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Tram Face Avalanche: “Kissed by Mother Nature”

Want to know what happened?

It was Sunday morning and a late aubible had been called by the Freeride World Tour organizers to run the event in the Tram Face instead of Silverado. The event crew and some athletes were up near the start at Tower One. An experienced Squaw Patroller was there and dug a couple snow stability pits. After getting a response of CT-11 (Compression Test score 11) he mandated that nobody ski adjacent to the skier’s left of the tower and that the start be moved lower down the ridgeline. This was done. However a Frenchie photog decided to become unilingual and walk out on a shoulder exactly where the patroller had told people not to go. He was the remote trigger for the crack that occurred 20-feet below his footsteps. This was the slide that barrelled into the assembling crowd at the finish.

A ton of my friends and I were in that group below. The party was just getting going: beers were being popped, a snow couch was being dug and we were hanging out carefree in what proved to be an incredibly unsafe location. Mid-laugh, I heard someone scream “AVALANCHE!!!” and looked up to see that white plume billowing over the first rockband. Everyone turned and ran, I fell and couldn’t get up in the deep pow. As I struggled I looked up to check the advance of the snow. It was coming fast and hard just like footage I saw in a movie where the camera was set in the path of the slide. As I tried to climb a tree with ski boots on, I heard Squaw Mountain Manager Jimmy King radio to whoever was listening, “We are about to be buried by an avalanche.”

We were lucky. This one didn’t have much snow coming with it. It was mostly plume. So when that cloud hit us at high velocity I was looking straight into it and wondering when to start holding my breath. Thankfully it blew through our entire crowd like a ghost then it was over. No one was hurt. All was shaken but ‘well’.

Renowned ski photographer Hank deVre was uphill and sideslope from us to shoot the contest. While we hung out in Silverado the next day for the comp he told me, “I thought I was about to watch 50 people disappear under that huge avalanche.” Needless to say, with his proximity and pucker-factor Hank didn’t fire off a single frame. Then after the comp I bumped into the patroller who dug the pits and he said, “Hey Al, I heard you got kissed by Mother Nature!”

I grabbed this video off of YouTube. Note: the finish area / group of us dumbies (!) was at the very bottom of the screen where the plume was highest. You can hear Jimmy King on the radio talking about this as one of the scariest things he’s ever seen (!); I believe the group of people were near the judges across the Valley at the Apache watertower; a mistake in the video’s intro – there was not a forerunner.