The day the mountain crumbled

They knew the likely outcome but had to come see for themselves what happened on the Wellhorn, a rocky peak that towers over the Reichenbachtal valley in the Bernese Alps.

A dash through multiple airports, a race through the mountains, and now they ambled through a small mountain village. That’s when they saw him, sitting in his car on the side of the road. Sue stopped, unsure what to do.

In another life, Guido Bieri could have been a friend, swapping stories over wine after a long day on the mountain. He was 61, a beloved leader at the boarding school that their 18-year-old daughter, Emily, attended. He had taken her on nearly a dozen backcountry treks across the alps. Emily adored him. And Sue loved that she and Reg had someone in Switzerland to look after their daughter on the mountain.

In this life, though, Bieri was the tour guide on the previous day’s outing, one of the last people to see Emily on the mountain.

Sue tapped on the car window.

“We’re Emily’s parents,” she announced.

EMILY WAS AN ONLY CHILD. Sue and Reg met in 1998, in the Denver operating room. He was a trauma surgeon, and she was a cardiovascular perfusionist running the heart-lung machine. They got married and started a family relatively late — he was 48; she was 41. Emily was the center of their universe.

They moved to Vail, Colo., and Sue quit working full time. Reg was the longtime medical director of the Vail Ski Patrol, and both parents would haul Emily up and down the mountains whenever possible. Emily grew up in the outdoors, finding poetry in trees and beauty in the sky. Summers were spent paddling on the river and winters skiing backcountry, exploring virgin snow far from the tourists taking selfies at pricey resorts.

Sue and Reg never once hired a babysitter, instead dragging their young daughter to symphonies, black-tie fundraisers and medical conferences. They made a point to visit impoverished communities around the world, to remind Emily there was a world beyond the Rockies.

“She knew that life was bigger than just here,” Sue says of Vail, “and the world is bigger than here.”

Midway through her junior year, Emily began to feel ready for something bigger than the small private school in her small mountain town. She told her mother as much, then stayed up all night researching possibilities.

At 5 a.m. the next day, she burst into her mother’s room with her laptop.

“I found it,” she said.

“The school I want to go to.”

She had stayed up all night researching Ecole d’Humanité, a boarding school of about 120 in Hasliberg, Switzerland, where students are encouraged to explore the outdoors, including skiing the backcountry with help from experienced guides. Emily had already contacted the admissions office, inquiring about the school’s cellphone policy, among other things.

She was never one to do something halfway. When she was younger, Emily was so determined to sell the most Girl Scout cookies that she set up a booth at the base of the ski lift, hawking boxes of Samoas until she had set the troop record. Now, when her parents told her she would have to work after school and during the summer to help cover Ecole d’Humanité’s $60,000 tuition, Emily didn’t flinch.

Sue called Reg, with whom she had recently divorced.

“Are you sitting down? Emily’s going to go to Switzerland for her senior year. It is happening.”

IT WAS EASY TO SEE the school’s allure for a backcountry enthusiast. Skiing off-trail is rustic and visceral. In ski towns, kids graduate quickly from chairlifts to the backwoods, with its untouched powder and unexplored terrain. There are well known locations but no trail maps, no ski patrol or snow groomers on duty. Skiers might have to endure an uphill hike of a few hours or more for a trip down fresh snow that lasts just a few minutes. It’s exhilarating, and it’s dangerous.

For most, the adrenaline rush isn’t the point. It’s being isolated, removed from the crowd, closer to nature. That’s all Emily wanted.

“I love watching as the sky changes at dusk and am amazed by the different colors,” Emily wrote in a college application essay. “My favorite thing to do whenever I’m camping or out at night is to look at the stars, hunting for different constellations or admiring the vastness.”

More than 2.5 million Americans alone skied off-trail last year, up 30 percent from just two years earlier, according to Snowsports Industries America. The spike comes with increased safety concerns and avalanche risks. In Colorado alone, there were 861 human-triggered avalanches involving 122 people and resulting in 11 deaths last year, higher than the 10-year averages (84 people caught and seven deaths). In Switzerland, 21 people were killed last season, and 222 people were swept up in avalanches.

