Mountain Account: Unstable Intuition

In April 2013, photographer Chris Christie and three friends ventured north of Pemberton, B.C. to Sun God Mountain and its popular, steep, north-facing terrain. The group split up, and after observing natural avalanche activity backed off from their intended line. Christie and friend Jimmy Martinello chose a nearby north-facing couloir, that from their snow pits and intuition, they deemed skiable. But their intuition was wrong. Here’s Christie’s story in his own words. —Lucy Higgins

The line is about 30 km from the nearest road; it’s a 25 km sled then a two-hour tour to the base. It’s a particular face we’ve done many times in the past. It comes into condition fairly often, but this year we’d been observing it and giving it a little bit of caution. Through the season we finally gathered enough confidence that we thought it was a good line to go into. The stability had improved a lot over the weeks, so we went in and explored the area from below.

We got to the basin and checked out the actual face that we wanted to climb, but we could see a little bit of natural [avalanche] activity. The 1,800-foot line is west-northwest, so it [gets] a bit of sun. We changed our objective to a couloir that we felt was manageable and had a different aspect from where the natural activity was. Our new line was true north and approximately 400 meters away from the original line. When we got to the base, we dug a little pit and we felt pretty good about what we saw—consistent snowpack and no instabilities whatsoever. We proceeded to climb the line, digging pits as we moved.

In the couloir, the terrain management was smaller than being out on the main face, where the original objective was. Often, we’ll pick couloirs for that reason—the features are smaller and contained. The climb took about three hours. As we came up to the exit there was a bit of a roll over, but there was a safe spot for one of us to stand in while the other poked at it. We found a way around the convex roll. We were on the ridge proper, maybe a 15-degree slope. My friend took a couple photos of me; we thought we were golden—50 feet from having lunch and putting our skis on.

Suddenly I felt the world shift. As we summited, we didn’t pick up on the slight aspect change. This was a melt-freeze feature that had buried surface hoar.

I looked up, and I saw Jimmy diving. I instinctively dove to the side of the couloir, thinking I might stay away from the moving snow. But it spun me face down, so I started my slide headfirst and immediately started gaining momentum. Right away I knew I was going in for the whole distance. As the snow got aerated, I was suffocating—my airway was blocked in the first 100 feet—and before I knew it, I was cart wheeling and had no sense of up and down, or how big the slide was. I was certain Jimmy was in there somewhere with me.

I believe we slid approximately 1,800 feet. The couloir had a little dogleg in it, and the slide took us over the dogleg and launched us over a couple of cliffs, 50 feet each. The whole way down—I’ll call it an out-of-body-experience—everything was very black, there was no sound. The moment stood still. I was waiting for an impact of rock, but it never happened.

I remember slowing down somewhat and feeling a tremendous weight. My instincts kicked in, and [so did] everything I’d read about other peoples’ experiences. I knew that was the time to fight to break the surface.

I came to a complete stop and touched up to daylight—my hand was out, and one leg. My chest and head were underneath the snow, but I had that one arm to dig. I was able to dig my face out but I still couldn’t draw a breath—my airway was blocked with snow and ice. I bit my glove off and clawed at the snow in my throat and cleared my airway. As the weight of the snow settled I couldn’t expand my chest, so I had to breathe shallowly for a couple minutes.

We were fortunate that our two friends were close by and saw the whole event and were able to come over to dig us out. Our friends skied another line adjacent to us with no incident. They saw the slide and thought we were doing control work on top until they saw our gear on the surface.

“Intuition” failed us that day. Often, if I see anything I don’t like, I’m quite quick to pull the plug and turn around, and I’ve turned back from a lot of missions because that inner voice was casting shadows of doubt. There were no weird senses at all in this area. I think complacency might be a strong word, but being on the ridgeline—being on lower-angle terrain after being on a 50-degree face—we let our guard down a little bit and didn’t open the senses up to the little changes in the feature. And that’s what took us down the line.

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This story first appeared in the January 2015 issue.