Brother Caught in Avalanche Today in St. Anton

[Hicks]

H-Man,

Glad to hear your brother made it out alive. Not the right time now to criticize anyone.....
Chilling to see an area I often skied being so mined up right now.

[tdwash]

I bought a pack after traveling to Austria 5 years ago and seeing all the guides wear one, I finally bought one from mtlion and have worn it several times this year in the bc. I even got a funny look from someone last weekend and asked if he could pull the handle! What compartment did the shovel fit into? I'm glad to hear you guys came out of this thing alive!!! What are the chances of finding this guy who set off the av!?

[SheSkisTrees]

Damn those slide pics are chilling. H-man, I'm not surprised you can't get that out of your head.

Good reminder to all of us to make sure you have everything and it's in working order.

[H-man]

I guess that the story, and the first mistake, begins two nights before. As stated earlier, we were test firing a couple of new ABS bags that were going to be used the next day. While this is a necessary step to insure that they work, we were having some fun with it. Herbie the Arab’s 84 year old dad was with us. We dressed him up in a helmet and goggles and the ABS pack with all the other gear on it and had him pull the trigger as he had never seen or experienced it. Pictures and videos were taken and it was quite funny.



I wonder now if the joking around atmosphere carried over and distracted us, causing the spent handle to get packed with my brother’s pack for the next day.

Sunday morning was blue bird and powder fever was in the air. Change over day is Saturday so Sunday is the first day for the new guests to ski. Add that to the new snow that fell the night before and people were hot to get out there. I was equally hot to get out there as it was the last day of my trip and most likely would be the best skiing. The last thing that I did before heading to the lift was check the avalanche report and as expected, it was up to considerable from moderate all the days prior. I left the apartment with the report still up on the screen…

Our group of four that morning had a very hard time coordinating what we were doing, where we were meeting, if we were touring or not ect. This confusion got us out on the hill later than usual, and the confusion left Herbie without skins. I was pissed and frustrated at the bad start to the day. Not good for paying attention. This tension and lack of a plan lead to Herbie not skiing with us. Now we were down to three.

As usual, we did a beacon check to ensure everyone was up and running. Andy took pictures of the piste and lift board on his camera to use as a guide to help us plan our attack like usual. We wanted to access the Schindler or Valluga as a kick off point to our planned tour, but both were still closed at this point, so we headed for Kapall to get up into Mattun and get a run before they opened the higher peaks and still be close to access the lifts when they opened.

Since we were late, Mattun was already being hammered.

An eerie picture taken before knowing where we were truly heading in Mattun




The traverse out makes the High T on a powder day look like a joke. It was more like a NYC traffic jam. Bumper to bumper people. Andy spoke to many people on the way out the traverse about them not having the proper gear and that this was not a controlled area. When we stepped off the traverse to gear up the first thing that he commented on was that he felt that probably 80% of the people on the traverse that he choose to speak with told him they did not have beacons or any other safety equipment.

At this point we stopped for a minute to put on our final gear. While I was putting on my Avalung, we noticed that Christoph had the expended handle. We discussed this for a minute and decided to continue, but that we would head to the Jennewein Sport Shop at the top of Galzig to get a new handle before we went touring. Christoph did at that point remove his pole straps from his wrists. We did not discuss changing our route or doing anything different at this point. We probably should have taken a minute and thought about our route down. This was an example of thinking that in the gear category we had a “green light” going in when really it was yellow or some might say even red. Would or should this have changed the go, no go balance is certainly debatable, but the truth of the situation is it didn’t even get thought about twice.

We headed down a flat round knoll above the small gully and came around from the left hand side. We stopped in a safe zone about 5’ below and to the left of the cornice ringing the top of the upside down tear drop shaped gully. As a definite terrain trap it was discussed to cross it one at a time. Looking at the pictures, we could have gone down a little lower and still made it to the line we were hoping to get to, but we were trying to stay high, and as it was only about 25’ across, it could be crossed quickly, so again, we never thought twice about not crossing it in that location. Thank god we did follow the one at a time rule.

