ConocoPhillips Alaska President Jim Bowles was a smart, capable and powerful man accustomed to making big decisions. The little one he got wrong cost him his life.

Bowles died Saturday, buried beneath an avalanche near a place so spectacular the Alaska Railroad called the old train stop next to it "Grandview.'' Along with a sizable group of friends, Bowles had left the tiny, Kenai Peninsula community of Moose Pass that morning on his snowmobile and crossed Trail Lake to begin climbing up into the Kenai Mountains. It was a gorgeous day destined to turn horrible.

Forget now anything you might have read or heard about this accident having anything to do with the Spencer Glacier or Portage. The former is two ridges and one glacier away to the north. The latter isn't even in the picture. The mislocation of this tragedy is the result of the inevitable fog of deadlines and the lack of knowledge among many of the people on both ends of the reporting continuum, the press-release suppliers of information at one end and the stenographers of the media at the other.

Had Bowles and his friends set out up the Placer River valley from Portage past the Spencer Glacier to try to climb over the ridge to the south and then into the Bartlett Glacier valley above Grandview, what they were doing might have been considered risky. But that is not what happened.

Death for Bowles, 57, and ConocoPhillips' Alan Gage, 39, came hidden in the far more innocent terrain on the approach to Grandview up Trail Creek valley from the south.

"I might have skied that line myself,'' a backcountry-savvy friend said after looking at photographs of the accident scene.

Only he wouldn't have. Not because he is any smarter than Bowles or the people who were with him. Bowles was an intelligent guy. You don't reach the position he attained without being smart. And most of the people with him were bright, college-educated men. Exactly how much any of them specifically knew about avalanches remains unclear, but you don't get through a college engineering course without studying physics. And avalanches are all about physics. Snow is a substance at war with gravity. It wants to flow downhill. Whether it does or not is a matter of friction and cohesion.

The skiing friend who made the observation about straying himself into what avalanche experts call a "terrain trap'' near Grandview is no Einsten, but he is smart and alert. Those qualities would have helped to protect him, but they are not what would have stopped him. Being on skis is what would have stopped him. When you are on skis, you feel and hear and better see the snow around you.

Bowles and the people with him were on snowmobiles. Avalanche fatalities related to snowmobiling have been growing steadily across the West for a decade. It is the fault, if blame is to be placed, of both the technology and the failure of many of us -- myself included -- to adjust to the dangers that come with better technology.

The simple fact of the matter is that snowmobiles can now be driven pretty easily into places that could only be reached by arduous effort in the past. Where once people had to get on snowshoes to pack down a trail to drive their snowmachine forward, they can now just drive.

And that little convenience changes everything in monumental ways.

When you are on a snowmachine roaring through the mountains, you lose two senses -- sound and feel -- and you compromise another -- sight. The roar of the machine, even the quietest machine, drowns out the "whoomph" of settling snow, and the superb suspensions of snowmobiles today suck up any feel of that snow settling beneath you.

As for the changes in what you see, almost everyone should understand the relation of speed to sight. If you sit and watch, you see more than if you are walking. If you are walking, you see more than if you are running. If you are running, you see more than if you are biking. If you are biking, you see more than if you are driving.