Emily, though, had been on skis since she was 2. She had attended avalanche safety courses and traveled with a first-aid kit. She knew and embraced the risks. So when she saw that Ecole d’Humanité had a backcountry program, with ski tours at least once a week in the Swiss Alps, she was sold.

She arrived in Hasliberg in August 2022, one day after she turned 18.

“I say she arrived, but it was more like she burst,” Lydia Breunig says. “She burst into our lives and into our community with so much enthusiasm.”

Breunig was the manager for House Kathrin, the school chalet where Emily lived with 11 other students. She calls Emily the glue there, drawing together students from different backgrounds. She folkdanced, did pottery, learned silversmithing, started a girls’ weightlifting group and baked cookies with her calculus teacher on weekends. Laughter poured out of her room each night, and Emily was always the first one up the next morning.

“I call Emily the sun of House Kathrin. At first, it was because she just glowed, and she was just full of such brilliance and warmth,” Breunig says. “But even more than that, she had a gravitational pull — she really did pull people to her. Her room was the center of our little house.”

She roomed with Breunig’s daughter, Maia Stark. Emily shared with Maia a word — a feeling — from back home in Vail: “frothing.” It’s an adjective, unique to the ski dictionary, that captures the bursting-at-the-seams excitement Emily had on the mountain, staring down a run, with friends, in nature. It was her happy place and her baseline.

Emily and Maia had the only balcony in the house. Some nights, they would pull their mattresses out to sleep, staring at the stars and frothing, together, about what the upcoming ski season would bring.

THERE WERE NO CLASSES on March 21, 2023. Emily and Maia woke up excited about what the day held.

It was the school’s last backcountry outing of the season, and with spring break a couple of days away, the girls had a train trip to Paris scheduled. But first, a trek to the top of the Wellhorn, a jagged, monstrous rock that stretches more than 10,400 feet toward the sky.

Emily blasted some bouncy reggae as the girls triple-checked their gear, which included a shovel, a probe and a transponder in case of an avalanche. Then seven students, three guests and two group leaders loaded into two vehicles.

They were led, as always, by Guido Bieri, a longtime school employee who was in charge of the outdoors program, and Lukas Iten, a veteran area tour guide. Iten and Bieri mapped out the excursion, and sometime around 10:30 a.m., the group began the trek up. Bieri and Iten did not respond to messages, and a defense lawyer declined to comment. Their accounts of the accident, as well as those of the surviving students, are included in an avalanche investigative report and police interview transcripts reviewed by The Washington Post. The Post also reviewed video of the day’s trip filmed by the skiers, including of the avalanche.

The climb winded through forest and took nearly four hours, parts on foot and parts on skis. The sun’s rays poked through the trees, illuminating their path. The temperature hit 48 degrees, warm enough that Emily stripped down to a T-shirt for stretches — a special Vail Ski Patrol shirt that belonged to her dad and that the two playfully stole back and forth.

Iten, 53, had been leading tours at the school for nearly two decades. He had made this particular trek a dozen or so times, by his own estimate, and had checked the avalanche bulletin the night before, taking note of the high-elevation dangers and concerns about the snow. On the ascent, he encouraged the students to walk 10 or so yards apart. He occasionally stomped to make sure the ground was steady and once even drove a ski pole into the snow to test its stability.

“I felt that the conditions were very good and did not notice any signs of a critical weakness at all,” he later told investigators.

Emily’s left knee started bothering her. She had undergone surgery a couple of years earlier, and the hike was taxing. She found a place at the base of the hill to rest as her classmates continued to the top. They skied down on the fresh snow shortly after 2 p.m. and agreed to return to the top to squeeze in a second run. Emily was feeling better, so she stepped into her skis to make the climb.

