In 2017, Toby Huggett triggered an avalanche in the backcountry outside Park City, Utah. A slab of snow about 500 feet across broke loose and carried him to the bottom of the slope. When it stopped, only his face was sticking out of the snow.
His friend Ryan Cutter watched from about 40 yards away and sprang to his friend’s aid.
“I can see from there, through the goggles, Cutter’s eyeballs just bulging,” Huggett said. “He was one of the first guys in action, and just dug me up.”
It wasn’t the only time Cutter dug someone out of the snow, Huggett said.
“He’s a guy you could trust,” Huggett said. “That’s who you want in your corner.”
Not that he ever said so to Cutter’s face.
“We’re sarcastic New Englanders, and we would just constantly rib each other,” Huggett said. “He was like my little brother, but he could give it out better than anybody.”
Cutter, a Hanover native and helicopter pilot, died Sept. 20 while flying a firefighting mission in Yosemite National Park, where crews were battling the Dome fire. He was 46. Fellow pilot Greg King also died.
The fire, which officials say was started by an abandoned campfire on Sept. 15, is still burning. As of the end of the week, it had burned about 7,00 acres and was more than 40% contained, according to the National Park Service.
Huggett got choked up talking about the procession that carried Cutter home. He watched as Cutter’s flag-draped body was loaded, with firefighters standing at attention and saluting.
“It really shows that what he did mattered,” Huggett said. “What he did was important, and a real heroic thing. Most of us are all just dirtbag ski bums, and what he did brought a whole community together.”
‘His feet weren’t meant to be on the ground’
One evening when Cutter was 5, his mother, Doreen Cutter, came home from work to find her son had news.
“Ryan let me know that Dad had taken him to the ski jumps, and that was it,” she said. He was hooked for life.
His father, Donald Cutter, was a Dartmouth ski and ski-jumping coach who later managed the Dartmouth Skiway and coached in the Ford Sayre program. No one made jumping boots small enough to fit a 5-year-old, so his son learned in his alpine gear.
As Cutter moved up to bigger and bigger hills, his father was too nervous to watch the first jump from a higher elevation. He asked the coaches to have his son take it when he wasn’t around.
“I didn’t want to be there the first time,” Donald Cutter said.
By his teens, ski jumping was close to a full-time commitment. In eighth grade, he trained in Finland. In high school, he made the national development team in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he lived at the Olympic Training Center for a stretch and won a junior national title. His parents said he was the New Hampshire high school champion three times and set five New England records, including one on the Oak Hill jump in Hanover that stood until last year.
His mother did most of the driving to Lake Placid and to meets all over New England.
“I always said I had a ‘P’ on the dashboard of my car that just said Placid,” Doreen Cutter said. “My weekends were spent on the road a lot.”
All that travel taught him to keep track of his own gear, and the habit stuck. For the rest of his life, his parents said, he was meticulous about his house, his truck and his gear, and later about logging every hour he flew.
“His feet weren’t meant to be on the ground from when he was a little guy,” Doreen Cutter said.
‘Two people who love to be alone’
Adam Schwall, who sells real estate in Park City, met Cutter about 30 years ago at a jumping competition in Steamboat Springs, Colo., when Schwall was 13 and Cutter was 16.
Cutter later worked the ski jumps in Park City during the 2002 Winter Olympics, and he stayed on. He rarely came home in the winter. He didn’t want to miss a powder day, his parents said.
He and Schwall lived together for years. When Schwall bought a house, Cutter bought one down the street. Each of them skied close to 100 days a winter, Schwall said, and about 95 of those days were together.
“I kind of thought of us as kindred spirits, because we’re both the type of people who would prefer to be alone,” Schwall said. “I told my wife, you’ve got two people who love to be alone but like to do that together.”
It was never a sit-around kind of friendship.
“I don’t think in 25 years of being best friends we ever went to a movie together,” Schwall said. “It was always, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about this jump,’ or, ‘I need your help.'”
