Avalanches scare me. Landslides don't look much better
Landslide in Himachal Pradesh, India. One massive rock takes out the bridge.
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) July 25, 2021
pic.twitter.com/4kw8GodPiG
And from GQ, January 20, 2022:
The world’s most elite helicopter rescue team is more important than ever, as skiers and snowboarders venture further in the backcountry and climate change makes mountain conditions more dangerous.
For days it had been snowing, but now the clouds were gone. And way up here, high above the tree line, where the storm had wreathed the mountaintop, the only evidence of the foul weather was the snow that it had left behind. It was everywhere, spread across the face of the peak and down the rocky ridges like a thick layer of frosting on a cake and glittering against a cerulean sky.
Joël Jaccard squinted hard in the bright light and shuffled in his skis. He took a long look down the backside of the mountain, studying the way the high slopes of Roc d'Orzival—a 9,400-foot arrowhead-shaped protrusion in the Swiss Alps—fell away beneath him. With his gaze, he traced a path down to the village of Grimentz, more than 5,000 feet below, taking mental measure of the obstacle course before him. Steep traverses, vertical crevasses, ice patches, and spines of black rock. It was a treacherous run, unsecured and unsupervised, suitable only for experts—the ultimate “free ride,” as he thought of it. Jaccard and his two friends had trudged to this off-trail spot by taking a ski resort lift to the highest station and then carrying their skis uphill for another 15 minutes. Now he was eager to get moving; he figured it would take them 30 minutes to reach the village.
Of course, out here, Jaccard knew, things could always go wrong. Like many experienced skiers of the alpine backcountry, he took precautions. Poised on the ridgeline, Jaccard made a mental checklist of the equipment he carried: shovel, collapsible probe, walkie-talkie. In his red canvas backpack he had stowed an airbag that, with the yank of a ripcord, could inflate during an avalanche, propelling him to the surface of the cascading river of snow. If he found himself buried, Jaccard's radio transceiver—known in French as a détecteur de victimes d'avalanche, or DVA—was designed to help rescuers locate him.
But the chances of a disaster on Roc d'Orzival seemed to have diminished this morning. Hours earlier, Jaccard had checked the weather report provided by the Davos-based experts at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. The heightened avalanche warnings that had been issued just over a week earlier had been downgraded for the last few days. The 32-year-old mechanic, a skier since early childhood, wasn't too worried.
The first one off the ridge, Jaccard plunged into the powder and glided downward across a wide snowfield. His two friends followed at a safe distance, a few dozen yards behind. Then Jaccard turned his skis down the 45-degree slope and shot through a pass between hills. He skidded over ice patches and plowed through drifts, picking up speed, trying to suss out a route in the trackless snow. He made one turn, then a wider one.
Then he sensed trouble.
Up ahead, the wind had gone to work on the fresh powder that had been coming down all week, whipping the snow into an enormous drift—a huge pillow-like mound, known as a windslab, or plaque à vent. Jaccard had spent enough time in the mountains to apprehend the danger of this sort of drift. The new pile of snow, resting precariously atop the old, unstable snowpack, could break off and charge down the slope at the slightest disturbance.
Jaccard tried to slow himself; he swerved but couldn't avoid it. Suddenly, he was upon the drift, and then he heard an ominous, low rumbling sound. Turning his head, he saw behind him a fissure open in the snow, 40 yards back, triggered by his body weight. He watched as gravity took hold of the dislodged snow, sending it down the hill. The enormous white wall was sliding in his direction.
Jaccard scrambled atop a rise, but the avalanche, moving now at 60 miles an hour, quickly met him. He felt the immense weight of the wave as it plowed into his back, tearing off his skis, fracturing one of his vertebrae, and pummeling him down in the direction of the ground. As the snow gathered all around him, Jaccard groped for the cord on his airbag and gave it a ferocious pull just before he was fully engulfed. The movement released 200 liters of compressed air from a steel cylinder, which ballooned a dual airbag system to life. He hoped the inflated device would carry him above the smaller bits of snow and ice, and keep him from being buried.
But it wasn't enough. The torrent was unrelenting and Jaccard could see the bright whites and blues of snow and sky now give way to darkness. For the first time, he felt the cold rolling over him, beginning to encase him, choking off any access he had to air. Instinctively, Jaccard stuck his hands over his mouth. Then, finally, all went still.
He was lying facedown on his stomach with his legs extended, unsure of just how much snow he was sealed beneath. With his hands by his face, a small pocket of air had been fortuitously preserved near his mouth, but breathing was already getting difficult. Then, crackling over his walkie-talkie, he heard the urgent voice of one of his companions
“Joël, do you hear me?”
The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn't answer. He couldn't move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black....
....MUCH MORE
That's the thing that spooks me. This snow isn't soft fluffy powder, this is a form-fitting strait jacket of death.
