My heart aches for Ranger Anderson and her family and friends. From her picture her face is familiar to me, I didn't know her but I recognize her from day trips to Paradise last summer. Park Rangers are almost always pretty happy people, but Ranger Anderson was clearly living my dream of being in the outdoors every day and helping people, which she did right to the end. My deepest condolences to her husband and two little kids.

This Barnes person is a suspect in an earlier shooting south of Seattle of 4 people at a house in Skyway. There's speculation about what he was doing heavily armed on the one-way road to Paradise, a destination for visitors, tourists, backcountry campers and skiers and snow cave builders, with a lodge with about 100-200 people in it most weekends. That speculation considers that he may have been on his way up to Paradise to kill as many people as he could. Regardless of where Barnes thought he was going or what he might do, Ranger Anderson's road block stopped him from doing it. Its not hyperbole to consider that her actions and presence stopped a far greater tragedy.

I don't know and don't care if Barnes was a 'survivalist', except if any group he may have been a member of exists, I'd like to know they don't share his particular anger and violence. There are certainly more than a few survivalist groups in the backwoods out here in the PNW, but mostly these guys are too far gone, they tend to be loners or loosely associated with a few other f-ups.

So he had his fire fight with Park Rangers, and escaped with his life - ill equipped - through waist-high snow. If he had survival gear or survival training from the military, he would have found his situation quite dire. You don't last long wading through Cascade concrete in tennis shoes and t shirt. It sounds like he got about a mile along Paradise Creek, probably by escaping the snow and wading the freezing creek - or maybe he just slipped and fell in (getting out with a 40 inch snow bank is pretty tough, especially in tennis shoes). Maybe his reptilian brain was sending him the only place he had a chance, downstream, downhill, but its a long way to get below the snow line from Barn Flat's where the shoot out occurred, and the creek is certainly terribly cold, and beyond difficult to navigate on foot. He may also have been heading up stream towards Paradise lodge, but that's an even harder path. Sounds like he died face down in that creek, hypothermia. Either way, it doesn't matter to me - the mountain got him in the end.