Backcountry
It was me. I fell in a no-fall zone.
What had begun as a beautiful day in a gorgeous amphitheater of Dolomite-style couloirs near 4,810-meter (15,780-foot) Mont Blanc ended with broken bones and an intense helicopter rescue. We had a strong crew of ski mountaineers, two from Italy and one from France, and set off on a nice morning from Courmayeur with our eyes set on a northeast-facing line on Petit Mont Blanc, a fierce peak in the Miage Glacier area in the throneroom of Mont Blanc proper. It was sunny, chilly, and windless—the perfect day to go ski a 900 meter (3,000-foot) couloir.
Grassi Couloir
We decided on the Grassi Couloir at the base of the mountain, now roughly 6 kilometers (3.75 miles) from the boundary of Courmayeur. One member of our team, Pietro, decided to stay behind due to a lingering knee injury that was flaring up, so then it was just Marco, Zian, and I. We booted up the long 900-meter chute for the next several hours, climbing up firm, fast snow to eventual soft snow at the top section of the line. The entire couloir was a consistent 50-55º degree steepness, with the top section being above a small cliff you had to work around to the skier’s left. Due to the line’s steepness, exposure, and snow conditions, falling was not an option. A tumble at any point could prove fatal.
Everything was going according to plan. We summited the top of a line, which terminated at a rock wall at about 3,200 meters (10,500 feet), with light cloud cover creeping in. It was past 17:00, the sun was on its way out, and temperatures were dropping. We each three skied the top section in good, soft snow above the cliff flawlessly. The opposing West Face of Mont Blanc stared us down on the descent. So far so good…
The next section was still soft, but the forgiving snow was thinning. Before long we were skiing on fast, chalky snow. After a big, 1,700-meter (5,000-foot) climb, we were tired, and our turns were getting more sluggish at this point in the descent. We pulled off the side of the run for a quick break right before the most aesthetic part of the line, where the walls of the couloir were the tightest and tallest. Marco, an Italian mountain guide-in-training, charged forward, stopping another 150 meters below and firing up his drone to get a shot of Zian and me skiing this section. Then I made an almost fatal error.
No-fall zone
When I pulled off on the side, I had traversed too low to get back into the couloir and now had some rocks in the way between me and the chute proper. Instead of sidestepping for about a minute up and above the rocks, I decided I could just scoot over the rocks since they were small—maybe 2 feet long—and seemingly manageable. I was tired. I just wanted to get down. So I took a shortcut. Big mistake.
The rock wasn’t smooth: it was jagged and prevented my skis from sliding over it. It stopped my skis in place, and I went over my tips. I was now falling in the couloir that I knew I could not fall in. One tumble in and I was still going. I should have stopped by now. I needed to stop. But I didn’t. I kept falling.
Then another tumble. I was gaining velocity. I knew if I didn’t arrest in the next three seconds it would be game-over as there were still over 300 meters of steep, walled couloir left in front of me and I’d only be going faster, my body opening up with the centripetal forces, pinballing off the walls and on the icy snow. This was all flashing in my mind as I was upside down, cartwheeling sideways between the rock walls.
Somehow my right ski tip dug into the snow, perpendicular to the chute and facing the skier’s right wall. It slowed my fall as it stayed in place but my ankle kept twisting left down the mountain along with the rest of the body. I felt a ‘pop’ on the outside right part of my right ankle as I put my hands in the snow and was able to come to a halt, my ski in place in the snow, effectively saving me. My ski bindings were locked because a lost ski in here could have been lethal. I’m still happy they did not come off.
Part of the game
My friend Zian, a ski patroller born and raised in Chamonix, came up to me and asked me how my ankle felt. Adrenaline was coursing through my veins so I couldn’t feel anything. We waited five minutes. It didn’t start hurting until I tried to put weight on my ski and continue the descent. I couldn’t weight it; my right leg was now rendered useless. Meanwhile, Marco was flying the drone overhead, unsure of why were weren’t already ripping the couloir towards him.
