Avalanche!

As anticipated, I decided to take a day off work, the first full day in over 3 weeks, and headed to the hills. Glorious! Blue skies, no wind, fresh snow. The day couldn't have been better. So we thought, but it was, in a rather dramatic way!

Mt Hutt is 90 minutes from my garage to the car park, a perfect drive, and we picked up our passes, and headed up the hill. After 1 metre of fresh snow the area was looking stunning, and we noticed one of the most advanced slopes, the South Face, about to open. My friend Rob wasn't so keen, he hadn't skied for a year or two, but I was. Some of my most epic days have been on South Face, after fresh snow and few people. Like today! So we headed to the gate and waited for the ski patrol to drop it, 10 minutes later we were rewarded with access to fresh tracks, deep fresh tracks. Unbelievably perfect!

I waited for Rob to access the slope thu one of the far shutes, and once he was thru I barrelled down the hill. Maybe 400 vertical metres of fresh untracked snow. Yes, I was screaming with delight, it's my idea of paradise! As I got to the bottom however I heard more screams ... Avalanche!

Weirdly, I wasn't too worried, despite the fact it was above me and coming straight at me. I simply pointed my skis downhill and across the slope and skied out of its path. Just, and then I got out my camera and photographed the remainder of the slide. It was SO exciting. Really.

We then skied out and looked back at the path. The two clusters of people are helping 2 people who were buried to their waist. Rob was beside the guy who triggered it, and was very lucky not to get swept down. As he said to his wife, if he had been fit and gung ho as me, he probably would have got caught. Time for another beer ;-)

We then skied back to the area, had another run, noticed that South Face was closed (but didn't think much of it), and then on the next run the area was closed. There was some thought a person was still caught. We visited ski patrol and us, along with an number of other witnesses were taken back up to review the scene. By then helicopters and dogs were in place searching. The rest of the ski area was evacuated and they did a "head count" with people in their cars lookign for missing persons.

In the end it was determined that only 2 were caught and got out, the dogs found nothing, witness reports were mostly consistent, so skiing resumed.

What a truly exciting day. Then we skied for the rest of the afternoon, and it was glorious. What a day!

And then of course the Press got hold of it. So sensationalist.

View it in large to see the slide path.

Also just added a few more photos to a Flickr Set

Edit: a new article today on the slide from the Herald.