One sound you don't want to hear while skiing is....
....the sound of galloping horses above you.
Wow....a big, fast-moving wet slide missed me by 5 feet today at Kirkwood. It came galloping and crashing down from up high in the Cirque.
I take the high traverse from the top of Eagle Bowl into lower Cirque and follow it nearly to the end. This travese takes you across and above multiple rock bands before dead-ending in a gully that always holds really good snow.
Around 11 AM or so I'm standing at the end of this traverse about to drop into the gully, when I hear the sound of galloping horses in the distance....or was that soft thunder just above me?.....I look above me and I'm like, "oh wow, there's some slough spilling over those rocks." 2 seconds behind this little slough is a wave of cascading snow. "Holy shit!!" Knowing that it was too late and stupid to jump in the gully and try to outrun the thing, I begin poling backwards on the traverse, hoping that I can get out of the way. That sketched me out even more, because the more I poled backwards, then the more exposed of a tumble I'd have if I got caught.
But luckily the slide path wasn't all that wide, and I was able to back-traverse to a little safe zone. If I stayed where I was standing however, I would have been taken out for sure. The debris cruised down about 100 feet past where I was standing after spilling over some more rocks.
Totally sketched me out....the initial wave of snow spilling over the rocks above me was about my height...and it was mooooooving damn fast.....just about every wet slide I've seen have been the slow, hissing, creepers. But this thing had momentum, was naturally triggered, and was in-bounds. Yikes.
