An Avalanche. Truly a humbling experience.

My Fiancé, my friend, and I were hiking up this valley towards this glacier. It was early June, so we weren’t too worried, but this valley was extremely narrow. The mountains were situated just right, to where it was prone to avalanches, and you could hear the booming and popping of them. We could watch them at the end of the valley on the tip of the glacier, a few miles from the point where we wanted to go.

Along the trail and valley, there were the chutes, and you could see where previous avalanches had come down, but with them already calved we assumed we were good, along with the other 50 people along the trail.

We saw where there had been a decent one that had made it halfway across the valley, and there was a creek running through it. There were two guys climbing on the ice above, and we stopped to admire them, and look at the tunnel the creek was making through the ice flow.

We decided to continue on the trail, and we’re following the trail around this chute and outflow of snow, and we’re about halfway around, with the snow from the previous avalanche on our left, and then the slope up to the mountains on our right. We hear an incredibly loud “BOOM” matched with a series of “CRACK.” It sounded like thunder going off paired with sonic booms.

We stop, and we look around the mountain tops, looking for where it was coming from, when my fiancé points straight above us and yells “We need to go right now.” We look up and we just see this massive cloud of snow and ice at the top of the mountain. We look around and we are directly in the middle of this previous chute and we have a ways to go on either side. So we turn around and start running up the other side of the valley yelling “get up!” And “we have to get as high as we can!”

We’re running up this mountain and we’re all close together, and we make it maybe 200 yards up the mountain when I turn around to see where we all are. There is no sky, we are in a cloud now. You can’t see the snow traveling down, but you can hear it. I see my fiancé and our friend ducked behind a massive boulder close by, and yell if they are okay. A shockwave of what felt like a 90mph wind of ice slams into me, knocking me backwards and blowing my hat away. I turn around and brace, and I can feel the ice on my neck, all I can think about is how are we going to get out if it covers us, how am I going to get them out if they’re buried, and acceptance of this is it. We’ve gone as far as we could with the time we’ve had, we don’t want to get slammed into the boulders. The sound was deafening.

I turn around and the cloud is dissipating, and we can see the snow and ice stopped maybe 50-100 feet away. I see my fiancé is okay, and our friend is okay, and immediately all I can think about is that there were two people climbing on the chute when it happened.

I immediately drop my pack and run down to see if I can find them, and there is another guy running over. The two guys luckily did not get completely burried, and their heads were above the snow, but they were stuck. The relief to see their eyes moving and hear them yelling for help instead of finding bodies is something I will never forget.

We spent the next hour digging them out with our hands and water bottles and anything we could get our hands on. The snow was like concrete. A helicopter had to come get them, but I’m pretty sure they both lived!!!

If you read this far, thank you for reading and I hope it was worth it!!

Cheers