Out there with Tom: Losing skis. What's going on here?

Working up the Deadman road

Mary Stelling ascends after taking a tele turn

Open water in Deadman Creek at trip's end

The sun popped out mid-way through our trip

The stats:

For the second time this backcountry ski season one of our party lost a ski that went skittering down a mountain slope.
The one on our Wayne's Wednesday Walk was more serious than the one that occurred last time on the Showdown Ski Area Golden Goose run where we could have easily walked back to the car on hardpack.
This time it was on our 7-mile Deadman Creek backcountry trip that starts at King's Hill and ends at Highway 89 at the Deadman Creek parking lot, climbing to the ridge and descending to the bottom.
The snow was pretty good, allowing us to yo-yo telemark turns on the first and safest of the Deadman bowls.
About half-way through our trip one of our skiers stopped to adjust his skis and one of them slipped away and took off down a long, steep slope and into dense timber.
We're a group of old guys. We had a 79-year-old, one 78, another 74, two 71-year-olds, and two in their mid to late 60s on this trip.
Post-holing out on one ski in deep snow didn't seem to be an option.
So, Mark Hertenstein and I dropped over the side, descended a couple hundred feet to the trees. We could see a faint ski track into the trees, and nothing from there. We couldn't follow the ski directly because the trees were packed too tightly.
So, I stood where the track entered the timber and Mark worked his way back and around the trees and looked up, saw me and found a ski track below himself. He followed that another 20 feet or so and found the ski.
We got lucky!
I was worried that because of the angle of the slope we had exposed ourselves to avalanche. Further, we didn't have avalanche gear with us.
Wayne Phillips, our hike leader, underscored that and reminded me that it may have been too risky going after the ski. "No lost ski is worth two dead guys caught in an avalanche," he said.
It was because of our earlier lost ski that Wayne had urged everyone to leash their skis.
I was one of those who had done so, and I'm glad I did.
I had weighed the risk of looking for the ski against the potential of having an elderly skier trying to get out of the area in deep snow on one ski.
It worked out this time.
Interesting that in my nearly 50 years of backcountry skiing this is the first season that a skier has lost an unleashed ski ---- and it has happened twice in this season!
After that, we had one more incident where a skier got separated from the group and skied back to the car without waiting for the rest of us. We figured out what he was doing, but our "stick-together" protocol had been violated.
Safety is such an important part of the backcountry, particularly in winter. We continue to learn as we blunder.