Andy went across first uneventfully. I watched the uphill side and cornice as he crossed without incident. As he finished his cross, he yelled for Christoph to go. Christoph dropped in and I looked back up at the cornice. At the exact same instant as he dropped into the gully, a skier came in hot and stopped hard right on the edge of the cornice. Instantly the cornice rim sheared away from the slope. It was probably 40’ plus long in a circular measurement and ranged from over 2 meters thick on the left to .5 meters thick on the right hand side. I immediately turned and looked at Christoph and started to yell “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! PULL THE TRIGGER, PULL THE TRIGGER!” even knowing that it would not work. It was the instinct that made me say it I'm sure, as there was no time to think rationally that it wouldn't work and not to waste my breath. At that point he got engulfed in the avalanche. My brother is a big guy, a weight lifter and 6’ tall. All I know is that the wall of snow that hit him covered him head to toe. I figure that he was about 15’ plus below where the cornice broke and 25’ away. I never saw the cornice hit the gully floor or even if the skier went in with it. In the time it took to yell the sentence above he was gone. I continued to watch the slide move down hill to get another last seen point yelling “LAWINE, LAWINE, LAWINE!” (avalanche), but I never saw him again.

[H-man]

From here on, I need to tell two stories to illustrate how fucked up this shit can be. I will start with my experience and then follow up with my brothers as he related it to me.

Just like that Christoph was gone. Andy yelled FUCK! And continued to look down the path for a last seen point. He asked me where I had seen him last and we both agreed that it was at the point of impact, the highest point of the slide. Andy started to take out his beacon. I looked back up hill to check for any hangfire. There did not appear to be anything significant, but there were other guys who were skiing with the guy who set it off standing at the edge of the broken cornice. I yelled to them to back away from the edge and started to get my beacon out. Andy yelled to them if they had avi gear, they replied that they did and he told them to get down in and start searching.

At this point I remember Andy and I and I believe three guys from this other group all heading for the last seen spot. My beacon, as well as Andy’s was going crazy with multiple signals as the other guys were not in search mode yet. I remember not panicking about this at first, knowing that the signals would go away as the other guys finally turned to search. The audio clues and visual distance guides on my Orthovox M2 started to get fewer until there was only one that said about 5 meters. Everyone was converging on that spot.

Mattun is a very highly skied area and a lot of people saw this happen. As you would hope, people started to come over to help. All of a sudden, there were multiple signals again.

I am far from an avalanche expert. I do practice with my beacon, probably not enough, but am confident in my skills. I vary the scenarios as to how many buried beacons and number of searchers. I mess with people that I have practiced with by switching mine back to transmit. The problem for me was that even with trying to mix it up, I never really thought about a beacon search happening with so many people in the search party coming in at different times and creating mass beacon confusion. Just when you would think you were down to one signal, more would appear this happened many times. I have started to call it the “urban” beacon rescue. I have always figured if it ever went down, it would be where there was only your immediate party, maybe a few others. Never did I consider many, many people.

We knew what was going on in regards to the beacons. I remember in my heart saying to myself that as hard as Christoph got hit and as fast as the slide was moving he had to have been carried downhill. I wanted to go down hill with my heart. My beacon, as well as everyone else’s who was coming over to help was telling a different story. My head said, there is a signal here still, until all of them are eliminated, I can’t leave this spot. I remember one guy, and I think it might have been powslut's buddy Marco, just yelling continuously for people to put there beacons in search mode.

This is the single biggest thing that I struggle with out of this whole experience. When should you trust your gut and go against your head, training and science? I would appreciate any and all comments from you all on this question.

This area is actually very small. With so many people coming in to help in such a small area it was getting insane. I still had my skis on in anticipation of moving down the path, but at this point people were standing on my skis and I could not move at all, so I took them off and stuck them in the snow vertically so they would not be confused as some of Christoph’s gear.

There were so many people searching with beacons in such a small area that I opted to stop searching and assemble my gear. I took off my pack and put together my probe. At one point shortly after that the signals went down to one signal that was less than two meters. I started to probe the area. I’m not really sure what happened, but some how my probe got all messed up. I either didn’t get the screw cap all the way tight leaving some play or one of the connections got broken with all the people around. After probing for only about a minute, the bottom two sections of my probe were dangling, making the probe useless. In frustration, I just threw it out of the debris, put my shovel together and then put my pack back on.

More people were still coming to the scene at this point, continuing the beacon confusion. Andy had taken out his second beacon and was using both a Mammut and a Tracker, one in each hand to try and verify the different signals. I will say here that Andy is a professional. He is a ski guide of the highest rank and a member of the Mountain Rescue. He has been involved with hundreds of searches in his life. This was the first incident that he had ever had with his clients. I think Andy would agree that this was a very confusing search effort. I remember saying to myself if I could have one wish right now, it would be that there were only about three people here. Kinda fucked up that my wish wasn’t that my brother was ok or with us or none of this had ever happened. I figure that the frustration of all the signals was so fore front in my mind that that is what I wished would go away. Fucked up shit.

