Riders On The Storm
There's a killer on the road.
I was surprised it was open. We’d just come off a risk 5 day and a new pulse of wind and heavy snow was hitting us again. I wasn’t even ready to ski when I saw the green icon on the website indicating the Telepherique was open to the 2400m mid-station. Meteo France called it a 4 and that gave the security commission hope to open for skiers. It was still snowing and blowing when Willy and I left the house to get a couple runs in the trees that for sure were holding some deep blower powder.
As we arrived at the lift, I’d heard someone saying that one of the guides on the commission had said that he couldn’t understand how the snow was still sticking to the mountain. Passing P1, the skiers who got on with us were all smiles after their first run and said it was super good. Further up we saw a big slough on the steep part of the lift line that a rider had released. I knew that I was responsible for Willy. We’d been shredding the trees already the last couple weeks with all the great snow and I didn’t have to worry about his skiing but today I was already thinking to keep us close to the lift line and especially… there was zero chance we were going to traverse over skiers left to under the face known as the Cote Fine.
Cote fine had been hanging there since the previous avalanche cycle on it’s persistent weak layer. I watched an unnervingly large release after a group of 2 skiers made some of the only tracks this year from the antenna entrance two weeks earlier. That was on the same day that a skier triggered the first big slab that ripped down the Freaux couloir. The FWT event was cancelled because it was sketch and perhaps because there had been local opposition to use explosives. As the waves of storm kept on hitting us and cumulated in a manner not seen for many years, I’d been waiting for the next natural cycle out of the Cote Fine now that there was already a hard avalanched bed surface for what was majorly reloaded warmer snow up there on the cold facets (including a wind direction change for the last pulses)… to rip bigger and even further.
When Willy and I arrived at the 2400 midstation there was chaos. The guy next to me stepped out of the cabin only to be physically pushed back in and they slammed the doors on us. ‘Huge avalanche from the Cote Fine with multiple burials’ they said and we we not allowed to exit the station. As we started our download, we still were not aware of any details like when exactly this had happened and if there was any rescue organised. We saw people still skiing who had previously come up and were still lingering outside the station so word must have arrived shortly before our arrival at 2400.
Willy and I got off lower down at P1 and had a great run down through the trees, still kind of bummed that this incident had happened and we couldn’t even get one full run in what was otherwise fantastic conditions. After climbing the stairs back up to the village we met Thomas, a local guide I’d known for many years. He was standing in his shoes in the parking lot. He asked me if I’d seen what had happened in the Chancel area this morning. Apparently the natural released avalanche carnage which he had seen from his house up in Les Terrasses was far more widespread than just the Cote Fine as I saw later that afternoon when it cleared…
Soon, the Gendarmerie and their dog crew arrived. The scenario wasn’t good and we started to learn why as skiers passed by and shared what they knew. My confusion turned to anger. I became upset that I had been blocked from leaving the station to help…something I’d been training myself and others for the last 36 years. I was also angry with myself for not knocking the guys at the lift to the ground and go anyways. It didn’t make sense that they weren’t taking advantage of all the equipped manpower that was being sent back down the lift.
The anger lasted a week…until I did enough interviews and research. I finally learned that given the timing of events, enough people were on the scene to perform the rescue and that the deceased were the first 2 to be dug up but were dead from the trauma of their violent trajectory, I wouldn’t have made any difference if I had disobeyed the lift staff. In the end, the tragedy was the guided group of 5 swept into the trees from a fat pocket releasing from above even before the main Cote Fine face. It was a miracle that the 3 others survived and that the other groups that were in the area had only close calls. I’m better now but a tempest of analysis and thinking has resulted from being very close to this ‘nightmare come true’ scenario for La Grave.
Personally, I think accidents begin when you get out of bed in the morning and in a ‘ski area’, there’s a lot of beds to get out of. This one however started when it began snowing in November. There’s a lot of food for thought and dismissing it all as hindsight without thoughtful analysis is wrong. I remember my awareness all along the winter so far because that’s what I try to do as a skier and I remember the discussions I had.
When the La Grave Freeride World Tour Challenger event was announced…to be held on the Cote Fine…the arctic high pressure was upon us and the thin snowpack on the face was already rotting out. I immediately commented that they should be up there with teams to ski cut it and knock down the facets. At the time the snow coverage was still too thin to enjoyably ski but for sure it would snow again. Then several weeks of faceting without any skier action created a situation of ongoing dubious stability. There was objection by some of the guides community to use explosives and I don’t know for sure if this influenced the final decision or not to cancel the event a week before it happened… right after there was a big avalanche on the Yret explosive controlled face that buried a competing snowboarder at the Serre Che comp. What would have happened onwards if they had bombed the Cote Fine and had the comp?
On Black Tuesday as I call it, there was another fatal avalanche also very close by in Valloire, but it was a pedestrian at the bottom of the valley. There, the head of safety at the ski area, Eric Viallet, was in disagreement with the Risk 4 hazard rating and called it 5 anyways to keep the ski area fully closed. If it had of been a 5, the commission in La Grave never would have gone up. As it happened, the thing that the commission always told the skiers when it was closed to the mid-station on great powder days in the tress (when many people toured up anyways) was exactly the ‘risk from above’ at the fringes of where gravity could take you from the lift...and when the heli can’t fly.
The La Grave safety commission has changed recently due to the childish political motivations of both the Mairie and SATA whereby the experienced local mountain guides that weren’t onboard with the 3rd phase of the gondola project, along with their spouses, were marginalised and ostracised from being part of the commission. The original older crew might not have collectively come to the same conclusions as the new one on that day… but that is pure conjecture.
Ironically the commission itself began in the last familiar storm cycle like this one in ‘89 because of an avalanche fatality only meters away…from the exact same scenario. I can understand that Eric the guide took his group out under the Cote Fine to the mellowest tree lines if his clients were not the best skiers instead of the less exposed but steeper trees. After all, the commission had been out there twice already and nothing had fallen on their heads. But that’s the danger we all face, guides included, when riding storms on the lift…thinking it’s all good just because the commission says it’s open.