Cutter was usually the one pushing. A couple of years ago, on a day when it was pouring rain, he showed up with big black trash bags so they could cut holes for their heads and wear them up the mountain. The lift broke down. After about 30 minutes in line, Schwall gave up and went home.
Cutter stayed. “And he skied all day,” Schwall said.
Huggett, whose family runs Huggett’s store in East Thetford, has known the Cutters since he was a kid skiing at the Dartmouth Skiway in the 1980s. At Hanover High, he was a few years ahead of Cutter and skied alpine instead of jumping. Like many New England skiers, Huggett moved west to Park City for a period.
He ran into Cutter one night at O’Shucks, a bar on Park City’s Main Street, and they hit it off. For more than 15 years, they were regular backcountry partners.
“We would climb till exhaustion,” Huggett said. “Five to 12 backcountry laps, going until every single day we were just tired, and the chair was probably already closed, and we’d have to ski down after hours.”
Cutter was always first in line on a powder day. Huggett was not. So Cutter started calling him “High Noon Huggett.”
“He was up at it first thing in the morning, waiting front of the line, 9 o’clock on a powder day,” Huggett said. “And then I would wake up at 10, I’d drink my coffee, I’d get out there by 11.”
Huggett moved back to Vermont eight years ago and started a family. He saw Cutter only sporadically after that. Some days, he said, it’s easy to forget he’s gone. Then it hits him.
“He’s always on my mind, close to my heart,” he said.
‘Very, very careful’
Cutter BASE jumped across the United States and in the Alps, and he skydived, paraglided and flew wingsuits. Schwall did hundreds of jumps with him, sometimes after climbing six hours to reach a cliff deep in a canyon.
People assume a life like that comes with a death wish, Schwall said. It doesn’t.
“All the people that I knew that are in that, Cutter especially, just very, very smart, intelligent, calculated people,” he said. “They’re people who just really enjoy life, but they’re very, very, very careful.”
They only jumped with people they trusted. Years ago, Cutter called Schwall late one afternoon wanting to BASE jump off a 400-foot cliff at a spot called Echo, about 30 minutes away. Schwall told him he couldn’t go. His parachute was sitting unpacked in his living room, and he didn’t have time to pack it before dark.
“He said, ‘I went over to your house and I packed your parachute, and it’s ready to go. I’ll pick you up in a minute,'” Schwall said. “That was the level of trust that we had.”
His parents usually found out after the fact. His first BASE jump was off the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho. On Father’s Day, Donald Cutter got an email from his son with the subject line “I remember when.”
“You open it up, and it said, ‘Dad asked if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you?'” Doreen Cutter said. “And attached to the email was a video.”
The first time he jumped out of a plane, he called home on a Sunday afternoon.
“He said, ‘Guess what I just did?’ And I said, ‘What was that?’ And he said, ‘I jumped out of a plane.’ I said, ‘On purpose?'” Doreen Cutter said.
She said her son’s adventures could “make my heart beat hard and fast.” What helped was knowing he’d climb back down when a jump didn’t feel right, and that one of his first Christmas wishes as a backcountry skier was avalanche safety gear.
Cutter met Nina Pacchia when they lived across the street from each other. His parents describe her as bright and disciplined: She has a doctorate in medical research, manages a team in Germany from home and was once a professional bodybuilder. They married in 2016. He gave up BASE jumping for her.
“She said, ‘We can get married, but you got to stop,'” Doreen Cutter said.
The two talked openly about the risks of his flying, too, Pacchia said in his obituary. With Cutter away for long stretches, they decided together not to have children.
“He loved his life as is. I loved my life as is, and we thought, we can do this together,” she said there. “And so we loved Labrador retrievers instead.”
‘A service to other people’
Cutter learned to fly airplanes first. Then he saw an ad in the paper for a $50 helicopter ride. He switched to helicopters around 2003, his parents said, and logged more than 6,000 hours, flying to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, flying a news helicopter in Salt Lake City and flying medical evacuations out of Moab, picking up injured hikers, hunters and crash victims.