At this point, I would bet that 5 minutes had gone by. Knowing what was going on with the beacon confusion, Andy yelled to me to start searching down the path and that he would stay and make sure there was no buried signal left behind.

Here are a couple of pictures taken by the police after we were sure that no one was buried here. They give you an idea of the tight quarters we were working in. There are 13 – 15 people in these pictures and this is after we had moved down the path. The guy sitting on the left hand slope in both pictures is the person that the police feel triggered the slide.

2008 EDIT: Added pictures back in.




I started walking down the path. It was very narrow and well with in the range of the M2 so I only had to walk down the center of the path. However with out skis on, I was sinking to my waist with every step, my beacon in my left hand orientating for a signal and my shovel in my right. I remember some one asking me how long Christoph had been buried and I yelled back at them that it didn’t matter and to keep searching until we found him. After this comment I remember kind of congratulating myself for not loosing my head and still doing my “job” while my brother lay somewhere dying.

As I went down the path, I would pick up a signal every once and a while yell to people above that I had something, and then it would go away. Same scenario of “ghost” signals, most likely of people just skiing by the gully on either side, probably not even knowing what was going on. This happened two or three times.

I truly do not know what happened next. I think that my early thought about me keeping my shit together and doing my job must have cracked my mental armor. The next thing that I remember, I was sitting in the middle of the debris path not doing anything. I remember having really strange thoughts. The two that stick out in my head the most really show where I was mentally at this point I feel. I remember debating with myself as to who I should call first, my mom or dad to tell them that my brother was dead. The second one was that I had left my skis up above and that I should probably climb up and get them. I think that at this point, I had entered some sort of shock and was realizing it. I remember sitting there and at this point seeing the helicopters hovering below, and dogs and Mountain Rescue people jumping out of them because there was no place to touch down. I’m guessing that ten minutes plus had gone by at this point.

At this point I made a decision. I was not mentally in this game anymore and not capable of helping. I decided that I was going to stand up, walk out of the debris path to the left and sit down and just start crying because my brother was dead.

At that very moment, before I could even stand up, Andy showed up and put his arms around me. He just said he was so sorry about this, but we couldn’t stop. We had to get up and keep searching below. He said come on and get up. I did.

We went down a little further still getting no signals. We got to the top of the narrow rock chute, and I think Andy said that it was not safe to go down through it. We hiked back up a little way and over a knoll and then slid down the length of the chute on our butts then walked back over to the bottom of the chute. We started searching the path again, Andy in front and off to the left, me trailing and to the right. Still no signal. Another load of rescue people were dropped off. More dogs. People were now searching down at the bottom of the slide. We were closing the gap and still had no signal.

My face was buried in my beacon. I heard Andy yelling to me and I looked up. There about 25’ in front of me, on his knees looking up the slide path was my brother. I ran screaming down the path to him and the three of us just collapsed into one huge hug. I was crying my eyes out.



I can’t even begin to explain what the emotion was that I felt the minute I saw my brother. I don’t think that I will ever be able to.

[Jrayne]

Good God, Hannes. Finish this story. I feel like someone tore the last chapter out of a book I was reading.

Glad to know the relatively good ending, but want more information. Your report is extremely valuable. Thanks for sharing.

Tim

[Blurreds_left_nut]

holy sh****. That was a pretty big slide. Reflect my man, and appreciate your bro like there is no tomorrow. Glad to hear all is well.

[Incompetent Boob]

Thanks for the detailed report, very glad to see everybody is ok.
The only thing that I would question is why a non-functioning ABS pack would be a red-light scenario? While it is nice to have, I'm sure you have ridden plenty of avalanche slopes without one. I don't think you should feel guilty about riding that terrain without it.

[IridePow]

Thanks for sharing this experience H-man.

This must have been unbelievable tough.... I almost started crying here at work when I was imagening how it must have felt.
Good thing the outcome was like this.

I recall a search-scenario we did in our Avy I class with 5 people in the group. One person did not switch over to search and it took us probably 3 to 4 minutes to figure that out, after we probed and dug around like crazy.
It must have been a total chaos with new people coming and coming....

[H-man]

I was there that sunday.

When you say you were there, what exactly do you mean? In St. Anton or at the scene?

[Dug]

That's a hair-raising story. Super happy everything turned out well.