I tried to scoot on one leg but it was taking years. Night was creeping in—soon it would be completely dark. I remember some learnings from the Wilderness First Responder course I took last May. If I could self-evac I should probably do that, but given the location of where I was injured and the current conditions, I was a prime candidate for a rapid evac. I remembered that my instructor told me ankle injuries in remote locations were the most common reason for rescues. Well…
At first, I didn’t think they could rescue us from where we were in the couloir. I thought I’d have to descend all the way to the glacier below, which would take hours and be sketchy as hell on one leg. But Zian reassured me. “This is Italy,” he said. “Of course they can get us.” Then he skied down to Marco, who went off to call in a rescue, while I hit the SOS button on my Inreach device and also my iPhone. Neither had a signal in the couloir. I had to get a clear view of the sky, which was virtually impossible.
I was alone now and getting cold. Fear set in along with intense frustration. I had just botched the entire rest of my ski season—the best season of my life—because I had rushed and not opted to go around a rock. I felt royally dumb. It was completely dark now. I put on my headlamp but it was running low on battery. I kept sliding inch by inch in the obscurity until the run got even steeper and I had to stop. Another fall would be horrible. So now I was just sitting there on my own. Thoughts of missing the rest of my ski season started to fade. ‘What if I had to spend the night out here? Could I? Or would I go hypothermic and die? I was already shivering. I have an emergency bivy in my medical kit. But shit, that would still be a long, freezing night in a bad, bad spot.’ My thoughts felt like they were echoing out loud, bouncing back and forth off the couloir’s dark looming walls.
Zian was now climbing back up to me. The French ski patroller had skied to Marco 150 meters below, dropped his gear, and climbed back up to me in fast time, which was impressive given how tired and hungry we all were at this point. When he was in earshot, I yelled, “Zian! I’m so sorry bro.” In a cool, calm French accent he shouted back, “Ah, it’s part of the game! Don’t worry.”
Rescue
My SOS signal had finally gone through. I received a message on my iPhone that a Soccorso Alpino Valdostano (SAV) helicopter was on its way and would be there in 25 minutes. Zian and I anchored ourselves into the slope with slings on our harnesses attached to buried ski poles and axes in preparation for the strong winds that were about to slam us from the helicopter’s blades. Then we waited.
I had a can of tuna that we split. My lucky can of tuna I keep at the bottom of my pack for emergencies. This was certainly that. The sky was clear, there was still no wind, and stars were starting to pop out above Mont Blanc. It gave the mountain the appearance of a queen wearing a celestial crown made of glittering jewels. She looked so beautiful. I would have almost enjoyed that scenic moment had I not been so cold and absolutely terrified of what was about to happen next.
Before we could even finish that greasy can of Italian tuna, the cavalry had arrived, chopper blades echoing off the glacier below. We waved down the chopper with our iPhone camera lights, the pilots spotting us within moments. The helicopter made a pass and then started approaching us head-on. “Get ready!” Zian yelled as the helicopter’s blade started drowning out all other noise with the wind whipping up a hurricane of sharp, skin-piercing snow crystals. I slid my neck gator up and watched in awe, eyes squinted, as the pilot positioned the helicopter directly above us in between the walls of the couloir with ease. It was as if he was parking a car in a garage.
I’ll never forget the next moment. Italian mountain guide Patrick Raspo was winched down on the 60 to 70-meter-long (200-foot) cable from the helicopter and looked like an Avenger dropping into a battle scene. He immediately slammed his thick Società Guide Alpine insignia ice axe into the couloir and got straight to business. His focus was palpable. He was not messing around. You could tell he’d done this before.
With the helicopter hovering above and the rock walls now only 4 to 5 meters (12 to 15 feet) away from the blades on either side, we didn’t have much time. Raspo helped me unclip my skis and got me prepared for the hoist as the helicopter made another pass. He attached a fixture that would connect the harness I was already wearing to a steel cable lowered from the heli. I was freezing but somehow that made me sweat.
Then another mountain guide, Christian Zanolli, a local legend of the Aosta Valley, was winched down to take me back up. Within seconds of his crampons touching the snow, he checked my harness, clipped me into the cable, screwed and unscrewed and jangled a bunch of clanky things on the cable, and then took me up towards the sky. He couldn’t have been in the couloir with me longer than 60 seconds before we were being carried off by the heli, side-by-side on a metal line. But then something unexpected started happening.
