Here is a video of a tree well incident that happened to a friend of mine last season. It's downright scary. Avalanches are not the only hazard to backcountry skiers. It went viral last year and recently did again. It has a particular resonance with me right now because I had a similar experience last weekend in the Lassen backcountry.
https://www.facebook.com/sacnonprofit/posts/10152579204650197
My trip last weekend had 6 clients and 2 guides, very fortunately for me. It rained much of Friday night at the cabin where we stayed at 5000 ft. Saturday AM we started from a trailhead at 6700 with light snow falling with visions of perfect powder dancing in our heads. The plow cuts on the roadsides were more than head high, enormous snow depths that had us Tahoe skier's eyes bugged out. The snow got heavier and wetter as we skinned up and snow turned to sleet, then light rain in fog. It was a gorgeous climb through mature evergreen forest, all topped with giant snowcones. We topped out above an open slope and did an avalanche search and rescue drill set up realistically by the guides. Everyone noticed that our probes went down their full length easily which is about 10 feet. In retrospect I think that the entire snowpack had gone isothermal in the time we were skinning up.
The slope was overall 25-30 degrees but had a convex rollover that went to 35-40 for about 5 turns. It looked perfectly smooth and perfect. It promised to be thick and heavy and it was. Below the steepest part it began getting harder to turn and shockingly the slope was full of deep runnels and depressions that were invisible from above. As I struggled to deal with those, vertigo. I've had it before and hate it. In flat light and fog the inner ear balance organs and the eyes detach from one another and from reality. The brain can't make sense of it and you barely know up from down. The folks watching up top saw me just disappear, on a smooth looking slope. In reality I had skied into a deep hole that I didn't even see and landed in bottomless soft snow, head below feet, skis, arms, legs and pack encased in rapidly hardening snow. My airway was clear, but no amount of struggle could get me upright. I was helped out by Max, a young super snowboarder who will in a few weeks begin his second season as a heli guide in Alaska. If I had been alone, I'd still be there. After making several more craters apiece. All of us finally got out to a road packed by snow machines, and skied out a few hundred yards to the Lassen visitor center which is warm, dry and open 365, 24/7.
I am still scared by the possibilities that didn't happen. I am going have to change my approach to backcountry skiing in deep soft snow times in the west and northwest. I may only do the backcountry in spring corn. I skied backcountry alone in WV and VT for many years, and a little bit in the west, without ever encountering anything like this. No matter how good you are, or think you are, the mountains can throw something at you that you can't handle.
I warned ya to be safe Denis.....I had a similar experience at Canaan last year.....it all started when I tried to take a shortcut from the bunny slope to my truck in the parking lot...crossing over the huge pile of snow pushed up by the snowplows I suddenly just fell thru to my neck...I couldnt move!!..I started to panic and could not reach for my emergency whistle so i started to scream for Betterhalfski...she eventually made it to me just in time before I lost consciousness...(maybe from screaming so loud)..after a few promises to her and some resolutions and changes of past patterns she pulled me out...Whewwww!..sorry denis..carry on..
Thanks Fish. We still haven't had that beer at Timbers. Hope you can make it out here sometime to rectify that.
yikes - well don't feel to bad, except for the head over heels thing i too had somewhat of a similar experience in my first season in Park City over in Snowbird somewhere off the Gazoom lift *in bounds*. Mine involved a convex surface with a slough avalache that damn near killed me if not for a small piece of rocky projection and a baby pine tree. Surfice it to say I learned the hard way -
1) Always stick you your plan. I had scoped out the off-trail chute I wanted to ski from below, but over shot it on my traverse in and took the next one - big mistake!
2) Convex surfices are a bee-ach . Even with mistake 1) I would have been able to see I was heading into big trouble with rock exposure and would not have taken it.
3) Always assume the worst and have a back-up plan - which I didn't. I never expected the snow to fall right out under me when I applied my edge on my second turn, and had no exit plan.
Actually I am sort of amazed that your guide did not ski somewhat over the sight line of the surface so he could observe conditions and clients going down .... hmmmmmm
The vertigo thing - that is a hard one but i know what you mean. i have found it useful - as weird as this sounds - if i look at the basket of my pole i am about to plant. it at least gives you something real to focus on and in fact if you are steep skiing and look at your basket just before you plant you are probably in a decent blocking position and countering. well it sort of works - sometimes.
There was a plan and it was followed. There were 8 people total, 2 of them guides. The lead guide took 3 of the clients to a lower angle slope off to one side and the second guide took those of us who chose to ski/ride the convex slope. A strong skier, well known to the lead guide from previous trips, went first while the rest of us watched from the top. He ski cut the top of the steep section, and went on down. A couple of his turns on the flatter part below looked ugly, which should have been a hint to the rest of us. His run also showed that the slope was not smooth, as it appeared to be. I went next, the guide swept the rear. This is the way I would have done it. All too often in groups of friends skiing together they go from strongest first to weakest last. Then if there is trouble the weakest has to deal with it alone, while the stronger skiers are already down.
i believe I would have been OK without the vertigo. How northwest skiers deal with this so well is a mystery to me. However they do. It isn't something I would expect to be learnable. Crush's pole basket idea sounds good but limited. I would have focussed on the trees on the side, but was trying to see the deep runnels and holes once i realzed they were there. The lead guide said that when caught by whiteout on glaciers they tie a 15 foot rope to a pole grip and throw it out in front of them, make one turn to a stop, and repeat. This will also reveal the presence of an open crevasse.
well - as far as guides are conceren - just a little tale. Again the first year in Utah i took a back-country avalanche course from the University of Utah. Our guide/boss "B" (no names here) was an experienced instructor there and had huge credentials. yeah i suely didn't know what i was doing but we skinned up "usa bowl" and trained trained trained on working out beepers, rescued, safety etc etc etc blahh blahh blahh. so we get to our destination and we learn about digging a now pit with a snow saw, yada yada yada and then we do the roche block test.
so
it was supposed to be a "medium risk" day and i was the happy crash dummy for the roche block test - and on my second hop it broke with a foot deep fracture.
At that point our guide said "ok - so I now think this is a high-risk day ... let's go one at a time on the traverse and Eric why don't you go first and don't stop until you reach the saddle".
Yeah - guides - that is when I sort of stopped trusting them. i kinda new it when he did kick turns down from the summit -
