A snow safety expert renowned for his expertise on avalanches was swept to his death on an Alaska mountain by just such a giant slide of snow.A lifelong Alaskan skilled in backcountry survival, Mike O'Leary died when an avalanche buried him under 18 feet of snow on Mount Eyak where he and three others skied Saturday.One of nearby Cordova's premier snow safety experts, O'Leary, 56, regularly posted avalanche forecasts on the city's Web site. His last came the day before he died, when he declared the risk "considerable.""He was the local avalanche snow guru," said Kevin Quinn of Points North Heli-Adventures, who helped recover O'Leary's body Saturday evening. "He basically ran the local ski hill here."O'Leary is the third person in Alaska to be killed by an avalanche this year. A member of the Cordova town council and a commercial fisherman by trade, O'Leary was married with no children.The slide -- which Quinn said measured 1,800 feet long and 70- to 100- feet wide -- happened on a 45-degree slope that had been soaked by three inches of recent rain, Leary wrote the day before he died. O'Leary and three others had skied Mount Eyak from top to bottom that day. Realizing the dogs they had brought with them were still on the slope, O'Leary and Tully Devine, 31, headed back up."Apparently they were about halfway up when they heard the snow crack," Alaska State Trooper Megan Peters said. Volunteers searched the slope by air and spotted Devine, who had a broken leg, but found no sign of O'Leary. A helicopter plucked Devine off the mountain and four rescuers began to dig to find O'Leary. Their task was formidable, requiring a chain saw to cut through a tree that had been swept away with O'Leary."Time's ticking, daylight's going by, and finally we" found him, Quinn said. "We got to him only to find his legs are trapped by more trees."Using shovels to break branches, the volunteers freed O'Leary and put his body aboard the helicopter. Aside from Devine, no one else was injured.O'Leary was well regarded in his community, friends said."More than once he was voted citizen of the year," said Quinn, who has lived and owned a business in Cordova for 11 years. "He's spent so much of his time donating time and energy to things. He's that guy, if there's a pothole and the town doesn't fix it, he's out there with a sand truck fixing it. He'd give you the shirt off his back."Everyone wants their obituary to say what a great guy they were, but Mike O'Leary honestly was one of those guys. There wasn't a bad bone in that guy's body," Quinn said.E-mail Beth Bragg at bbragg(at)adn.com (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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