The group reached the base of the rocky peak around 3:45 p.m. Emily teased a classmate named Eli and shared her Toblerone with another boy, Louis, who had already emptied his snack pack.

Iten discussed the descent. They wouldn’t follow the same route that they had just taken. Instead, he directed, he would ski down first and the others should keep to the right of his tracks.

Iten reached the bottom, followed by two others. He wore a GoPro camera so he could review the footage and discuss technique with the younger skiers. The rest followed one by one, 30 or so seconds apart, leaving some distance between skiers.

Next up was Maia, followed by Emily, a British student named Archie Harvey and a French girl named Valentine Reynaud. They were all seniors, on the cusp of adulthood, making plans and swapping dreams that had no limits. (The students and their families either couldn’t be reached or didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.)

MAIA WAS NEAR THE BOTTOM when the ground started to crumble, but the three others were higher up. As massive and powerful as an avalanche can be, it must be summoned to life. The slightest pressure in the wrong patch of snow can set off a chain reaction felt across the mountain, which is why there are detailed and sacrosanct safety guidelines that tour guides must follow.

On the Wellhorn, the string of skiers had upset the ground beneath them. A crack formed near the top of the hill, where Valentine had begun making her way down. She froze.

“I couldn’t do anything but watch,” she said later.

The snow around her broke into pieces, a shattered puzzle, and started sliding. Valentine was in the clear, but Archie and Emily were in a more precarious stretch. Soon the slope was in a free fall.

“The whole mountain was in motion,” another student said later.

It wasn’t like a movie; the snow wasn’t a giant wave crashing down from overhead. It was more like a gushing stampede more than three football fields wide, growing in size and speed as it barreled toward the valley.

Maia was safely coming to a stop at the bottom of the slope when she turned and watched the side of the mountain slide. She thought back to a video she and Emily had watched online, a snow rabbit hurriedly jumping its way through an avalanche, safely reaching a still part of a mountain.

High up the slope, Archie and Emily were getting chased by snow. Iten saw it all, helplessly bellowing, “Oh, God!” Bieri was up above, where all he could see was a cloud of white dust.

“At first I thought that the whole group had disappeared,” he said.

Archie managed to remain upright on his skis briefly, skidding across the slabs of snow like a wakeboarder before vanishing into a cloud of snow.

About 25 yards below, Emily seemed to realize something was amiss as the ground broke apart. Her scream echoed across the valley. She stopped just short of a jump on the mountain, where she was pummeled by a wall of snow, a frozen freight train that carried her over a 600-foot cliff.

When the snow settled at the base of the mountain, the Alps were eerily quiet, save the sobbing from the surviving classmates who had collapsed into each other’s arms.

Rescue crews raced to the mountain. There was a signal coming from Archie’s transponder, but it took time for crews to reach him. When he was found more than an hour later, he was buried under six feet of snow, pronounced dead at the scene.

There was no signal from Emily’s transponder, suggesting it was buried too deep. Nearby they found her backpack, one ski and a pole. They kept searching the mountainside until it became too dark to see.

WITH ONE STUDENT DEAD and another missing, police investigators called in avalanche experts immediately. The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research arrived the next day to find out what went wrong.

By that point, police had already interviewed the tour guides and the surviving students. Many students mentioned how close they were with Bieri, whose wife also worked at the school. “I mean, Emily adored this man,” Sue says.

Bieri estimated he had planned more than 100 outdoor excursions for the school over the previous decade. Bieri’s son, a former student at Ecole d’Humanité, was also on the tour that day.

“I trust Guido and Lukas completely,” one student told police.

“They were role models for me,” another said. “We had a very good relationship over the last three years because I loved outdoor sports so much. Definitely for me but also for other people, we were very close.”

“I trust [Lukas] completely,” a third reported, “with my life.”

Iten was a student himself at Ecole d’Humanité more than a quarter-century ago. He had been a licensed mountain guide since 2000 and had been running tours for the school since 2004 — climbing excursions in the spring and fall, skiing in the winter.

