The Way Out

“On par with Into the Wild… Fast-paced, yet thoughtful and empathetic, all the way to its devastating conclusion, this psychological thriller will haunt me whenever I step off the pavement into the woods. I couldn’t stop reading it, and I can’t stop thinking about it.” — Bill Gifford, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Outlive

A harrowing, never-before-told story of life and death in the Colorado mountains—thirty hours that changed lives forever and forced a reckoning about the cost of adventure.

“You wanna ski a lap?”

Fifteen-year-old Cole Walters-Schaler couldn’t resist. This was why they’d come to the backcountry, after all—three fathers and four teenage children together for a bonding alpine getaway outside Salida, Colorado, in January 2017.

Within minutes, Cole and Brett Beasley, a longtime Forest Service ranger and expert outdoorsman in his mid-forties, had pushed off from their cabin, expecting to be gone for a half hour or so. But an unforgiving blizzard transformed their quick jaunt into a thirty-hour ordeal that would end in tragedy, as the community raced to find them.

The Way Out is the story of those ensuing hours and their aftermath—an almost unbelievable event that shook a tight-knit mountain community and raised difficult questions about life and death, guilt and redemption, and the pursuit of adventure. Why, when we know that the wilderness can kill, can’t we stay away? When the unthinkable happens, how does a community forgive the survivors? And how do the survivors forgive themselves?

Drawing on firsthand interviews with those closest to the tragedy, including the key eyewitness, and written with the gripping intensity of classics such as Into Thin Air and Touching the Void, O’Neil recreates that fateful day. The Way Out is a thoughtful investigation of the allure of the mountains and the aftermath of trauma, and an unforgettable look at life at its very edge.

The Way Out includes 12 black-and-white personal photos throughout.

Author Biography

Devon O’Neil is a journalist based in Breckenridge, Colorado. O’Neil got his start as a daily newspaperman and later worked as a staff writer at ESPN.com and as a correspondent for Outside magazine. His stories have been recognized in the Best American Travel Writing and Best American Sports Writing anthologies and have twice been finalists for national awards in civic journalism. Raised on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he studied psychology at Middlebury College and often writes about the effects of psychological trauma on adventurers. In the winter, he helps maintain a network of backcountry ski cabins above 11,000 feet.