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Mountain man
When Michael Miner isn’t managing Beaver Creek Golf Club, he’s busy saving lives in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
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Beaver Creek GC superintendent Michael Miner has volunteered as a member of Vail Mountain Rescue since 1999. Photo by Jack Affleck/www.japhoto.com |
On September 24, 2005, Michelle Vanek — a 35-year-old wife and mother of four from Lakewood, Colo., a suburb of Denver — walked into the woods at the Halfmoon Trailhead southwest of Vail. She and her hiking partner, Eric Sawyer, planned to climb the 14,005-foot-tall Mount of the Holy Cross. It is known as a “fourteener,” one of Colorado’s 54 peaks that rise above 14,000 feet.
Vanek was a triathlete, but Holy Cross was to be her first fourteener. She and Sawyer had been planning and talking about the trip for nearly a year. The day before the one-day outing, Vanek and her husband, Ben, went to a local sporting goods store to outfit her for the excursion.
Sawyer and Vanek left the trailhead at 6:30 a.m. Soon thereafter, they made a series of serious mistakes. For one, Sawyer had left his food and water purifier in the car. Second, and perhaps more important, rather than taking the fairly easy and straightforward North Ridge route, Vanek and Sawyer made a route-finding error and wound up on Halo Ridge. It’s a long, serious, committing and circuitous route to the summit of Holy Cross. By 1:30 p.m., both Vanek and Sawyer had run out of water, Vanek was exhausted and they weren’t yet to the summit.
Then the pair made a final, and eventually fatal, error — they agreed to separate. Sawyer continued on to the summit of Holy Cross alone. Vanek, meanwhile, would rest for a bit, then traverse the mountain northward where she planned to intercept a trail and Sawyer for the descent.
When Sawyer descended from the peak, Vanek was nowhere to be found. Sawyer searched in vain for his hiking companion, and finally rushed out to the trailhead to call for help. The Eagle County Sheriff’s office received the 911 call.
Meanwhile, GCSAA Class A superintendent Michael Miner sat in his office at the maintenance facility of Beaver Creek Golf Club, near Avon, Colo. It was the end of the season, and he and his crew were readying the course for its hibernation during the fast-approaching winter. A small black beeper on his belt buzzed to life. Miner looked at the message: he and the other members of Vail Mountain Rescue were being activated. They would be needed to search for, and hopefully rescue, Michelle Vanek.
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After landing his first head superintendent job at Beaver Creek GC in 2004, Miner ushered the course through the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program. |
Start spreading the news
Michael Miner grew up in Port Jefferson Station, on Long Island, New York. Tall and athletic, he attended the University of Delaware on a partial lacrosse scholarship as an “undecided” student. By the beginning of his sophomore year in 1991, the university wanted Miner to choose a major. Both criminal justice and landscape architecture held his interest.
He had cut lawns during high school and worked part time for a landscape construction company. Those experiences caused him to gravitate toward a degree in landscape architecture, where he thought he might find a rewarding position in landscape design, or with a turf management company or sports turf management job.
Three weeks after graduation in 1994, Miner found himself working for an interior landscaping firm in Manhattan. But the commute from Port Jefferson into New York City “killed him,” he says. And besides, Manhattan wasn’t where he wanted to be, professionally or otherwise.
Around the same time, a friend of Miner’s who was a teacher on Long Island started working as a caddie during the summer at Atlantic Golf Club. Atlantic had opened in 1992 to rave reviews. Golf Digest called it the “Best New Private Course” in the United States that year. Miner came on board in 1995 as a crew member and equipment operator. But he was still thinking about other career possibilities.
“My mind was set on sports turf,” the 10-year member of GCSAA says. “I thought I could learn a lot about agronomy on the golf course, and then transition into sports. But that never happened. I fell in love with life on the golf course.”
Miner didn’t know at the time that Atlantic was one of the best and most exclusive private clubs in the country, and that Class A superintendent Bob Ranum, a 28-year GCSAA member, was a superb mentor. “I got lucky,” Miner says. “I was off and running. I learned the right way to do things on the golf course.”