As the helicopter began flying away while simultaneously winching us up, the drift of the cable was taking us toward the tall rock wall on the skier’s left of the couloir. In the loud tornado of flying snow, Zanolli instinctively put both his legs up and punched off the wall with his crampons, sending us in the other direction in a twirl. Then we swung back toward the wall, this time the wall on my side and me having to use my one good leg to push us off the wall. This continued for two or three more rounds, with the final push off the wall being a joint effort from Zanolli and me with my one leg. We were finally out of the rocky, wind-whipping hallway and suspended in the cool, still night air.
“It was a little bit tricky.”
Matteo Riva, the pilot, said that the extraction was difficult because the night vision goggles he was wearing limited his field of view to about 120 degrees and he had to completely rely on his teammates to tell him exactly how far away he was from each of the couloir’s rock walls. Co-pilot Matteo Cesano was looking at the left wall and cable technician Simone Di Mattia was looking at the right wall while Riva kept his eyes fixed forward, solely focusing on keeping his bird stable. Only 4 to 5 meters of air separated the blades from the mountain on either side. Riva’s trust in his team had to be bulletproof: “It’s like looking at a screen and the screen is small,” he told me. “You have two binoculars, one for each eye, and you don’t have the side view. It’s a little bit hard—especially if you are close to the walls of the mountains—to estimate how far are you from the walls because you don’t have the feeling of depth. It was a little bit tricky.”
Once we were out from the couloir’s walls, for a second—only a second—being suspended from a cable hanging from under a helicopter at 800 meters off the ground felt free and liberating and cool; I was completely in the hands of the moment and could do nothing but surrender as the mountains moved gently past. But that didn’t last long—my head started going crazy. Intrusive thoughts of the cable malfunctioning and us falling off the line to the ground and dying on impact mugged my mind. We were so insanely high up off the ground now, completely helpless, my life utterly in the hands of this dude I never met and a mysterious steel cable that I didn’t know anything about. I tried looking at Zanolli’s face to keep me calm, but I could still see how high we were in my periphery, so I tried closing my eyes. That didn’t make me feel any better, either. Zanolli was tinkering with items on the cable as we sailed toward the helicopter and I was not sure if this was part of the rescue or not. It was happening so fast and I just dangled there, frozen with fear, not even able to get words out of my mouth. My mind was not making sense of anything. Truly I was at the mercy of whatever would ever happen next.
Then the final climax: getting into the helicopter. We were now over 1,000 meters off the ground and I had no idea how they were going to throw me into this chopper from the cable. But I trusted that they had done this before and I just tried to observe what was going on. For a moment it felt like I was watching a movie, just letting the plot play out on a TV screen. In one swift and coordinated motion, the rescuers in the chopper pulled me into the comfort of the cabin and then Zanolli as the mountains slowly drifted away and blurred. A wave of emotion flooded over me like a dam breaking once I sat back on the stretcher. I was just so happy to be off that damn cable.
Aftermath
Courmayeur’s city lights glowed into view and within minutes we were at the helipad. I hobbled with Zannoli and the helicopter doctor, Di Francesco Nicola, to the bench as we watched the helicopter take off again to go get Zian. Dr. Nicola assessed my injury before I called Marco to find out where he was and let him know I was ok. He had already made it back to town. Then Zanolli, Nicola, and I had a moment to debrief.
“Everything is scarier at night,” Zanolli told me. “Daytime is much easier.” That made sense. I didn’t know what was going on with the rescue, but it being dark and not being able to see certainly didn’t help with that. The mountains also felt really tall, but maybe that’s just because I was suspended thousands of feet off the ground from a cable on a flying helicopter. I knew my mom was going to be pissed when I told her about this later.
