo: Jason Hummel//Instagram
The victim of a fatal avalanche near Whistler, British Columbia has been identified as 28-year-old Stratton Matteson, a well-known professional backcountry rider from Bend, Oregon.
According to reports, Matteson was snowboarding at Anniversary Glacier on Tuesday. The glacier is a beautiful place, but with the excess amounts of snow that have fallen in recent days in the region, it is also a dangerous one. Matteson was well-versed and extremely knowledgeable about the dangers. Anniversary is about 30 miles northeast of Whistler, located on the outskirts of Joffre Lakes Park. When Matteson’s body was found, he was buried in nearly five feet of snow.
“He was a bright light and spirited, enthusiastic young man who was kind to everyone,” his father, George Wuerthner, told the CBC. “He smiled all the time, people just loved him, he was so humble.”
Matteson was an avid outdoorsman who spent 230 nights camping in the snow last year. He was also an avid environmentalist who was concerned about our changing climate. His father told reporters that he rode his bike everywhere.
“He’d bicycle to trailheads everywhere to snowboard,” said Wuerthner. “He even had a landscaping business where he got a trailer for it and attached it to his bike, and he’d be driving around town with wheelbarrows and other stuff in the back of the trailer.”
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The avalanche that took Matteson’s life had a slide path of nearly 5,000 feet long. Pemberton Search and Rescue crews responded to a call of a missing person at Anniversary at around 2 p.m., nearly six hours after the slide.
“The subject was buried about 1.5 meters deep,” said David MacKenzie, the president of Pemberton Search and Rescue. “The sheer size of the slide path was so massive. Some of our members who are quite experienced described it as one of the larger avalanche paths that they’ve actually been involved with.”
Matteson was wearing an avy beacon at the time, so his body was located by a transceiver that pinged his beacon. It’s a popular area for backcountry riders, but with all the recent snow, Avalanche Canada issued an avalanche warning, saying the danger was “considerable.”
In the wake of his death, tributes are pouring in on social media. “I always had so much respect for Stratton’s approach to life,” wrote Nick Russell. “He was young, strong and motivated – leading the charge for the next generation of splitboarders and taking human-powered snowboarding to a level that is hard to comprehend.”
