VIDEO: Skier Triggers Avalanche and is Buried For 5-Minutes Before Rescue

 

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A post shared by Forrest Schorderet (@forrest_schord)

The weather is fine, the snow is beautiful.

We do a few short lines, beautiful photos, the perfect day.

We decide to move to another sector, we have fun, we laugh.

Suddenly the fear, the stress, the euphoria is gone.

A big avalanche takes me and my brother @lake_schorderet.

Everything happens very quickly, the power of the avalanche takes us down the mountain.

Our 2 friends are still upstairs, Per calls for help, Frédo joins me to start the search.

We locate my brother after 2min and clear his head after 5min. He is unconscious at first, but he is breathing, he will eventually wake up with a start.

The first helicopter arrives after 20 minutes, the second with the doctor 30 minutes later.

My brother is fine and he has nothing.

1) We should never have skied with 2 people in this face and we should not have jumped this rock
2) We should have made a safety crossing, see if it was stable before setting off.

The joy and adrenaline that these days of powder give us sometimes make us lose our common sense.

Despite the stress and the fear, we managed to organize ourselves well with my friends for the rescue. Soon everyone had a defined task. Per directly called for help, he knows Chando and knew exactly in which sector we were. Then Fred joined me, confirmed that the signal for the start (60m was good) and then he immediately started sounding. Nice teamwork that gets us out of Lake safe and sound.

With Fred, Per and Lake, we’ve known each other for over 10 years, we’ve been skiing together. We did our first Freeride competitions together. Skiing with a trusted group is essential.

We decided to share this testimony while being aware of our mistakes. This testimony has as one and only goal to prevent. We are not trying to create a buzz with this video, but to explain the positive and negative points to remember.

We hope that this video will have an impact on some skier-snowboarders.

The mountain is beautiful but you have to know how to respect it.

Thanks to @fredopowpow, @perwingaardsjoqvist, the lifeguards of Chando St-luc,