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Яндекс.Метрика
2025-01-15

CAIC Full Report From Red Mountain Pass, CO, Avalanche Fatality: Victim Discovered by Wife After He Failed to Return Home




On Tuesday, January 7, an avalanche caught, buried, and killed a backcountry skier on Red Mountain Number 3, east of Red Mountain Pass, Colorado. The area is known locally as Bollywood and is about six miles east of Telluride.



Related: Backcountry Skier Killed by Avalanche Near Telluride, CO



The Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) just published its full report of the incident. We share these reports as learning opportunities for all of us.

The full report is below:

Avalanche

This was a hard slab avalanche, small relative to the path but large enough to bury, injure, or kill a person. The avalanche broke into the old snow layers (HS-ASu-R2D2-O). The faceted snow layer formed during dry weather in December. Strong winds drifted snow onto the lee side of the subridge forming a strong and hard layer of snow (Pencil hard on the Hand Hardness Index). As the avalanche ran, it stepped down to a deeper faceted snow layer in places. The avalanche was about 800 feet (250 m) wide, and the crown face ran along a wind-drifted subridge of Red Mountain Number 3. The crown face was 3 to 4 feet (75 to 95 cm) high and almost 6 feet (175 cm) at the tallest point. The avalanche ran into a gully below the drifted ridge, traveling 400 vertical feet.



Avalanche Forecast

​The Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s (CAIC) forecast for the area around Red Mountain Pass for January 7, 2025, rated the avalanche danger at Moderate (Level 2 of 5) at all elevations. The primary problem was Persistent Slab avalanches on west through northeast to southeast aspects above treeline and west through northeast to east near and below treeline. The likelihood was possible. The expected size was Small to Large (up to D2). The summary statement read:

If you find a shallow spot and collapse a hard layer of snow that rests above weaker snow below, you can trigger an avalanche that will be large enough to injure or kill you. You can trigger avalanches from the margins of these stiff slabs from a distance or below. If you trigger an avalanche, it could be deeper and wider than expected. Avoid traveling near common trigger points, such as convex rollovers, rocky outcrops, or the edges of slopes with thinner margins of a slab.

You may not observe these signs of instability before triggering an avalanche. Give yourself a wide buffer from suspect slopes steeper than about 35 degrees.

New snow overnight Tuesday could raise danger again at upper elevations.



Accident Details

Pertinent Weather & Snowpack

An unusually snowy November in the western San Juan Mountains was followed by a mild and dry December. The result was a very weak snowpack composed entirely of faceted snow grains. Storms returned to the area in late December with nearly continual small to moderate snowfall from December 24, 2024, through January 5, 2025. Twenty-four inches of snow with 2.5 inches of snow water equivalent (SWE) accumulated during this period at the Red Mountain Pass SNOTEL station at 11,080 feet, 1.25 miles southeast of the accident site. Snowfall was accompanied by periods of strong west and southwest winds that drifted layers of hard snow onto open slopes.

Seven inches of snow on January 5 and 3 inches of snow on January 7 covered the old snowpack with a layer of soft powder snow. Winds were light on the day of the accident. The Red Mountain Pass SNOTEL was 106% of the seasonal median for snow water equivalent.



Accident Summary

Skier 1 traveled alone on the day of the accident.

Rescue Summary

Skier 1 missed a check-in with his spouse. His spouse, Rescuer 1, notified the Ouray County Sheriff that he was overdue and then drove to Red Mountain Pass. She snowshoed to the slope Skier 1 planned to ski.

Rescuer 1 saw the avalanche on the slope Skier 1 intended to ski. She initiated a transceiver search and immediately acquired a signal with a reading of 56 meters. She used her transceiver to find Skier 1’s location, pinpointed him with her avalanche probe, and began to dig in the debris. She yelled for help, and soon other backcountry skiers in the area arrived, followed by members of Ouray Mountain Rescue Team (OMRT). They helped remove Skier 1 from the debris. OMRT provided medical care and transported Skier 1 to the highway.



Comments

All of the fatal avalanche accidents we investigate are tragic events. We do our best to describe each accident to help the people involved, and the community as a whole better understand them. We offer the following comments in the hope that they will help people avoid future avalanche accidents.

Skier 1 was traveling alone. CAIC investigators were unable to speak to anyone who witnessed the accident or the events leading up to it. Our comments are based on information we collected from the accident site and interviews with rescuers. There was a skin track (uphill) and seven ski tracks (downhill) on the slope prior to the avalanche. These tracks were made by Skier 1 and possibly other backcountry skiers. The uphill track went up the north side, or climber’s left, of the slope. We suspect the downhill tracks began closest to the uphill track and then moved to the south, climber’s right, with each successive run. The avalanche released from a subridge on the southern side, climber’s right, of the slope and ran over portions of four previous ski tracks.

Based on tracks and equipment, Skier 1 was descending at the time of the avalanche. He was wearing an avalanche rescue transceiver and an avalanche airbag backpack. The backpack was armed and functional, but it was not deployed.

Backcountry travel in a group is generally safer than traveling alone. A well-equipped group that uses safe travel protocols will have more resources to enact a rescue if something goes wrong. However, like the decision to travel on a specific route during certain avalanche conditions, solo travel is a personal choice. Between October 1, 2020, and January 7, 2025, solo backcountry travelers accounted for 18% (6 of 33) of avalanche deaths in Colorado. In each of the last five avalanche seasons, at least one solo traveler has died in an avalanche in Colorado.

Rescuer 1 was expecting a call from Skier 1 at the end of his ski day. When he did not call, she alerted authorities and went to check on Skier 1. Despite these actions, Skier 1 may have been buried for more than four hours before help arrived. Skier 1 was buried about 1 meter deep, too deep to effect a self-rescue from avalanche debris.

McCammon (2002) identified several common heuristic patterns in a retrospective analysis of avalanche accidents. Heuristics are pragmatic mental shortcuts that simplify decision-making in complex situations and often operate below the level of deliberate decision-making. Heuristics become “traps” when the informational cues are inappropriate or not relevant to the situation, leading to undesirable outcomes. Heuristic traps can be generally identified after the fact. Specific queues or decision points are impossible to identify in this accident because Skier 1 was alone.

McCammon described “familiarity” as using past actions to support current behaviors. Successive tracks shifted southwards across the slope, possibly with no indications of snowpack instability. Skier 1 skied an adjacent slope the day before with no signs of instability. He had skied on Red Mountain Pass for 16 years and knew the terrain on Red Number 3 well. He chose his terrain as appropriate for the day based on his previous experience of the slope and the snowpack.

McCammon described “scarcity” as psychological reactance expressed as competition for the limited resource of untracked snow. Downhill tracks were adjacent to each other and did not cross. Each run could be made in fresh snow. The effect was a gradual shift southward with each run, closer to the wind-drifted snow that would eventually avalanche. Possibly coupled with the reinforcement of familiarity, there could have been a series of cues that made Skier 1 more comfortable with his final ski track.



The post CAIC Full Report From Red Mountain Pass, CO, Avalanche Fatality: Victim Discovered by Wife After He Failed to Return Home appeared first on SnowBrains.

Ссылка на источник: https://snowbrains.com/caic-full-report-from-red-mountain-pass-co-avalanche-fatality-victim-discovered-by-wife-after-he-failed-to-return-home/


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