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Miner quickly learned about water conservation issues when he first arrived in Colorado in 1998. That year marked the beginning of a long and severe drought in the area. |
Love of the land
For Miner, part of the “the right way to do things” included a deep-seated environmental commitment. Atlantic Golf Club’s location on the east end of Long Island placed it squarely in sensitive and hotly contested environmental territory. The 204-acre former farm had glacial topography with ridges and swales, wetlands, deep kettle ponds, a view of the ocean four miles away, and two endangered species: the northern harrier hawk and the tiger salamander.
“It was my first experience managing for wildlife, using Integrated Pest Management, maintaining native grasses, using biologicals and weather stations and soil sensors,” Miner says.
His tutelage under accomplished superintendents at esteemed golf courses continued when, two years later, he joined Nantucket Golf Club as the second assistant under Charlie Passios, a 27-year member of GCSAA who is now the Class A superintendent at the Golf Club of Cape Cod in North Falmouth, Mass.
“Environmentally, he was ahead of his time,” Miner says of Passios. “The environment wasn’t a hot topic yet, but Charlie pushed for it. He took things a step further beyond regulations. Habitat conservation. Endangered plant species. Hiring a dedicated environmental coordinator.”
Miner and the Nantucket crew worked on propagating endangered plant species such as St. Andrew’s cross and bushy rockrose. They also implemented a prescribed burn program at the club to return the land to a more native state that would provide habitat for the northern harrier, similar to what had been done at Atlantic with native grass preservation. “The experience taught me that that’s the way we need to go, because it’s our land and our planet,” Miner says. “Not just because we have to.”
In November 1998, Miner traded the East Coast for the Rocky Mountains. He landed in Colorado as the first assistant under 17-year GCSAA member Bryan Morison, the Class A superintendent at Eagle Springs Golf Club, an exclusive invitation-only club in the heart of the Vail Valley. Miner arrived on the edge of what would become a severe and sustained drought in the West. It was a quick education in water rights and water conservation.
Finally, in April 2004, Miner got the chance to run his own show as the superintendent at Beaver Creek Golf Club. Tucked in a tight valley at the base of Beaver Creek Ski Resort, the club originally opened in 1982. Miner was charged with revitalizing the 20-year-old course.
He ushered the course through the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program, ultimately earning certification, and elevated the club’s stature to earn a spot on Golf Digest’s “Top 75 Golf Resorts in North America.” But Miner’s accomplishments on the golf course were only half his story.
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During the off-season at Beaver Creek, Miner goes on six to 10 search operations a year for Vail Mountain Rescue. |
Called to serve
As much as he found an unexpected calling in golf course management, Miner also felt called to public service. That call started during his time back in his hometown of Port Jefferson, where Miner volunteered as an emergency medical technician for the local fire department. When Miner moved to Nantucket, he joined the fire department there as well, both as a volunteer firefighter and as an EMT. He enjoyed the small-town feel, and although the department wasn’t particularly active, he continued to train.
When he came to Colorado in 1998, Miner held a deep conviction to continue his volunteerism. He joined the Avon Fire Department — later renamed the Eagle River Fire Department — and in 1999, enrolled in a countywide fire academy for volunteers. Miner earned his firefighter certificate and his wildland red card for fighting wildfires.
But around that same time, the fire department began phasing out volunteers and shifting to an all-paid organization. Miner shifted his focus slightly in response, setting his sights on mountain rescue instead. It was just as well. Mountain rescue offered better flexibility for his demanding schedule at Eagle Springs and later Beaver Creek. And besides, Miner came to Colorado as a self-proclaimed “newbie to the mountains.” He wanted to learn the Rocky Mountain lifestyle — kayaking, rafting, hiking, skiing. What better way than with the experts, the members of Vail Mountain Rescue?
“I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open,” Miner says. “I learned from them.”
