Haines author and backcountry adventurer Tom McGuire, 79, set off skating alone on Thursday, Feb. 6, and fell through the ice, disappearing before he could be rescued.

His disappearance touched off an official search with half a dozen volunteer firefighters and a state park ranger teaming up and walking more than a mile out onto the ice to try and find him; a search by plane the next day that revealed stretches of open water toward the north end of the lake where McGuire is believed to have fallen in. Privately, friends of the family went out on the lake in the days following his disappearance, looking for any sign of where he went in.

A longtime friend of the family found a spot on the northeast side of the lake, and his mitten nearby which Sally McGuire, Tom’s wife, said is the spot where he is assumed to have fallen through.

Troopers said Wednesday that members of the Alaska Dive Search and Rescue Recovery Team are headed to Haines to help with the recovery.

Meanwhile three of the couple’s four children, Gabriel, Rebecca and Rosemary, arrived in Haines after hearing of the disappearance. The fourth, Rafe, is set to arrive in a week or so. While no stranger to his backcountry rambling, the couple have been married for 55 years, Sally McGuire said his sudden death is a shock.

“Like you’re standing on a rug and somebody, something jerked it out from under you,” she said.

The last moments/witness

A 25-year-old Haines resident, Jonathan Rasch, was skating on Chilkoot Lake at the same time as McGuire last Thursday, though he said the two never came more than 500 yards from each other.

It was Rasch’s first time skating on Chilkoot Lake, but he’s used to skating on natural ice. He said he spent five years playing hockey on natural ice in Montana. As he and his Australian Shepherd-Corgi mix, Lupine, made their way away from the boat launch last week, Rasch said he skated only where he could see others’ tracks and avoided patches of ice that looked different from their surroundings.

He wandered farther away from the southern shore, occasionally picking Lupine up to warm her paws. From the boat launch to the north end of the lake is just over 3.6 miles long, according to Google Earth. At Rasch’s farthest point, his smartwatch showed him to be just over 2 miles from the boat launch.

After skating over a number of cracks in the ice, he encountered one that gave him pause. “It groaned when I went over it,” he said.

So, he turned headed back toward the shore, passing McGuire on his way back. He paused periodically to pick Lupine up and at one point stopped, sat her down and took a drink of water. Then he heard a loud crack. “A very definite snap,” he said.

“I thought it was just shifting ice. But then I immediately heard the yells afterward. ‘Oh god, oh god, help,’” he said he heard.

According to logs on his Garmin InReach, Rasch hit the SOS button at 3:28 p.m. Then he turned and took off back in the direction he’d come from and skated hard. According to his smart watch, he covered nearly a mile in his search for McGuire.

For the next nine minutes, the two shouted back and forth to each other. Rasch said he’d ask “Where are you?” and McGuire would respond with “I’m over here!” But the sound bounced off of the ice and surrounding mountains in a disorienting echo.

He kept having to stop. “I couldn’t hear because of the noise from my skates on the ice. So, like, stopping and talking to him and then also texting the other person on the end of the InReach,” he said.

As Rasch worked his way closer to where he thought McGuire had gone into the water, he said he started hearing the ice creaking underneath him.

“I came to these two big cracks that met at a point in the ice and I didn’t really want to cross,” he said.

He called out again but this time McGuire didn’t respond. He sent a message saying as much on his inReach at 3:37 p.m. and then stayed in that spot yelling and listening for a response. He got a message from Garmin that emergency responders had been notified and was told to stay where he was until they could reach him.

But Chilkoot Lake is remote and it took time for Haines Volunteer Fire Department to get the gear they needed and stage at the boat ramp so they could safely head out on the ice toward him until nearly 40 minutes later.

They walked slowly, in a line across the ice and radioed back to first responders on shore when they found Rasch crouched down low on the ice. Lupine had gotten cold.

“I took my backpack off and put her on my backpack and then put my jacket around her and then, like, huddled over her to warm her back up,” he said. “So I didn’t see them walking out until they were probably 500 yards away.”

The sun was setting by the time the team of six first responders arrived – Haines personnel and the state park ranger.

“The lead person walked to me, and the rest hung back. There was a second guy but the ice was spidering under him,” Rasch said. He said he ran them through the sequence of events.

“At that point they said, well, realistically we don’t have enough rope to safely search the area,” he said. “They needed a helicopter.”

So, they all turned around and headed back toward shore. Rasch skated back, his feet finally touching shore hours after he had first called for help.

A history of near misses

Talk to people in the Chilkat Valley about ice skating on Chilkoot Lake and they almost reflexively start listing off the names of people who have gone in. Tom Heywood, Tim McDonough and Ann Myren, Thom Ely; each of them still skating on the lake today.

Heywood, who said he had been ice skating on the lake for the first time in years the day before Tom McGuire disappeared, said he fell through the ice on a Superbowl Sunday about 25 years ago.

He was in his mid-40s at the time, and said he was essentially alone when he arrived at the lake. He took off, intending to skate to the far end and back. But there was a light dusting of snow blowing across the surface of the lake, so the ice looked deceptively uniform.

“As I got down closer to the far end of the lake, I just crashed through,” he said. “I mean, absolutely no warning, no cracking of the ice, no anything. I looked around, there was ice bobbing around my head.”

He said he tried to pull himself up and broke the ice numerous times.

“I was eventually able to get one knee up and my arms kind of spread out and I just kind of wiggled my way up onto the ice and spread-eagled about 10 yards down to the ice,” he said.

But, Heywood also said Tom McGuire – who has been skating on that lake for 40 years – had so much more experience with it than he did. “This is what’s scary,” Heywood said. “I mean, he would exercise good judgment time and time again out there, I’m sure dozens if not hundreds of times over the years.”

