I NEARLY DIED…

“Say three things about yourself, one of which is untrue,” was the instruction.

I nearly died in an avalanche. I nearly died in a car accident. I nearly died flying a plane.

The first of these was a truth and I’ve decided to write about it today.

But why choose today, in the middle of August, to write about a snowy day in the mountains? Well, I wanted to write something; didn’t fancy writing about sex or relationships, and I recently told this tale to my therapist, taking myself back to February 2002 in the process. My skiing buddy, P, and I had carefully saved up all our pennies for several years and, fully aware of how ridiculously privileged this made us, booked a heli-skiing trip.

Here’s how it turned out:

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Arriving in the ski lodge near a small town in the centre of the Canadian Rockies on a cold Sunday evening, we fill in questionnaires about our ability and our fitness. Everybody lies a bit. We sort out “Fat Boy” powder skis and avalanche bleeps and, over a huge roast ham and plenty of beer, meet the people we will be skiing with. The following morning we practice helicopter drills and avalanche drills, burying and finding each other’s bleeps to show we know how to use them.

We’d have paid even more attention to the drills if we had only known then….

Only an hour after breakfast, along with the eight other guests in our group and two guides, we pile into the Helicopter and are off. Our helicopter works with three groups and we are the first away. Our guide is Swiss and all conscientious focus behind his wide smile and expensive shades. He’s the lead guide for the three groups and responsible for deciding which peaks we land on and which slopes we ski.

The helicopter lands just under a peak and, once its intrusive “wokka-wokka” has left us in the silence of the mountains, we test our unfamiliar fat skis on a medium slope of fluffy powder, making tracks alongside those of the guide. The blissful feeling of skis sliding though new snow; the wonderful, seemingly endless, mountain views; the joy of sharing such an experience with both old friends and new; these things all combine to cause smiles, whoops and fist-bumps at the bottom of the first pitch.

It last snowed less than a week ago and the guide finds fresh snow for every run. We are blessed, especially blessed because this is the first day of a five day trip. What a joyous thing to contemplate!

Lunch is meaty soup from an insulated container brought out of the back of the helicopter, and served up with huge chunks of fresh bread. The conversation is all about the morning:

“Wow, that last run was something!”

“Hey, Mike, your fall by that tree was spectacular!”

“You Brits ski pretty good, considering there’s no snow in England!” This last directed to P and I.

There’s a group of four guys on a stag trip; the rest, like us, are pairs of friends. I chat to the second guide. He’s only with us today because the sun’s out, and there’s a spare seat in the ‘copter. His wife and young daughter, visiting from Switzerland, are back in the lodge. He tells us there’s a long history of Swiss guides in Canada; they originally arrived in the nineteenth century to seek a route through the Rockies for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

I realise now that I’m writing all this detail, not to embellish the story, but because, nearly 20 years on, describing what happened after lunch is still emotional. 

As he loads the remains of our lunch back into the helicopter, the lead guide promises a treat for the next run, a peak that hasn’t yet been skied this year.

“We surveyed it yesterday, and you will be the first crew to get into it!”  he says.

The first pitch is wide and steeper than the morning runs, each turn needs to be completed before starting the next to control our speed. After maybe twenty turns, he stops on a ledge and waits for us to join him.

“Watch your spacing, guys! I know it’s fun, but keep 100m between each of you on this next pitch. Stay to skier’s right of my tracks.”

Waiting for my turn, I wonder what made him urge so much caution: Some sixth sense given only to guides? Something about the way his skis had reacted to the snow? He heads down the next pitch followed, one by one, by the group. Still on the ledge, I hear the whooshing sound of snow on snow and the alarmed shout of the second guide: “AVALANNNNNCHE!” at the same time.

When I was 8 years old, I was once body surfing with my father on holiday (we lived in Africa at the time) and we ventured further from the shore than I intended. Too small for the wave I tried to catch, it picked me up, twisted me into a ball and ground me onto the sand. That memory floods into my mind as I’m picked up by the wave of snow and tumbled like a soft toy in a washing machine. I desperately fight to kick my skis off, just as the books tell you, while frantically trying to swim for the surface. Dread twists my stomach into a knot. Am I going to die? I’m going to die. I won’t see the boys grow up.

