She knew from avalanche safety courses that outstretched hands might puncture the ice surface and alert rescuers. Saugstad felt the snow slow and tried to keep her hands in front of her.
Saugstad’s pinwheeling body would freeze into whatever position it was in the moment the snow stopped.Īfter about a minute, the creek bed vomited the debris into a gently sloped meadow. The laws of physics and chemistry transform a meadow of fine powder into a wreckage of icy chunks. But when it stops, it instantly freezes solid. Moving, roiling snow turns into something closer to liquid, thick like lava. Seconds later, tumbling uncontrollably inside a ribbon of speeding snow, she was sure this was how she was going to die. She caromed off things she never saw, tumbling through a cluttered canyon like a steel marble falling through pins in a pachinko machine.Īt first she thought she would be embarrassed that she had deployed her air bag, that the other expert skiers she was with, more than a dozen of them, would have a good laugh at her panicked overreaction. It was not unlike being cartwheeled in a relentlessly crashing wave. She had no control of her body as she tumbled downhill. She was knocked down before she knew if the canister of compressed air inflated winged pillows behind her head. About to be overtaken, she pulled a cord near her chest. The energy raised the temperature of the snow a couple of degrees, and the friction carved striations high in the icy sides of the canyon walls.Įlyse Saugstad, a professional skier, wore a backpack equipped with an air bag, a relatively new and expensive part of the arsenal that backcountry users increasingly carry to ease their minds and increase survival odds in case of an avalanche. It accelerated as the slope steepened and the weight of the slide pushed from behind. It moved in surges, like a roller coaster on a series of drops and high-banked turns. The slope of the terrain, shaped like a funnel, squeezed the growing swell of churning snow into a steep, twisting gorge. Somewhere inside, it also carried people.
Others it captured and added to its violent load. The avalanche, in Washington’s Cascades in February, slid past some trees and rocks, like ocean swells around a ship’s prow. Moving about 7o miles per hour, it crashed through the sturdy old-growth trees, snapping their limbs and shredding bark from their trunks. Within seconds, the avalanche was the size of more than a thousand cars barreling down the mountain and weighed millions of pounds. Snow shattered and spilled down the slope. Somewhere above, a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt, slicing a slab nearly 200 feet across and 3 feet deep. The very thing the 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought - fresh, soft snow - instantly became the enemy. The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last-second whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing cry: “Avalanche! Elyse!”
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