“I’m quite attached to the school,” he told investigators.

On the day of the trek, the area near Wellhorn’s peak, called the Gstelliwang, had a moderate avalanche warning, which meant there was an elevated risk, particularly on very steep slopes. Skiers were advised to choose their routes carefully, ski down one at a time and avoid steep areas.

The bulletin warned there could be weak, older layers of snow, and Emily and her classmates knew what that meant. They had just had an avalanche safety course a couple of weeks earlier.

Iten told police that he had asked the students whether anyone wanted to do a second run. They all agreed, and Iten proposed the new route down the hill.

This, investigators determined, was likely a costly mistake. The new route placed the skiers on a slope that was 40 degrees steep in parts — far too steep for the conditions. Because of its proximity to the cliff, it also made any potential rescue attempt impossible. Investigators said Iten’s stomping and driving a pole into the snow had been insufficient tests to assess the avalanche risk.

The report found that skiing “on steep, exposed slopes is difficult for us to understand given the generally good leadership.” And while the report did not cite a specific cause, the presence of four skiers at different parts of the slope was probably too much pressure on a fragile layer of snow.

“The avalanche was triggered by chance certainly,” the report stated. “A person had to [ski] into an area where the weak layer was particularly weak and not heavily covered.”

In short, if they had just skied the same initial route, the avalanche probably could have been avoided. The avalanche investigators concluded that the tour guides bore some level of responsibility. Bieri and Iten are now being formally investigated for negligent homicide, according to Swiss court records. Police and the public prosecutor in the canton of Bern declined to comment, citing Swiss privacy laws.

“This was not an accident,” Sue says. “These were poor choices.”

THE DAY AFTER SUE AND REG ARRIVED, they went up in a helicopter to help with the search for Emily. Reg had worked with the ski patrol in Vail for two decades. He knew there were two ways to die in an avalanche: buried by snow resulting in suffocation or blunt force trauma. When he saw the huge cliff, he knew.

“She was dead in seconds,” he says.

With a background in medicine and an expertise in backcountry skiing, Emily’s parents had, like her, a deep appreciation for the dangers on the mountain. Sue especially carried a nagging fear. She had given her daughter a keychain, in fact, that said, “Don’t do stupid s—.”

“Every time she’d send me pictures from one of the trips, I’d be like, ‘Oh, thank God, another day is gone,’ ” Sue says.

It was pure happenstance that they spotted Bieri parked not far from the school. Sue was stunned — and conflicted. She knew how much her daughter cared for him, but she also knew Bieri was ostensibly in charge of the tragic backcountry outing. Part of her wanted to summon every morsel of the pain and grief that had suddenly consumed her and hurl it at Bieri with all the force she could muster. Instead, she just introduced herself.

Inside the car, Bieri didn’t say a word. Sue and Reg saw the veteran guide speak briefly at an impromptu memorial one day earlier at the school, where Bieri broke down. “I miss you, Emily,” he had said through tears.

Sue asked him to step out of the car and offered a hug, as did Reg. Bieri was an empty shell — “a shattered, broken man,” Reg would recall later.

“Emily loved you,” Sue told Bieri.

“I loved her so much,” she recalls him responding.

Reg and Sue packed up their daughter’s room and returned to Colorado to settle into their nightmare. The updates from Switzerland were slow. In early June, crews found the other pole. And then the other ski.

That month, Reg was involved in a terrible car crash. He was in an intensive care unit when the phone rang. It was Father’s Day.

The snow had melted in Switzerland. Part of Emily’s body had been found in shallow water. She had been buried under 50 feet of snow, and her body had been wedged between some rocks in a streambed about three-quarters of a mile from the accident, not far from where Archie’s body also had settled.

The avalanche was so powerful and the surge so strong that her body was not intact. A local fisherman would find the rest of Emily three months later, more than two miles downstream.

