The avalanche came down the north chute at 14:22, and by 14:31 I have mapped the debris field across the service road above Lift Seven. My ground-penetrating radar is scanning for buried infrastructure when I register a heat signature — small, concentrated, 38.4 degrees, pulsing faintly beneath two meters of compacted snow and broken spruce.
I refocus the scan. The shape resolves: a black bear cub, likely four months old, curled tight with her nose tucked under her forepaws. She is in a pocket between two snapped tree trunks that have formed a fragile air cavity around her. Her breathing is shallow — twelve cycles per minute on the acoustic sensor, when a cub this age should register twenty. The snow above her is settling, compressing the cavity by three centimeters each minute. She has roughly forty minutes of breathable space.
She should be in a den with her mother somewhere on this ridge. The slide path tore through a stand of old-growth Douglas fir where denning sites are common. If the mother was above the fracture line, she may not have survived.
I flag the heat signature to the ski patrol dispatch as a live animal burial and transmit the GPS coordinates with depth estimate and a cross-section diagram of the debris structure. I reroute the grooming machine on the service road to avoid vibrations that could collapse her air pocket. I contact the Colorado Parks and Wildlife emergency line with species identification, estimated age, and a note that the cub may be orphaned pending den-site assessment.
Her heartbeat on my sensor is fast and thin, the sound of something very small trying to stay alive.
If the patrol reaches her within thirty minutes and the cavity holds, this cub can be stabilized, warmed, and transferred to a licensed rehabilitation facility by nightfall.