TWO SLIDES, TWO SURVIVORS: WHAT ACTUALLY SAVED THEM
13 min · Free lesson · written from fifteen years in the terrain
After this lesson you have two real incidents to reason from rather than a set of rules, and you understand the uncomfortable common thread: in both cases the people involved were competent, and what saved them was somebody else being in a position to act.
The Technique
- A word first on why these are here. Almost everyone who has been caught or buried is willing to talk about it, and the backcountry community is unusually good at sharing rather than hiding. That culture is the reason avalanche practice improves. We publish these for the same reason our training is mandatory: we would rather you learned from other people's worst days than lived your own. Names and identifying details are left out on purpose. The lessons belong to everyone. The stories belong to the people they happened to.
- **The first incident. A slope with no history.** Dan had ridden a particular slope days earlier without event. Later that same trip, a group riding the same zone triggered a very large avalanche, in an area where nobody could remember one running in a very long time. One rider was caught and buried. He came out alive.
- What saved him was not his gear and not his own party's speed. **Another group had seen it happen.** They came in and helped, and that extra capacity is the difference between a dig that beats the clock and one that does not. Sit with how thin that margin is. Survival turned on the presence of people who were not part of the plan.
- The lessons stack up quickly. **A slope with no avalanche history is not a slope with no avalanche risk.** Absence of evidence is not evidence of safety, and a zone that has not run in years may simply be waiting for the year the snowpack sets up wrong. **Riding it safely days earlier proves nothing about today**, because the snowpack is a different snowpack. And the practical one: **being seen matters.** Riding within sight of your group, knowing who else is in the drainage, and being visible to them is a genuine safety measure rather than a courtesy.
- It also cuts the other way, and this is the part people skip. If another party is above you, you are exposed to their decisions as well as your own. If you are above another party, your decisions are landing on them. Knowing who else is in the zone is a two way obligation.
- **The second incident. A rider fully buried, and his own crew dug him out alive.** A well known riding crew, people who ride hard and ride constantly, had one of their group buried in a slide. The party performed the rescue themselves and got him out alive.
- This is the whole argument for companion rescue in a single fact: **his party was the rescue.** No external service was coming in time and nobody was going to arrive to save him. The people who dug him out were the people he rode in with, using the gear on their bodies and the training they had done beforehand. That is always what a live recovery looks like.
- The detail that matters most for our purposes came afterwards. The rider went on to attend a snowmobile specific avalanche course **in order to tell his story to other riders.** Somebody who had been buried chose to stand up in front of a room and hand over what it cost him. That is the culture this sport should be judged by, and it is the reason the material in this library exists at all.
- Pull the two together and the thread is uncomfortable. Both groups were competent. Neither was reckless. In one case survival depended on strangers being nearby, in the other on the party's own training and equipment being ready before it was needed. **Competence did not prevent either slide. Preparation and other people determined who walked away.** That is why we make the training mandatory rather than recommended, and why we ask what everyone on a trip is carrying and what they have practised.
- The final thing to take from both. Neither of these groups expected it that day. Nobody rides in believing today is the day. **If your safety plan depends on correctly predicting which day it happens, you do not have a plan.** The plan is the gear on your body, the training in your hands, the people in position, and the terrain choices you made before you got there.
Common Mistakes
Reading a slope's history as a safety record. Fix: it has not run recently is a fact about the past, not a statement about the snowpack you are standing on.
- Assuming yesterday's ride clears today's slope. Fix: new snow, wind, warming or time changes the problem entirely. Reassess every day.
- Riding out of sight of your group. Fix: if nobody watched you go, nobody knows where to start looking. Being seen is a safety system.
- Ignoring other parties in the drainage. Fix: they can save you, and you can bury them. Know who is there and where they sit relative to you.
The Drill
The debrief habit. After every backcountry day, spend ten minutes as a group on three questions: what did we see, what did we decide, and what would we do differently. Write it down. Most avalanche knowledge in a crew is accumulated this way rather than in a classroom, and a group that debriefs honestly gets safer every season.
These accounts are shared to teach, and they are simplified to protect the people involved. They are not a substitute for certified avalanche training with field days, and neither incident should be read as a formula. Do the course, do the companion rescue module, and practise the rescue you hope never to run. This is general education, not professional avalanche advice.
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