It was supposed to be a "last boys' weekend" in Colorado's best ski country for three former college buddies.

Only one survived.

The friends, who had met more than a decade before at Colorado School of Mines, converged last Friday at Jason "Country" Luck's Arvada home.

Simon Ozanne, 35, flew in from New York with a plane ticket his pregnant wife gave him for Christmas.

Alexis "Franswa" Dodin, a 32-year-old French national, arrived from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Since graduate school, Luck and Dodin had become engineers. Both single, they were ready to show Ozanne - he had gotten married and had become a business consultant - the time of his life before he became a father.

They set out first for Winter Park. Then they headed to Aspen.

Tuesday morning, they hitched two snowmobiles to their trucks and drove six miles out of town on Colorado 82 until they reached the highway gates closing off Independence Pass.

They loaded their backcountry ski gear onto the snowmobiles and rode 1.5 more miles down the unplowed highway to Weller Lake trailhead.

They parked their machines, strapped into backcountry ski gear and made their way up steep Mount Shimer, known locally as Sunshine Peak.

Aware of possibly dangerous spring avalanche conditions, the experienced outdoorsmen dug a test pit and decided it was safe to go on.

"Their goal was to get to the top of the peak and ski down," Pitkin County sheriff's spokesman Jeff Lumsden said.

They never made it.

Sometime after 1:30 p.m., about an hour into their climb, the snow base cracked at 11,800 feet, about 200 feet above them. By all accounts, there wasn't much they could do.

"They were in the trees to the side and were pulled in by the power of the avalanche," Ozanne's wife, Jennifer Ozanne, said by phone from New Jersey.

A massive, Category 5 avalanche - the "biggest, broadest, baddest" kind there is - shot the men down the mountain, Lumsden said. It was about two football fields wide and took the whole northwest face of snow with it.

The avalanche was so big, people saw it back in town.

Luck, 33, "was caught in the slide but was able to self-rescue," Lumsden said.

Armed with avalanche beacons, Luck located his friends and spent the next 90 minutes trying furiously to dig them out, knowing they were suffocating.

He managed to pull one of the men out from under 4 feet of snow, and found he was unconscious but breathing, Lumsden said. Luck dug 8 feet down to his other friend, who wasn't breathing.

At 2:58 p.m., Luck found a cell phone on that friend and dialed 911.

"They were both dead when we arrived," Lumsden said.

Rescuers helicoptered the bodies of Ozanne and Dodin down to the Weller Lake trailhead, and shuttled them by snowmobile from there to the highway closure gate.

The coroner ruled later that both had suffocated.

Around 7 p.m., a tired and defeated Luck left the area. He called Jennifer Ozanne that night.

"He tried to do everything he possibly could," she said. "He was very upset."

After spending the night in Aspen, Luck drove back to Arvada on Wednesday morning. Before he left, he told Lumsden he wasn't interested in talking with the media.

Jennifer Ozanne spent Wednesday afternoon making funeral arrangements, still in shock that the father of their expected child had died during what was supposed to be a happy, bonding experience.

"Everyone loved him," she said. "He was an amazing husband and a great friend. He was doing what he likes to do, and he's not reckless, either.

"Hopefully, it was fast."

bargec@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5059

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