Schwall said that work changed what risk meant to Cutter.
“I think his adventure for life kind of transitioned into flying,” he said. “It became more of a service to other people.”
He still found ways to have fun with it. For his 40th birthday, Huggett was camping near Moab with friends from back East when Cutter called and asked whether they were at the same campground as the year before. Was he coming by for a beer, Huggett asked.
“He goes, ‘Yeah, something like that,'” Huggett said.
About 10 minutes later, a helicopter came over the campsite, put a spotlight on them, circled twice and flew off.
“My buddies thought that was the coolest thing ever,” Huggett said.
In 2017, Cutter switched to fighting wildfires. This season, he was learning to lower firefighters by rope into fires from a larger helicopter. His mother once asked whether he’d thought about switching companies.
“He said, ‘Oh no, I love this company. They are just a big family,'” she said.
Get him talking about flying, and he could go on forever. Huggett heard all about the engines and the training, and he never let on how much it wowed him.
“I was always impressed and respected the hell out of him for it, but I can never tell it to him,” he said.
‘Every single minute’
Cutter had a dry sense of humor and knew when to hit you with a zinger, his mother said. He designed patches and stickers, made memes for his friends and would call home so his parents could hear his dog howl along with sirens.
He was godfather to Charlie, his neighbors’ 4-year-old son, and never showed up at their house without candy, a toy or a book. Charlie called him Uncle Ryan. He’s having a hard time understanding where Uncle Ryan went, the Cutters said.
Just before Cutter left for what would be his last shift, Schwall had him over for dinner. With another friend, they had a couple of beers and told old stories from their 20s until they were laughing so hard they were almost in tears. On the morning Cutter flew out to Yosemite, the two went for a bike ride.
“Sometimes you hear people when somebody passes, they’ll say, ‘I have a regret that we were arguing or not getting along,'” Schwall said. For him, it was the opposite. “I couldn’t have asked for a better kind of last time hanging out.”
Not long after, on a Sunday afternoon, a friend texted Schwall about an accident. Ryan was gone.
“I only ever knew him as Cutter,” Schwall said. “I didn’t process it at first because it was kind of a disconnect with the name.”
He spent most nights that first week at the house with Pacchia. Since then, he said, he’s had good days and bad.
“When I slow down and think about it, it’s pretty hard going through some of the old photos and videos,” he said.
Doreen Cutter traded texts with her son the Friday before he died. He told her they were flying the maximum hours every day to fight an intense fire. She was about to retire from Dartmouth and had planned to go out and spend time with him.
Mornings and nights are the hardest now, she said.
“I just want the phone to ring and for them to say it was a mistake, knowing darn well it wasn’t,” she said.
Until Cutter and King were cremated, someone stayed with each of them around the clock. There was a long list of people asking to take a turn, Cutter’s family said.
“I can confidently say I spent more time with him one-on-one than my wife, my parents, like anybody in life,” Schwall said. He counted on Cutter more than anyone. “There’s a lot of things that I still want to do in life, and I always did them with him. It feels a little bit like operating without a safety net now.”
What’s hardest, he said, is the future. Up on the ridgeline, older skiers still turn in slow laps in their 70s. Cutter and Schwall used to buzz past them.
“I planned on being one of the old guys on the ridgeline with him in our 70s, just turning slow backcountry laps,” Schwall said. “They seem to be able to slow down and enjoy it more. And I was kind of looking forward to that.”
Cutter’s parents told him often how proud they were.
“I said, ‘I’m very proud of what you have become and how you’ve handled yourself,'” Doreen said.
He told his mother something more than once, too.
“Mom, remember, if anything happens to me, I was doing what I love,” he’d say.
A celebration of Cutter’s life will be held Oct. 24 at the Olympic Park in Park City, at the base of the ski jumps. A second will be held Nov. 14 at Oak Hill in Hanover.
