“Both my partner and I are fine. Thankfully, she was able to hold on to the rope (we were rappelling), and I was tied into an anchor.”
Extremely close call on Directissimo Couloir near Snowbird where a skier was nearly blasted off a cliff by an avalanche. As you can see in the footage the woman standing on the cliff was in the direct path of the charging snow moments before it hit. She was able to hang onto the rope they were rappelling with and both skiers were uninjured. This was an extremely close call:
The directissimo couloir went huge yesterday! Crazy this is less than 1 mile from snowbird center.
by u/astokely in Backcountry
“Just for clarification, I mentioned that it is across the street from Snowbird, so that people who are not familiar with Utah know where this is, and so tourists are aware that just because a line is across the street from a resort does not mean it is safe. We also started skiing down before 9. We thought this was early enough, but clearly we were wrong.
As someone else pointed out, UDOT does avy control on the north side of the 210. I have met way too many people that assume this means the terrain is safe if it’s open. THIS IS NOT THE CASE! There are still hundreds of cornices that can and will break, which means this will happen again when it gets warm. Hopefully people will watch this video and realize how dangerous UDOT avy mitigated terrain is. Also, this being part of a UDOT avy mitigated area did not influence any of my decision making.
On our descent we noticed several red flags. Originally, my partner and I planned to descend from the top of Monte Cristo via the “Edge of the World” route, but we heard a huge woomph while on the ridge traverse, and decided to drop in from the top of superior instead. We should have definitely turned around at this point. About 1/3 of the way down, my partner and I noticed an increasing amount of sluff and we were almost taken out by a small soft slab slide. We talked about climbing out at this point, but concluded it would take to much time.”
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