Alex Maginnis, who skied out of bounds at Purgatory at Durango Mountain Resort on Friday and planned to arrive at Needles Country Store, said he never intended to ski out of bounds.
He also said he had never made the trip before, and he wasn’t the skier who was lost in a similar incident a decade earlier.
Maginnis, 41, of Cincinnati, was reached by La Plata County Search and Rescue members Saturday afternoon.
They had been tracking his movements overnight after he was reported missing Friday afternoon by his wife, Jen Maginnis. He spent more than 24 hours trying to find his way out of the remote wilderness of Hermosa Creek, a 20-mile-plus stretch of densely forested terrain between Purgatory at Durango Mountain Resort and Hermosa.
A news release Saturday from the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office said Maginnis had skied out of bounds from DMR 10 years earlier and with another skier had made his way down to the Needles Country Store.
Butch Knowlton, the county’s director of emergency preparedness, said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that if that information was inaccurate, he offered an apology to Maginnis and his family. But he said that didn’t change the fact that “Mr. Maginnis made a choice to defy warning signs at DMR that prohibit skiing out-of-bounds, left the DMR property and skied in an area that he was not familiar with and ultimately impacted the lives” of those involved in the search.
Knowlton lauded the 31 people who spent a total 346 hours to help Maginnis.
Maginnis said Saturday, “I heard a lot of (search-and-rescue personnel) talking about different scenarios, where someone had been lost and stayed in a cabin on the way to Needles and things like that, and I wonder if it just got mixed in to my story somehow. I had never actually been back there, but I had heard there was a way to Needles, and that’s why I texted my wife saying that’s where I’d meet her.”
His wife said she mentioned to one official that her husband had been mountain biking in the vicinity of the Needles store before, and perhaps that was misunderstood.
“I was trying to tell them that,” she said, “that he knew that area, and was trying to get to a trail. But I told them that 10 years ago, we had just had a baby, so we were home. We were in Cincinnati.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
