Deadly California avalanche highlights backcountry risks as a rescue operation stretched into a second day, with a continuing storm keeping additional slide risk on the table, authorities said. The avalanche killed eight people in the Sierra Nevada backcountry area and left one person missing two days after the group was caught in the Tuesday slide, AP reported. Six people survived.
Rescuers faced the same dangers that killed the skiers and professional guides as they searched for victims in an environment made more volatile by several feet of new snow. With the storm continuing on Thursday, officials said recovery efforts were planned to resume Friday.
The situation highlighted a safety principle that experts say applies as much to rescuers as to travelers: do not turn a rescue attempt into another emergency. “It was, quite likely, very necessary for them to leave the backcountry so their hazard wasn’t increased further,” said Anthony Pavlantos of Utah-based Prival USA, which makes avalanche safety equipment and runs mountain safety programs. In the same remarks, Pavlantos cautioned against trying to assign blame after the fact, saying, “What’s really hard to say is like ‘why were they moving?’ You can’t ever start placing blame on events like this because we can all be there.”
Avalanche danger also intersects with the way people use backcountry winter weather. Experts said that hazardous storms can mean abundant fresh snow, which can draw skiers and snowboarders into areas where avalanche risk is heightened. Dale Atkins, who has been involved in mountain rescues and avalanche forecasting and research in Colorado for five decades, said the decision is not simply whether to go. “It’s not about not going; it’s about where and when you go,” Atkins said.
Atkins said fatalities are rare enough that risk takers can survive long enough to develop a false sense that conditions will hold. “It’s really easy to be fooled by the snow and avalanches,” he said. “We keep going out even in the worst of storms because that’s what we did last time, and then our luck runs out.”
In practice, experts said the best odds for someone buried under snow come from quick self-rescue or rescue by a companion, in part because many avalanches strike remote terrain where outside help takes time to reach victims. AP reported that rescuers took about six hours to reach the victims after the first report came in, compared with the survival outlook Atkins described for people buried for an hour—about one in 10, he said. The surviving skiers in California found three of the victims while they waited for help, while authorities had not released detailed information on how the other victims were located.
Searchers described a “probe line” approach for the aftermath of a major slide, where a debris field can cover a large area and make it harder to determine where someone ended up. The first steps involve spotting clues such as a glove or ski pole that can indicate where a victim may be. Anthony Stevens, chief adviser for the search and rescue team in Teton County, Wyoming, home to Grand Teton National Park, said searchers look for such clues.
Stevens and other experts also pointed to technology carried by many guided winter parties. Skiers in guided groups often carry transceivers, known as avalanche beacons, that send out signals indicating their location and can receive other signals to show direction and approximate distance to a victim. If signals do not resolve a person’s position, rescuers can line up and use long poles to probe into the snow in hopes of finding someone, said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
Once a buried person is located, digging becomes the next race against time. Atkins said the average depth of burial is roughly a meter, or just over 3 feet, and that compacted snow means rescuers have to move at least a ton of material to reach someone at that depth. He said survival beyond the early window is rare, though he added that he knew of cases in the 1990s in Washington state where two people survived being buried for 22 and 24 hours, respectively, while a third party member did not survive. “It’s very unusual for a rescue team to find a buried person alive. But it happens, and that gives us hope,” Atkins said.
Associated Press writer Corey Williams contributed to the report from Detroit.