Michael Ferrara was a prince among Aspen's elite Alpine rescuers. But the mountain took a dreadful toll

MICHAEL FERRARA HAS trouble pinpointing the exact moment when his life began to unravel. A plausible starting point, though, might be March 29, 2001.

The weather was snowy and cold on that evening nearly 10 years ago. Fifteen friends from Los Angeles, most of them in their late 20s, had chartered a jet for a few days of spring skiing to celebrate a buddy’s birthday. Something went wrong on the final descent into Aspen’s small airport; the pilot apparently couldn’t see the runway. A wing tip caught the ground, the plane flipped, and the tail segment broke off. Then the plane exploded into flames.

Ferrara, who at the time was both a Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy and an assistant coroner, was among the first to arrive. He had worked on a half-dozen small-engine  plane crashes in the mountains around Aspen. As a paramedic, a ski patroller, a high-angle rescuer, and an avalanche specialist, he’d often dealt with blood and trauma. Among scores of incidents, he was first on the scene when Robert Kennedy’s son Michael Kennedy, 39, fatally struck a tree while skiing in Aspen in 1997. Steeped in the stoic culture of the first responder, Ferrara instinctively took charge in chaotic situations. But he wasn’t prepared for this.

The first charred and bloodied body he came upon was still buckled to his seat, his cell phone ringing in his pocket. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Ferrara saw something jammed into the elk fence: a hunk of flesh, dripping with serous fluid. Ferrara spent that terrible evening with fellow officers, assembling body parts into plastic bags. All 18 people, including the crew, were killed. Ferrara got home at 4 in the morning, smelling like jet fuel. He stripped out of his gore-smeared clothes and left them in the front yard.

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