I'm also interested in what others would have done had they been in the situation you described where your gut feeling was to start searching lower down but methodology says otherwise. Luckily H-Man had Andy to search and going down might have saved time but in a single searcher scenario I'm not at all sure what I would have done.

[H-man]

Below I relate the comments and some of my interpretations of the incident as my brother explained it from his point of view.

As Christoph dropped into the gully he heard me yell “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! PULL THE TRIGGER, PULL THE TRIGGER!” He turned and looked up the hill and he said there was already no time to move. Being a big guy and a weight lifter, and not really knowing how much snow he was dealing with, he said that he felt that he should be able to brace himself against the snow, and since there was not time to move, he prepared himself to take the impact head on. He says that he did reach up and pull the handle even though he knew it would not function. He said that he was hoping that just maybe it would. I believe this again was instinct.

Bracing himself for the impact was useless he said. The slide knocked him down like he was a wet rag. It hit him hard and moved him quickly down the path. He lost his poles immediately and he said that one ski came off very quickly but that the other one stayed on quite a while.

I asked him to describe what it was like being in the avalanche. His first comment, as the tears welled up in his eyes and his voice cracked was that you could not imagine how terrifying it was. He believes that he was rolling over and over because he remembers seeing sky/light and then darkness over and over again. He said that the noise was unbelievably deafening and maybe the most terrifying part. As he rolled over and over again he remembers breathing in the snow with every breath and trying as hard as possible to keep his mouth covered.

Next he said that he felt that the slide was coming to a stop. Slowing gradually. Then suddenly he remembers feeling/being air born. This must be the time at which he fell into the rocky cliff. The cliff was more of a narrow rock lined chute in my opinion than what one might view as a vertical cliff. It was still steep and narrow with very little snow in it. Christoph says he remembers feeling his leg break during this part of the slide. At some point in here he thinks that his second ski finally came off.





He said that he remembered hitting hard but that he thought that he did not hit any rocks. Again he was moving down the hill in the slide. He said that he seemed to think that it was going to stop a second time, but didn’t and then it picked up speed again.

Finally the slide came to a stop. Christoph was lying on his back. He could see light and was able to move his arms. He brought his hands up to his face brushed away the snow and sat up. With a minimal amount of coughing he was able to breath. According to him, within 10 seconds of the slide coming to a stop he was up on his knees, breathing and looking up the slide path.

Think of the physical trauma he had just been through.

The first thing that goes through Christoph’s head is, “Fuck! No sign of Hannes and Andy!” Now his mental trauma begins…

He yells over to the closest group of skiers if they have a cell phone and to call the Mountain Rescue because there are still two people buried in the avalanche. This is the first report that goes out to the Mountain Rescue. Of course Christoph doesn’t know this, but it is completely wrong. Ever wonder why some ridiculously high percentage of first information coming from an avalanche scene is wrong? So with in a couple of minutes, an emergency text message is generated to all members of the Mountain Rescue telling them of an avalanche in Mattun with two people still buried.

As a member of this group, Andy gets this text message, but we are so involved in the initial minutes of our search 900’ above that he never even recognizes that it comes in. Later examination of the phone records shows that he got the text at 11:31, approximately three to four minutes after the slide started.

The group of people that made the call came over to Christoph. I am unsure whether they had some gear or not. I do know that at least one of them was a local. One of the members takes Christoph’s beacon from him and begins a beacon search for Andy and me from the bottom of the slide path. Christoph remembers telling him self that he needs to get up and do something. He tries to stand up but can’t put any weight on his leg. He tries to get out his other gear and it is all gone. It was ripped of his body during the slide. The group yells to him to get up and help them search. He tells them he thinks his leg is broken and can not stand on it. He feels he can’t really help.

Other people begin to show up, including the Mountain rescue with dogs and rescue personnel. We estimate that they were on site with in ten minutes of getting the call, so probably a little less than 15 minutes after the accident. Remember, these guys are always ready and it took them the magic number of time to get there. They started searching the path with beacons, but there were no signals. They are acting on the information that two people are buried and that both have working transceivers, but they got nothing…

Back up to Andy and I for a minute, Andy finally takes the time to make his own call to the Bergrettung (Mountain Rescue). The phone records show this happening at 11:42. His report is of an avalanche in Mattun with one person buried. So now the Bergrettung has two different reports about the same incident with different information, or wait, do they have two reports of two different incidents in the same general vacinity? Confused yet? I was headed down the path so I do not know when Andy actually made the call. He was not wasting search time calling for help at the beginning as he was trying to coordinate the search and deal with the beacon chaos. I think this call must have gone out at about the same time the first responders started showing up from the first call.

