Inbounds Slide Runs on Mammoth Mountain

By Bob Berwyn, 12-19-07

	Caption: A triggered avalanche is visible on the steep East Wall terrain at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area in Colorado. Photo by Bob Berwyn

It may be a little outside New West’s geographical area, but still of note for Snowblog readers when a massive inbounds releases at a major ski resort — after the terrain has been controlled for slides and opened for skiing.

And that’s exactly what happened at Mammoth Mountain in early December, as reported by Mitch Weber, founder of the lively Telemark Tips web site. According to Weber’s story on the slide, he was skiing with several friends in an area known as the Paranoids, specifically in P3, when he looked uphill to take some pictures of one of his partners when he saw a “wall of snow 10 feet high and some 100 feet wide” rumbling toward him.

Two of the three skiers were swept up by the snow and left shaken but uninjured. Weber’s account of the incident on Telemark Tips is well worth reading, not only for the gripping description of the slide and rescue, but for the conclusions that he draws. Despite the best efforts by Mammoth Mountain’s pro patrol, the mountain remains wild and unpredictable, and Weber says his days of carefree romping on steep powder slopes at the ski area are over. His post also includes a photo of the slide area.

Weber says he and his friends are planning to carry a full complement of avy gear in the future, treating avalanche-prone inbounds terrain with the same respect as the backcountry. At the same time, he cites stats on inbounds avalanche accidents to show exceedingly rare they are.

Weber says that, anecdotally at least, there seems to have been an increase in post-control releases as “more and more skiers and snowboarders are pushing out to the edges of the resorts in search of untracked powder, especially when conditions in the backcountry are sketchy.”

There’s also a thread on the Mammoth avalanche at the Teton Gravity Research ski forum.

The most recent inbounds avalanche death was at Arapahoe Basin in 2005, when a Boulder skier was killed by a huge wet snow slide on a well-skied trail. The Forest Service investigated the incident and found that the ski area followed all required avalanche safety protocols. The A-Basin death was the first U.S. inbounds avalanche death in 30 years.

Mammoth Mountain experienced another large inbounds slide in April 2006 on Climax, a wide-open slope directly under the summit gondola. That slide triggered a huge search operation involving hundreds of volunteers, as reported by Powder mag. Dramatic pictures of that slide are also online at this Mammoth Mountain forum.