The helicopter went back and picked up Zian and Raspo and took them to the helipad where they scurried off the helicopter with my skis, pack, and ice axes. I thanked them. As we took off again, I looked at Zian through the helicopter’s doors, who was on the helipad and shrugging at me as if saying, “Part of the game.” In minutes I was at the hospital in Aosta, getting my ankle checked out and x-rayed. It was confirmed: I had fractured it. But this was a very small price to pay for falling in a no-fall zone. I don’t like to think about what would have happened had I not stopped my fall. Now the recovery process would be smooth—just no skiing for at least the next two months.
Learnings and takeaways
“We try to do the best we can. 99% of time it is a lot of teamwork. We have to trust each other a lot,” Riva told me.
The only way Riva and his team can conduct nighttime rescues on high-altitude peaks like Petit Mont Blanc is by having a strong team and maintaining excellent trust and communication. The rescue team that day was amazing and our team in the couloir was also strong: we are all strong skiers with big mountain experience and at least some medical training. Zian is a ski patroller in Chamonix who deals with rescues often. His ability to ski down to Marco and then climb back up to me within minutes was impressive and a big factor in the rescue going smoothly. Marco is a guide in training who’s skied these mountains all his life. He knew exactly where the deadzone on the glacier was and where he needed to go to call for help.
We had all the right gear and knew how to use it. I had a medical kit and an SOS device that allowed me to call in a rescue. I’m not sure who called the rescue first—Marco or me—but either way, having a way to contact emergency medical services in the event of a rescue is an absolute necessity for high-alpine mountaineering missions. I had extra gear for the cold like a puffy coat that I donned at the top of the couloir, a harness that was used for the heli-hoist, and an emergency bivy in my medical kit in case I would have to spend the night out there. Thankfully it didn’t come down to that. Next time I’ll remember to have fresh batteries for my headlamp, too.
Communication that day amongst our team was good but could have been better. We left our radios at home because we thought we wouldn’t need them in a tight couloir where we’d likely always be able to hear each other. When I got hurt, Marco was out of earshot flying the drone and didn’t understand what was going on. This burnt 30 minutes that could have been spent on the rescue. Marco and I agreed after I left the hospital that we would always bring radios on ski mountaineering missions from now on.
Insurance! I have travel insurance that covers mountaineering missions up to 4,500 meters. Without this, I’d probably be in debt for the rest of my life. Always have insurance in the event you need a rescue, like I did. I was not expecting this whatsoever and am relieved that it will not ruin my life financially.
- American Alpine Club is the best insurance for mountaineering in Europe.
Biggest lesson: do not take chances or cut corners in places you do not take chances or cut corners on. What I mean by this is that I made a very avoidable mistake by trying to scoot over a rock that I knew I should probably have gone around. But I was tired and sidestepping felt like a major drag (Not as much of a drag as wearing a cast and sporting crutches for the next month). The steeps are a completely different game. I think back to what one of my steep skiing mentors told me recently: “For a jump in a committed place I need to be absolutely sure to land it regardless of the snow. Like doing it 100 times I wouldn’t fall.” The rock I attempted to cross, although small, was jagged and sharp. I took a chance by skirting over it in steep terrain, and I paid the price when it caught my skis and launched me over my tips. That is a chance I will never take again. Don’t take unnecessary risks or cut corners in steep terrain.
Grazie mille
A huge thank you from me to:
- My ski partners Zian Bertrand and Marco Malcagni that day for working well as a team and helping me out in a bad situation and also just for the epic season we’ve had.
- Rescuers Matteo Riva (pilot), Matteo Cesano (co-pilot), Simone Di Mattia (hoist operator), Christian Zanolli (Mountain guide), Patrick Raspo (Mountain Guide), and Di Francesco Nicola (doctor) for doing an amazing job with a dangerous rescue in an intense location. These men are what heroes look like in real life.
- Miles Clark, Erica Bueno, and Cory McMullen for coming to the hospital in Aosta and bringing me pizza and a spare change of clothes plus whatever else I needed.
- All of my friends and family who have reached out showing love and support in light of this incident. I appreciate you all more than you know.
Even though it was a relatively minor injury, it could have been much worse due to the sheer remoteness and dangerous nature of the terrain we were in. I am grateful to be alive and well and get away with a ‘somewhat’ free lesson.
Fun story thanks for sharing