Devon O'Neill on the Power of Nature

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Devon O’Neill about his new book, The Way Out.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Sometimes when you write, when you have questions and then you answer them. I don’t know if you answered some of these questions you had about why we go into the wilderness and what happens. You did probably answer the mystery of this particular backcountry event, but your book asks bigger questions. It questions the neutrality of nature, that nature doesn’t really care about any of your feelings. Why do we do perilous things? What does adventure mean to us? And I’m curious, if you found some answers to those questions.

Devon O’Neill: Are there answers? I don’t know. I think for me, the most helpful part, and the most beneficial part was the fact that I live a similar life to the people that I was writing about. So, I would always try and relate their insight to how I understand it in my own brain, for my own outings and my own wants and whims, I feel all the same things that the people who confided in me in this story do. While I was reporting this book, I went backcountry skiing with a friend. Both of us have two kids. We got our blessed wives to take them to school that morning so we could meet at a trailhead at 6:45 a.m. on a weekday and try and thread this needle in late April. We went skiing in a really familiar place. We’d skied there the year before, on almost the same date. We triggered a massive domino effect, persistence, slab avalanche. A series of four that ultimately spanned a half mile in width and slid to the ground 10 feet deep at the crown on April 26 so you’re not expecting that. It was triggered by a wind slab that then stepped down, and it was again the sequence that we never would have thought would have been possible that day, but easily we could have both and/or at least one of us died. That just made me try and come to terms with why I’m out there and what was I doing that day. Why did I have to try and thread that needle that day? It was my first like steep in dry snow back country ski run of the year. I thought I had given it enough time. But when we guess, sometimes we guess wrong. And so, I don’t think as much I was concerned about how do we underestimate the potential for a wind slab to create this catastrophic event but certainly I tried to probe, why was I up there that day. What did I think I needed to be doing that was more important than taking into account what might happen. So absolutely, that added a brutal layer of understanding to what I was reporting about as it related to the accident at the center of this book. But do I still like to get outside every day? Absolutely. Do I need to be doing what I was doing that day? No. Do I need to come home? Oh, yeah. It just made me kind of reevaluate the whole equation that I had been using for 20 years at that point to evaluate the chance I was taking or might be taking versus what it might deliver to me. And I think I saw in all the hard men and women who I talked to in Salida who had to reckon with their life choices as it relates to their time in the backcountry and in the wilderness and even on simple quick. There was a massive reevaluation of lifestyle that took place among a lot of people who are in this book, and it was communitywide.

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Devon O’Neil is a freelance journalist based in Breckenridge, Colorado, and the author of The Way Out: A true story of survival in the Heart of the Rockies, published in November 2025 by HarperOne. In the past he has worked as a daily newspaperman, a staff writer for ESPN.com, and a correspondent for Outside magazine. O’Neil’s stories have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and noted in The Best American Sports Writing, and twice have been finalists for national awards in civic journalism.