That question of what exactly happened lingers for Thom Ely, too. Ely had his own near miss when he went through the ice and into the water during a nighttime skate about 10 years ago.

Ely said there’s an area on the west side of the lake where the Chilkoot River comes in that never really freezes thick.. He said there’s a good mile of shoreline where the ice is thinner.

“My mistake, when I went in, was that it was night and I started cutting back across the lake from the west side to the east side and I heard cracking under my skates and I turned back to the shore where the ice was thick. I skated up the shore – what I thought was far enough – and then I started cutting back across to the east side. I was skating really fast and then all of the sudden, boom, I’m in the water,” he said.

When he went in, Ely said he had on a down parka and pile pants and wind pants and a jacket so he was buoyant at first. But, it was cold and he could feel the water seeping into his clothes and starting to drag him down.

He had ice spikes hanging around his neck, so he put one in each hand and was able to pull his chest up onto the and slide for about 20 feet.

“The ice was cracking underneath me. But, I wasn’t going back into the water, it was just cracking and cracking. When I didn’t hear the sound of cracking anymore, I stood up and started skating back toward the boat landing,” he said.

He said the experience left him being much more careful on the ice.

“When I skate out there, I’m very cognizant of looking for cracks, if there are any and also the bubble line and ice and getting my eye down there and assessing how thick the ice is,” he said. “If I hear any noises, I turn around. I don’t go for it.”

Unanswered questions

Initially, Sally McGuire said it was hard to believe someone with her husband’s experience didn’t see the weak ice.

But in the days since he went in – she has heard from a number of people who are more familiar with the changing ice conditions and she feels differently now. She said the pilot who flew the lake Friday morning with ranger Jacques Turcotte said that the spot where they believe he went in looked safe and he “just suddenly hit a bad patch.”

Family friend Michael Wald also skated the lake Friday looking for him and found a spot where Tom’s mitten was floating.

“It’s about three quarters of the way down [the lake] and kind of in the middle,” he said.

There, the ice had separated by about a meter and then refrozen.

“The ice that Tom McGuire was on for 99.9 percent of his skate was good,” Wald said. “But he tried to skate over a refrozen crack and it was thin.”

Sally McGuire, and others, also said they had a hard time understanding why he wasn’t able to self-rescue. While she didn’t check to see if he was wearing them when he left Thursday morning, she said he always wore a set of ice spikes that his daughter made for him.

“He’s extremely strong, you know. I just couldn’t understand how he couldn’t get himself out, even if it is slippery,” she said.

In talking it over with their children, she said they have a theory. Tom McGuire was having heart problems and the family believes that he may have had a heart attack when he hit the icy water.

But even without knowing the circumstances that led up to his death, Sally McGuire said she has always understood that Chilkoot Lake is dangerous. The couple shares a home along the shore of its outlet into the Lynn Canal and in the 40 years since the family moved there she’s never skated on it though her husband and children did so frequently.

She said she knew he was going skating when he left Thursday around 2 p.m. and when he hadn’t gotten back by 4 p.m. and all of the emergency vehicles flew by the house – she knew something had gone wrong. Eventually state park ranger Jacques Turcotte came by to tell her that her husband had gone missing.

Now, she just hopes they find him. “I kind of don’t like to think of him wandering around out there,” she said.

And, she said she wishes people shared her concern about the lake.

“It’s freakin’ dangerous,” she said.

The freedom of choice

Talk to people who have been skating on the lake for decades, and it’s clear that the danger is well-known. But some say the risk is worth the reward. Ely said it’s probably his favorite thing to do in the Chilkat Valley, particularly at night when the moonlight illuminates the hoarfrost.

“Tom (McGuire) was doing what he wanted to do and enjoying the beautiful environment we live in. There’s always a chance that something’s going to happen but we still go out and do it because it’s an amazing experience to be out here in this wilderness,” Ely said.

He, Heywood and Wald also say there are ways to make an outing on the lake less dangerous.

Ely said it’s good to carry safety equipment.

“I carry the rescue spikes on me,” he said. “They saved my life. If I hadn’t gotten those ice spikes, I probably would not have gotten out and I was alone.”

Ely also said if people do end up in the water, it’s important to remember to turn around and climb out on the thicker ice.

“The thick ice is behind you,” he said. “You were on ice, and then you weren’t – so it got thinner. What people make the mistake of doing is, they try to swim forward. That could be a quarter mile of thin ice.”

He and Heywood also say the far end of the lake is much more dangerous than the area closest to the boat ramp. Heywood doesn’t skate back there anymore.

“I stay away from that. And, I always skate where I see people’s tracks,” he said. “I think people need first, first of all, to realize that while there’s many safe places on the lake that far, third or fourth of the lake, in the middle, particularly, is not reliable,” he said.

Wald, who also regularly skates on the lake and has taught ice safety for the North Slope Borough said there are two parts of safety:

Prevention. That is knowing the lake and knowing there are areas where the ice is going to be thinner, and carrying an ice probe or some way to test the ice to verify its thickness.

Mitigation. That is having some way to get out should you end up falling through it. He points to the ice rescue picks, or ice awls, that are cheap and easy to carry.

Many also said it was best to be skating with other people as well, though Heywood said he was grateful to be alone when he went in because he didn’t have to worry about someone else.

Rasch, the last person to see Tom McGuire alive, has complicated feelings about it, too.

There was a point when he thought he was skating alone on Thursday afternoon that he thought about heading back. But, he saw McGuire out there and decided that he would keep going.

“Because there was someone else out there that could potentially act if there was an accident,” he said. “But, looking back, that’s not necessarily the case because I was pretty helpless. It was kind of a false sense of security that there was another person there.”

• This story originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.