VMR is an all-volunteer, nonprofit mountain rescue team. It covers Eagle County, home to some of the most rugged terrain in the continental U.S. — 14,000-foot mountains, deep wilderness, rivers and streams rushing with whitewater. It can be unforgiving country for someone in trouble.
Every member of VMR is trained in Wilderness First Aid and CPR for the Professional Rescuer. Members — men and women alike — are accomplished backcountry skiers. Several have climbed Mount Everest. The team as a whole is one of the best in the state, conducting search and rescue missions for vertical rock rescues, ice and snow evacuation, whitewater rescue, cave rescue, avalanche search and rescue, downed aircraft searches, lost victims and helicopter rescue techniques, to name more than a few. In short, Miner was in good company.
He learned quickly. Miner says he’s “not an expert in anything, but I’m competent in most disciplines.” Competent may be an understatement. And his prior experience with firefighting gave him a strong understanding of incident command and mission coordination. Miner had become an integral member of the team.
The agony and the ecstasy
His first search and rescue with VMR was looking for a lost hiker in the Holy Cross Wilderness, the same wilderness into which Michelle Vanek disappeared. That first search had a happy ending. “We found him just in time,” Miner says. “Walking back knowing your team got the person you were looking for is a really good feeling.”
At times the work can be adventurous and exciting, like when Miner and his teammates will get picked up in a helicopter and dropped on a mountaintop deep in the heart of the wilderness. At other times, it can be downright humorous, like the time VMR spent a night searching for an overdue skier, only to find out around midnight that the person was found … drunk, hanging out at the wrong bar after missing meeting up with friends.
It’s not always glamorous, though. There are hours spent hiking and scouring a patch of land for clues. Long stretches of doing nothing but sitting next to a victim’s car at the trailhead, making sure no one shows up and drives away in it. Or putting together packages of Gatorade and sandwiches for other searchers.
“It’s not all glory and excitement,” Miner says. “A lot of the time it’s drudgery and monotony.” But it’s all work that must be done, and work that saves lives … most of the time. “You hope for the happy ending, but it doesn’t always turn out that way,” Miner explains.
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Under Miner’s direction, Beaver Creek GC earned a spot on Golf Digest’s list of top 75 golf resorts in North America. |
Painful lessons
Michelle Vanek was one of those somber endings.
The search for her lasted more than a week. Miner led a team of five searchers who scoured a scree field — a jumbled mess of rocks and boulders — between 13,000 and 14,000 feet high on the shoulder of Mount of the Holy Cross. At its largest, the search included more than 300 searchers. But snow and other bad weather hampered search operations and hid clues that might have been found had the snow not fallen.
Ultimately, the search for Michelle Vanek was called off without ever finding her, or any sign of her. It was the largest search-and-rescue operation in Colorado history. “It’s the first time in a long time that we didn’t find the person, dead or alive,” Miner says. “It’s not a good feeling to not know what happened. It kills me to know that the family doesn’t have closure. They’re hurting and struggling.”
Most of the time, however, there is a happy ending, and Miner is partly to thank for that. Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 1 of last year, VMR conducted a total of 70 missions and 26 searches, rescuing 48 people. In his first years with VMR, Miner went out on an average of 12 to 14 calls per year, mostly in the winter during the golf course’s off-season.
In more recent years — between the demands of his new position as superintendent at Beaver Creek, and of helping his wife, Linda, care for two young sons — Declan and Conal — born 14 months apart — Miner’s time hasn’t been as free, participating in six to 10 search operations per year. But that’s changing. With his sons growing, and with good assistants backing him at the course, the coming years promise new opportunities to search with VMR. And that makes Miner happy.
Beaver Creek has a slogan — “Not exactly roughing it.” While that slogan may apply within the resort’s boundaries to its golf course and ski runs, beyond the boundaries, it’s a whole different story. Things can get rough pretty quickly. But when they do, one thing is for sure. Michael Miner will be there to come to your rescue.
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