If you weren’t already wary of avalanches in the mountains, then this piece from Xavier De Le Rue will scare the hell out of you. Xavier recalls being trapped in a massive slide in 2008 near Orcières, in the border region between France and Switzerland. Xavier has said that everything felt stable that day and there were already tracks on the slope, which lulled he and his friend, skier Henrik Windstedt, into complacency. Here, he talks about a few of the mistakes, then openly answers questions in the comments of the YouTube video.
“I traveled the full distance and was unconscious at the bottom of the run,” he said. “My helmet strap was choking me and my mouth was full of snow. Normally the rescue would have started at the top, but from the heli they thought they saw something near the bottom, so Henrik Windstedt, who I was riding with that day, skied all the way down – what they had spotted was a tree – but thankfully I was close by and amazingly on top of the debris, so he was able to get to me in time, clear my airway and get me to hospital…. Lucky doesn’t begin to cover it.”