As the search continues, Christoph relates just kneeling there looking up the slide path looking for ABS bags, gear, anything that would show where we were buried. Of course, there was nothing. People started to come into the slide from above. Christoph says that someone would enter his vision at least 150 meters above and be wearing an orange or blue jacket. He would get his hopes up that it was one or the other of us, only to sink back down into depression as the people came closer and he realized that it was not. After this happened about three times, he said that he just gave up letting himself get excited that we might be ok and would wait until he saw and knew it was us.

Christoph started to have his own thoughts about my death. He vividly remembers the feeling of thinking about how he was going to have to tell my 8 and 10 year old sons that their father was killed in an avalanche doing the thing he loved the most.

[lemon boy]

holy
fucking
shit.

Thanks for telling this all H! damn.

+~+~+~+~+~+

was his ABS pack torn off in the Avy?

[strawjack]

h-man...for what it's worth...don't have any regrets. everything you during the rescue was awesome. you were on a totally different level then all the other recuers because it was YOUR brother. i can't even imagine being in that situation and if i ever was i would be thankful to have performed as well as you did.

hope your bro heals up quickly!

++vibes++

[Tippster]

Goddamn, Dude - glad you're all (relatively) OK.

[iceman]

What an emotional roller coaster. So glad things worked out as well as they did and thanks for sharing.

Don't keep kicking yourself for what happened, just remember it and learn from it. And give your Bro a hug next time you see him.

[SheSkisTrees]

Very powerful and emotional stuff. It must have been very difficult to share all of that. Thanks for finding the words, I suspect telling the story is helpful for more than a few people.

Once again, glad to hear that you are both OK.

[Trackhead]

Wow, very informative.

I had never thought about doing a search with so many bystanders with beacons still on transmit.

A great learning experience. Thanks for sharing. And glad everything turned out relatively ok.

[Hutch]

holy shit, H-man!!

that is a wild story. Thanks for relating it.

[beaterdit]

Incredible report, this had me really choked up. Definately highlights some interesting issues with so many peeps around.

Like someone else said, I don't think having a disfunctional ABS is a red, or even a yellow light, I mean, you're not skiing to get slid either way.

Great job on the rescue effort though, sounds very nerve wracking.

Thanks for sharing.

[ZGnzo]

++ vibes. Glad everyone is okay. Thanks for such a detailed story.
In response to your question about whether to follow your training or your gut instincts, I think you could have done both. This is what I would have done, but of course i don't know all of the circumstances. Leave someone you trust, like Andy, with the original signal and a small group (it sounds like there were a dozen or so there?) Then assign another small group to beacon searching the chute. Then grab a few guys, keep you skis on, and go strait down to where you think your brother is buried. It makes since that he would be carried all the way down, and it seems inefficient to have 12 or 15 guys in one spot. It sounds like it took you 15 minutes or so to get down to the toe of the avalanche....if you had kept your skis on and gone down to the major zone of deposition, it would have improved your brother's chances had he been buried down there, and by splitting up that huge group, you could have prevented a lot of chaos up top. Its hard for me to picture so many people there and the nightmare of having people skiing in with their beacons in send.
I agree that your brother's handle not working was not a red flag. You shouldn't rely on your equipment to save you, just make smart terrain choices.

[H-man]

At this point Christoph was just sitting and waiting as Andy and I proceeded down the debris below the chute. Once Andy started yelling to me that Christoph was down below, the Mountain Rescue member with Christoph saw Andy yelling to me. He of course knew Andy and turned to Christoph and asked if he was skiing with Andy Vondrak? Christoph replied, “Yes, and my brother.” The mountain rescue guy just patted him on the shoulder and said, “Its ok. Here they are.” This was the first moment that everyone knew that we were all safe.

Reunited at last, we started to tell our parts and sort out the story as the Bergrettung prepared to take him off the mountain. I was so shocked to realize that he had been having the same mental trauma that I had been having. Thinking about this and then figuring out the series of calls and such that went out about the incident immediately reinforced how crazy this situation was.

Bringing in the rescue bag.


















Christoph said that the flight down to the village was like nothing you could ever imagine. The rescue bag was close fitting to begin with, but when the weight of it with him in it came off the snow and all the webbing and cables tightened he said that it felt like being in a coffin. He could not have moved if he had to. Once in the air it was like a terrible carnival ride staring up at the underbelly of the heli spinning around seemingly out of control, loud and cold. A couple of minutes of flight time and they landed at the heli port on the way into the Verwall where an ambulance was waiting to take him and another woman who had broken her ankle skiing on piste to the doctors together.

