This one’s grim. 

When I first started skiing, I had jacket with a kind of beacon-lite technology for location purposes, like in the event of an avalanche. I wasn’t too worried. I’d seen the cute pictures of search and rescue dogs unburying their smiling handlers during training sessions. I assumed I would survive a small avalanche and that most people did. I was wrong. 

The odds of surviving an avalanche are pretty abysmal. If you’re lucky enough to not get buried alive (most that do die of asphyxiation), it’s unlikely you’ll survive the body trauma inflicted by the wall of ice chunks and accumulated debris swirling around you at highway speeds.

I had avalanches on the brain after remembering an interview I’d read a while back with Jill Fredston, who performed avalanche search and rescue for years before calling it quits. The whole interview is fascinating (Fredston just seems like a fascinating person all around), but this is the part that has been etched in my brain since I first read it:

“[As my partner and I] become more comfortable with hazard … we realized that it was going to take a much smaller mistake for us to get into trouble. So we’ve made a pretty conscious effort to step back. We don’t push ourselves to the full range of our skills so that we’re trying to allow a greater margin for error, because, to some extent, if you do something for 10, 20, or 30 years, you’re up against the law of probability. One of the reasons I hated being called an avalanche expert is that the avalanches don’t know you’re an expert. And the fact that you’ve done it for 10, 20, or 30 years doesn’t mean that you can’t make an error in judgment.”

Jill Fredston as told to David Epstein for Slate

I was blown away by the realization that mastery in a given area wouldn’t result in a higher comfort with risk. I really appreciated her distinction between comfort with hazard and overall risk tolerance. Rereading the article, I was also struck by this great observation:

We’re a very fickle society when it comes to risk because we celebrate it when it succeeds and we denigrate it when it doesn’t

Jill Fredston as told to David Epstein for Slate

After mentioning this interview to a friend, I went in search of it and was mildly devastated when I could not find it anywhere. Eventually I did find it, but not before stumbling upon this truly stunning six-part series by John Branch for The New York Times. (Thanks to the quoted search engine gods for sending me down this path.) Snow Fall is about a group of professional skiers that got swept up in a deadly avalanche at Steven’s Pass. It is a phenomenally reported piece. If I were telling you this in person, I would drag out “phenomenally” and maybe (probably) even place my hands on the table for full emphatic effect. Branch spent six months on it and the attention to detail shows. More importantly, so does his empathy for the story’s subjects. It’s a tragic tale that is handled with care and clear consideration for everyone involved.

The series is also extremely educational, with lots of informative graphics that really help to encapsulate the magnitude of what the skiers experienced. The New York Times has been experimenting with visual elements in their long form reporting over the last few years and I would say this was one of, if not the best use of video alongside text.

She had no control of her body as she tumbled downhill. She did not know up from down. It was not unlike being cartwheeled in a relentlessly crashing wave. But snow does not recede. It swallows its victims. It does not spit them out.

John Branch for The New York Times

Because this is a proper rabbit hole, we’re not stopping at two articles (or is it actually seven? You be the judge). In my internet hunting hysteria, I came across another avalanche story I’d read in the past year, this one a spooky tale made possibly less spooky by science. I’d never heard of the Dyatlov Pass incident before reading this.

When a search team arrived at Kholat Saykhl a few weeks later, the expedition tent was found just barely sticking out of the snow, and it appeared cut open from the inside. The next day, the first of the bodies was found near a cedar tree. Over the next few months, as the snow thawed, search teams gradually uncovered more spine-chilling sights: All nine of the team members’ bodies were scattered around the mountain’s slope, some in a baffling state of undress; some of their skulls and chests had been smashed open; others had eyes missing, and one lacked a tongue.

Robin George Andrews for National Geographic

The new/old theory is that an avalanche pummeled the sleeping team. The possibility of an avalanche had been considered previously and then dismissed, however new modeling tools (built for the movie Frozen, yes THAT Frozen) demonstrated how one could’ve occurred in an area not known for avalanches. This theory is not popular. As the article put it, “People don’t want it to be an avalanche … It’s too normal.” Personally, I like it because of the normalcy. A series of unfortunate choices that seemed fine at the time (cutting into a slope for wind protection, placing skis under the sleeping bags for added warmth) resulted in a dismal domino effect (human triggered avalanche, rigidity of the skis beneath them increased the blunt force of the cascading snow). It fits within the small margin of error that Fredstone alluded to.

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I think the “cut from the inside” bit really grabbed me because it felt narratively similar to Tana French’s In The Woods, where the main character is found as a kid wearing sneakers soaked with blood (not his) from the inside out. That mystery remains, frustratingly, unsolved.