Miraculously, I find myself, still, in silence and alive. I open my eyes to find I am on the surface of the snow, to the side of the avalanche path, spat out like a plum stone. One ski is still attached, the other nearby. Slowly, I take in the scene. A wide river made from big boulders of hardened snow stretches below me. Two or three hundred yards away, the river splits around a rise in the terrain where I can see two people, one standing unsteadily, the other lying down and looking broken. I recognise the standing figure as my friend P and a surge of relief wells up in me. The second figure is in a guide’s ski-suit but I don’t recognise him. (We later found that he was the guide from the second group sharing our helicopter, who had started skiing above us on the same slope).

In the distance I can see more figures and a wide stretch of broken snow at the bottom of the slope. I make my way gingerly through the field of icy boulders, bleep set to receive in case anyone is trapped above the main accumulation of snow. The next hour is a series of snapshots:

Counting the people I can see below me again and again, only getting to eight when it should be twelve.

Seeing one guy partially buried but still breathing. They’ve left him till they’ve dealt with the more urgent cases.

The second guide from our group, the young guy with his family back at the lodge, is lying on the surface. He’s been found, already dead, by the senior guide who is struggling to be in charge, voice thick with emotion, movements slow.

P, with a signal on his bleep, is digging steadily. Success! It’s the best man from the stag party, but he’s not looking good. I pump his chest while P breathes into him, but we’re too late and he dies under us. We know the exact moment. His friend, the groom, begs us to carry on, so we do, knowing the figure beneath us has already gone, but not yet ready to admit it to his friend

A second helicopter arriving with more guides and equipment. Grim faces, too late to help much.

A frantic dig following a faint signal from a bleep. Deeper and deeper into the icy snow. He’s alive, but only just, an avalanche breathing aid clamped in his mouth. A helicopter leaves immediately with him and the broken guide.

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Only later were we able to fill in the gaps of our own experience: The guide from the second group had made a turn over a patch of hoar frost a metre down. Hoar frost behaves like ball-bearings and it had released a slab of snow 50 metres wide; 2,500 tonnes of the stuff accelerating towards us waiting on the ledge below. The path of the avalanche was half a kilometre long and it triggered a secondary avalanche that went all the way to the valley. Four people were buried of whom two died, the young guide and the best man from the stag trip, and two others were taken to hospital.

The bar in the lodge was quiet that evening. P and I drank some beers and talked about what to say to our wives. He wanted to keep it to himself while I needed to share it. We visited the guys in hospital the next day, all skiing suspended.

Over the next few days, everyone in our helicopter group went home, apart from P and I. We had travelled a long way and felt the need to get back into the mountains and face down the fear of it. On my first run, a skier stopped just above me and the snow-on-snow sound made me twist round in alarm, heart thumping. On the final day of the trip, I managed, over ten runs in deep snow, to stay with a group of very experienced Swiss guys who skied in Zermatt most weekends. They were solicitous and caring and thoroughly lovely, hugging me firmly at the end and buying me drinks back at the lodge.

You might ask why I say “I nearly died,” at the start of this story, when I was uninjured. Well, when the avalanche hit those of us that were still on the ledge, the young Swiss guide was standing no more than five or six metres to my right. I occasionally imagine myself tossing a coin. If it comes down tails, we swap places. That’s all it would have taken.

Strangely, telling this story now, nearly twenty years on, is more likely to choke me up than it would have done in the year or two after it happened. But I’ve learnt how to acknowledge and share my emotions now and that, I think, is a good thing.

I nearly died in an avalanche. I nearly died in a car accident. I nearly died flying a plane.

Perhaps, one day I’ll write about the other truth in this list.

 

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Below is the Avalanche Canada record of “my” avalanche.

 

 

I hope you don’t mind me sharing this, but this blog is a place where I can take things out of my head and examine them in detail. This was a formative event for me and I don’t want the memory of it to fade.