At this point, the police officer introduced himself. I didn’t know that in the Tirol province of Austria towns with major ski areas have special mountain police officers up on the hill that respond to these incidents to gather information about them. He started to take our information and asked if Andy and I would accompany him back up to the site to give a statement and explain what we knew.

The guy in the headband is the police just quietly taking pictures and making notes the entire time.

[Buzzworthy]

That was the most sobering read I have had a priviledge to read. H, I am so glad things worked out the way they did. You are a good man and you have a very lucky family to have an individual as yourself in this family.


I really don't have any words on the avie and what happened as I am rather stunned at this point. I have never experienced anything like this and pray I never will.

Thank God you all three of you are alive.

Ron

[H-man]

Andy and I returned with the police officer, also named Hannes (only in Austria), to the start of the slide. Interestingly, when we got off the Mattun Bahn, Andy noticed that the handle on the ABS pack of the police officer was starting to show red. He commented to him and as he touched it just to look at it, the bags were set off.



Andy and Hannes went into the lift station to re-pack the bag. While waiting outside, the emotions got pretty heavy again and I found myself sitting in a snow bank crying. When they came out Police Hannes said that I didn’t have to go up if I didn’t want to. I told him that I wanted to go, and up we went.

Andy and Hannes chatted away in German that I didn’t understand as I think it was pretty, legal, technical stuff. I thought about what I would do when I got to the site. I was going to measure slope angles and all that type of stuff to help get the best info possible. We got off the Kapall Bahn and started to head back out the traverse where we had started this adventure almost 2 hours ago at this point.

The wind had picked up and the warning sign for avalanche danger had been blown down. Hannes stopped to put the sign back up before we entered.



Looking back into Mattun, the upper areas were just starting to open as some tracks above the traverse were starting to appear, but there was no one else going out on the traverse at this point.



We made our way almost all the way out the traverse. As we approached the spot where the Hohe Schulter enters the valley, a snow boarder dropped in on top of us.





This was very scary based on this morning’s experience. We all stopped where we were and looked for escape routes and then watched above. The boarder started to make a big sweeping turn above us and we all yelled for him to move away, which he did. At this point some other German guy skied up behind us. Hannes told the guy he was with the police and asked him if he had a beeper and all of the other gear. The guy had nothing and told Hannes that he had followed us out. Hannes gave him a quick talking to and pointed out a safer route that the guy should follow out.

At this point we were at the relatively flat knoll where we had started our decent to the gully. The set of two tight linked turns above the rocks are mine and Christoph’s tracks headed in earlier.



We followed the tracks down to the left side of the cornice break and started to review the scene.

Here is the cornice break with the tracks of the skier who set it off in the fore ground filling with windblown snow.



It was at this point that I forgot about all of the stuff that I told myself I was going to do. The emotions of being back there were very strong. I just kept taking pictures of every step of it as I remembered.

View of the cornice break from where I was standing:



I skied out onto the bed surface. It was not the ice layer that I had been concerned about from the rain a week before. It appeared to be a very hard wind blown snow layer. Not being a professional, I really didn’t even think about going and looking closely at the layers. I was just kind of in awe of the whole thing. Guessing isn’t much help, but if I had to guess the slab probably failed on a layer of surface hoar created after the rain as the next couple of nights were clear and a major drop in temperature occurred.



Andy standing at Christoph’s last seen point:



Me almost at Andy’s location at the time of the cornice break:



Upper slide path:



Lower slide path above the chute:



Lower debris field below the rock chute:



Just because I try to find a little humor in everything, quite possibly the best police job in the world, no?



Here are a couple of different views of the path





At this point, Hannes was happy with the information collected and our help in piecing it together. He took mine and my brother’s personal information and we parted company. I skied down to Herbie’s apartment to drop off my gear before heading home to see my brother. When I walked into his living room to quickly post this thread for the first time, the daily avalanche report was still up on the screen. Boys and girls, it’s named “Considerable” for a reason.

[iceman]

What an excellent report. I had been wondering about that ice layer, especially since you brought it up earlier in the week, thanks for addressing that. I didn't want to bring it up after what you had said about it before, it would have sounded like Monday-morning quarterbacking.

Somebody was smiling on you guys despite it all.

I wonder what they could do to the guy who set it off if they found him? I'd guess not much but I have no idea of the laws there.