Avalanches scare me.
When all that potential energy goes kinetic you understand the meaning of puny human.
From GQ, January 25, 2022:
Now more than ever, skiers and snowboarders are venturing further in the backcountry — at a moment when climate change is making mountain conditions more dangerous. The result: it's never been a busier time for the world's most elite helicopter rescue team
For days it had been snowing, but now the clouds were gone. And way up here, high above the treeline, 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-feet 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 metres 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, 35m 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 60mph, 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 pummelling 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 litres 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....
....MUCH MORE
