Verbier avalanche carries away family

26th:

http://www.lenouvelliste.ch/fr/suisse/avalanche-a-verbier-une-famille-avec-deux-enfants-s-en-sort-494-217674

Off piste in the Lac de Vaux - Mt.Gelée area. Dad, Mum and two kids 16 and 13 set off an avalanche which carried them away. Fortunately no serious injuries.

I'd say that this is a warning not to be complacent just because the weather conditions have improved.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time. But I doubt that the two helicopters, doctor, rescue guides, three dog rescue teams and 15 ski patrol would necessarily agree .....

would they have to pay for all them serivces? i know some insurance doesnt cover off piste, so in that case they would have to.

offshore wrote:would they have to pay for all them serivces? i know some insurance doesnt cover off piste, so in that case they would have to.

It's important to buy insurance that covers you for the elements of the sport you are involved in. Not sure of their Nationality, if they were Swiss, they might have Air-Glaciers Cards or Rega. It seems to be only British skiers that can buy ski insurance that offers vague cover.

The weather might have improved but the posted Avalanche warnings have only just gone to Moderate AFAIK. Before Christmas I skied off piste in Level 5 in Megeve. Black flag, never seen one before

Before anyone asks, yes I was with an instructor, on moderate gradient in amongst the trees

It costs about CHF 10,000 an hour to search an avalanche manually using probes and dogs. For which the family involved will be billed, if they have insurance fine if not cash will do nicely. Their nationality hasn't been published; the papers just reported that they were French speaking.

I think this is the forth Swiss off-piste avalanche incident to be reported so far this season. Two of the others were fatal, in the third one the victim was taken to hospital suffering from injuries caused by avalanche probes.

It's a shame there wasn't a little more detail in the original article in the Nouvelliste. It would have been interesting to see the angle and aspect of the slope that released, as well as the Avalanche Forecast for that day.

In Chamonix it was 2/5 on Boxing Day, and things were generally pretty stable. However I don't know what Verbier was.

They MIGHT have actually been experienced, well equipped, and acting responsibly. They MIGHT have just been very unlucky. Avalanches can release on mellow slopes when the risk is low - it's just not as likely. 34% of reported avalanche accidents actually occur on Cat 2 days (European statistics covering accidents 1993 to 2010).

However, without a few more details it's very hard to really draw any conclusions from the incident. We just need to take it as reminder that the risks off-piste are not always visible.

Safe skiing folks....

I've managed to find out some more information on this accident, and it would seem that the family involved were not the most responsible of off-piste skiers.

None of them carried any avalanche safety kit, and they were descending a South facing slope at mid-day when the accident occurred. The avalanche risk category that day was 3/5, and the freezing level was quite high (possibly 3000m - unconfirmed).

All in all, not very good.

There is a basic Google translation of some of the media coverage of this incident over on Pistehors:

http://pistehors.com/news/forums/viewthread/1104/

We skied Mont Gele on the same day, but did the itinerary - going to Lac de Vaux side scares me, even on the itinerary side I am close to fainting during the traverse. I didn't hear that they didn't carry avalanche kits, although I didn't ask specifically and assumed the did as most people do these days. They were certainly very experienced skiers if they crossed the ridge to the Lac de Vaux side. Steep, very exposed and unforgiving, not something like 'oh, this powder over there looks nice, lets ski it'. But in a way this is probably the best place to be caught in avalanche as it's very well seen from the main skiing area, they were immediately noticed, found and pulled very quickly but rescuers continued searching the area because there was no certainty if they were the only victims. The avalanche risk stayed at 3 out of 5 on this day.