ANCHORAGE - The president of
Jim Bowles, the head of the oil company’s Alaska operations, was with a dozen snowmobilers in the Grandview wilderness area near Seward when an avalanche roared down a slope Saturday, burying him and Alan Gage.
Bowles’s body was recovered before nightfall, but Gage couldn’t be located before the search was suspended because of darkness.
Megan Peter, a spokesman for the State Police, said yesterday the weather was not conducive to a search for the missing man. Once the weather breaks, a search will resume, she said.
Rescuers from Bowles’s party pulled him from the snow and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation for 30 minutes but he was pronounced dead, troopers said.
Bowles, 57, had headed ConocoPhillips Alaska since November 2004 and oversaw roughly 900 employees in the state, said spokeswoman Natalie Lowman. Gage, 40, is a member of the company’s capital projects team in Anchorage.