Sue flew back to Switzerland to retrieve her daughter’s remains. Investigators had to use DNA testing to positively identify Emily. At the crematorium, Sue held her daughter’s hand and painted her fingernails one final time, picking a glittery purple nail polish that she thought Emily would have loved.

EIGHT HUNDRED PEOPLE came to Emily’s memorial service, filling the auditorium, plus two overflow areas, at Vail Mountain School. Her high school teachers recalled special gifts Emily brought them: a playful coffee mug for the biology instructor, a llama piñata for an English teacher. Friends recalled stargazing from water towers and cracked jokes about Emily’s car, which she had playfully dubbed “Shelly the S—box.” They agreed she was an old soul — or, as one cousin put it, someone who seemed to “belong wherever she went.”

They lauded Emily’s unique style and relentless positivity, too. How she was always “frothed with stoke.”

“Whatever magic and witchcraft you performed, we’d have the greatest of times,” one friend recalled. “Enemies would become friends. Two groups who couldn’t stand each other before were now sitting on the same couch laughing uncontrollably at some stupid joke.”

Friends from Switzerland made the trip and told the crowd how much Emily had impacted their lives. And then Reg and Sue stepped toward a microphone. They were still in the fog, the second act of a horrific tragedy.

“She was my life,” Sue said. “She completed my world.”

As an only child, Emily had formed tight relationships with both of her parents. Reg recalls long walks with his daughter during the pandemic, telling her: “Look, Emily, I know how to do a lot of stuff, but I have zero skill set for raising a teenage girl. So we’re going to have to fumble our way through this together.” They jokingly called Reg’s style “experiments in poor parenting.”

At the memorial service, Reg mentioned that when they packed up Emily’s room back in Hasliberg, he couldn’t find his old ski patrol shirt. When he studied photos of Emily from that last day on the mountain, sure enough, he spotted it.

He turned to the projector screen and found his daughter’s face smiling back. “I want my T-shirt back,” he sobbed.

A YEAR HAS PASSED NOW. Ecole d’Humanité canceled its backcountry program this year. Iten and Bieri have been summoned for questioning at a May 31 hearing, court records show. There is no making sense of the tragedy for the Franciose family, no recourse that might somehow balance the scale. Under the Swiss legal system, if convicted, Bieri and Iten could face up to three years in prison for what is technically a misdemeanor charge.

“For two kids? I don’t think that’s fair,” Sue says.

The Franciose family could recoup $30,000 or so in a civil judgment, but the Swiss system doesn’t allow for punitive damages, so they will never see money that even covers their costs associated with Emily’s death. They recently received a $5,000 bill for the cost of a search-and-rescue helicopter.

Ecole d’Humanité has maintained to the family that the school is not liable for the accident, and it is not a party in the criminal proceedings. Administrators from the school declined to be interviewed. “For the past year we have been grieving this loss and our hearts continue to go out to the families affected,” the school said in a statement.

The family is left only with grief. The memories that shadow Sue through each day provide some comfort but mostly sadness. Reg has stopped taking on-call shifts with the emergency room in Vail. “I don’t have any empathy left,” he says.

They had spent much of their professional lives around pain, trauma and death. The physiology of the human body and the fragility of human life are not foreign to them. But that doesn’t make the emotional toll any lighter.

Emily’s Vail bedroom is largely untouched, save for the urn on the bed and the picture-filled poster boards from her memorial service. Sue has her daughter’s photos on display throughout the house, each stirring a different memory. From the hospital when Emily was born, a school recital, a family trip to Guatemala, Emily’s 16th birthday, a carousel ride, a father-daughter dance, the beach, the river.

In many, Emily is wearing skis, a parka and an ear-to-ear smile, colorful snapshots that place her forever on the mountain, forever surrounded by snow and trees and blue sky.

“No matter what time of day it is, the sky always changes,” Emily once wrote, “and is never the same or predictable. I love how, even though we’re all under the same sky, it looks different for everyone. It reminds me that even though we are all unique, we can find something to connect over.”