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With the prominence of social media, action cameras, and the constant flow of content on the web, there’s no shortage of near-miss footage in the outdoors. We’ve all seen our fair share of avalanches, rescues, and insane wipeouts on the threshold of disaster by now.
One clip from Italy’s Marco Bassot has been grabbing a lot of attention because it captures these elements perfectly, all with a first-person perspective that adds a touch more anxiety than usual. Bassot was navigating a couloir in the Dolomites without realizing that he was outrunning a fair amount of sluff most of the run — the cascading, loose snow breaking free in the wake of each carve. He stops to survey and target a jump he wants to hit and use as part of his exit, which is just enough of a delay to end up in the very slide he’d unknowingly started. By this point, Bassot is entirely at the mercy of the slide but as fate would have it, the sluff actually pushed him directly to the exit he’d planned for.
“I was scared when I saw it but fortunately the jump was not big and the snow pushed me exactly in the kind of ramp in the middle, it seems dangerous and scary but nothing at all happened,” he says, laughing it off in the end.
