"They're in over their heads now"

Martin Symington and his 2 teenage sons joined Nick in Val d'Isere last winter for one of our Winter Skills and Backcountry Skiing Courses. Here's his report...

'Avalanche... heeeeeeelp!' The blood-curdling bellow echoed across the valley as four teenage boys skied over the lip of Col de la Leisse to find a man clutching his leg and howling in anguish. “Susie, my girlfriend... she’s buried... somebody get her out!” A chute of churned-up snow was strewn down the mountainside like builders’ rubble. It was a scene that every backcountry skier dreads.

But the boys kept their cool. In unison they switched their transceivers from “transmit” mode to “receive signal”. Toby found a stray glove on the snow and followed the fall line downhill. The injured skier was becoming hysterical, but Jack did his best to calm him down and get some facts: “How many people were unaccounted for? When did the avalanche strike?” Patrick heard a bleep from his transceiver, so Sebastian located the signal source, jabbing his probe into the snow until he hit something hard. Then the four of them dug furiously and had Susie out in the Val d’Isère sunshine within 13 minutes. Phew!

On this occasion, “Susie” turned out to be merely a transceiver buried in a backpack. The man with the “broken leg” was an instructor, Nick Parks, who had planned this avalanche scenario, a serious test of the skills he had been teaching his young charges during the previous few days.

Parks was impressed: “Not bad, guys. Your only mistake was not switching my transceiver off, so its signal didn’t get confused with Susie’s. But, luckily, you managed to get her out in time.” As they learnt, if a person is buried by snow, their chances of survival are about 90 per cent if they are reached within 15 minutes. After that the odds plummet."

Read the full article in this weekend's Times Newspaper... click here