Surviving an avalanche

0:02Hello, I'm James Reynolds. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. In BBC OS Conversations, we bring people together to share their experiences. This time, we hear from three people who've all had a close encounter with an avalanche. Avalanches can happen at any time of the year. In the past few days, there have been a number of deaths on ski slopes in the Alps. And in recent months, hikers in Greece, climbers in Italy's Dolomite Mountains and guides in the Himalayas have all lost their lives. You may have seen the video earlier this week of the Spanish skier Ales Masip and her dog Kim being swept down a mountain in the Pyrenees by an avalanche.

0:44Fortunately, they were not hurt. The peak season for these huge and potentially lethal mass movements of snow is now underway in the Northern Hemisphere. To understand the dangers and what it's like to experience an avalanche, we're going to hear from three survivors. Benton Hodges was caught in an avalanche while skiing with three friends. in the US state of Wyoming. JT Holmes, a professional skier, was in California when he was buried by an avalanche. We're going to start though with mountaineer and author Corey Richards speaking to us from Cape Town in South Africa. He described to my colleague Luke Jones what happened to him when he was climbing the world's 13th tallest mountain in Pakistan.

1:27We were descending after doing the first winter ascent of Gashabram 2 in the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan. And it had been snowing for about two days, and there was at least a meter of fresh snow. And we were traversing under a mountain called Gashabram 5, back down from Camp 1 to Base Camp. We don't know how the avalanche released, but a large avalanche got triggered on the face of G5 above us and came down and hit myself and my two climbing partners, Simone Moro and Dennis the Rubco. And we were actually quite lucky because we were in what's called the deposit zone. It's sort of the flat area or the zone where the snow starts to slow down.

2:12So as big as it looked, the reality is probably what carried us mostly was the air blast and the debris as it started to really, really stop, you know, moving across the flat ground. So it picked us up and it threw us you know several hundred feet we were all tied together and we all ended up partially buried initially i just thought i'm dead we're all gonna die but when i realized that i was mostly on the surface or at least my face was out my first thought was simona and dennis are dead and i have to i'm gonna have to get out of this alone so your face was sticking out of the snow and the rest of you was underneath it yeah terrifying yeah it's terrifying i was buried mostly sort of laying down and my arm was under my chin and keeping my face propped up out of the snow.

2:58The air cloud looks massive. That's what people think of when they think of an avalanche. Really what that is, is just sublimated ice and snow getting pushed out in front of the actual mass of snow that's moving downhill. It looks terrifying, but really, I think we were very, very lucky because as soon as that snow hits flat ground, it slows right down and it pushes that air out in front of it. And it can pick you up and throw you. It can rip tents out of the ground. I mean, the air blast can snap trees in half. So you're walking and then suddenly just energy and wind and snow just picks you up and moves you.

3:34Exactly. We all know what it looks like, right? The billowing cloud coming down the mountain and you're like, oh no. Like I've replayed this a million times in my mind and I'm like how did this happen how did we all end up on the surface and I think it's just because the vast majority of the power pushing us was the air blast JT tell us what happened to you I was skiing and I thought I was following the directions of my guides and the whole entire face just cracked like a windshield that just shattered and I I tried to escape out to the left by skiing fast. And I very, very nearly escaped the thing.

4:16But one piece of snow, maybe the size of two kegs of beer, wiped me off my feet and prevented me from getting to the undisturbed snow. And at this point, everything really accelerated. You know, I'm now on top of these sliding pieces of rectangular kind of glass that's coming down. And soon it becomes more powdery as it enters a funnel, essentially. So I was funneled through a chute and over a small cliff. And this whole time I'm fighting to keep my head up as we're taught to do. And I was pretty successful in doing that. I was upright for a while. Then when I tumbled and lost my skis, I was able to kind of stay oriented and keep kind of rolling with the tumble to keep my head up.

5:10Then it started to slow down at the bottom. And as it slowed down, I came to rest head up, which was lucky. But that lucky moment was very short lived because more avalanche came behind me. and it then hit me in the back of the head and pushed my head down and put me into an uncomfortable but not horribly uncomfortable contorted position as it buried me maybe four feet under the snow. I'd say closer to three. So a meter, a meter under the snow. That was when the situation became pretty miserable. It starts to cement in on you. You can't wiggle a finger or even flex a muscle, you're just completely locked in.

5:59That's when you're alone with your thoughts in complete darkness, complete silence, completely zero ability to move. And you have to wait and trust that someone's going to come get you. In my case, somebody did come get me. I had a lot of thoughts underneath there. And then the next memories I have are coming back to consciousness. I was unconscious, unresponsive, and I had a period of time where I could not compute. My mind could not quite process what was going on. I could see my friends, recognize my friends. I could even, after a little bit, I could put together rational thoughts. I knew I was okay, but I had this fear that nothing would ever be the same again because I couldn't, my brain wasn't working properly.

6:53When you're about to die, your oxygen, all your blood, which carries your oxygen, it goes to your vital organs and it goes to your brain. Then the feeling of that oxygen going back to your extremities, that's a very unpleasant feeling. That's not something that people should long to experience. There were people that happened to have GoPros on that were part of the rescue. Little video cameras. Yeah. So I was able to figure out that it was between six and seven minutes until I was dug out to the point where I would have had oxygen. They found me by use of avalanche transceivers, which everyone in this conversation is familiar with.

7:36it's just a device that puts out a signal for other similar devices to track and then when you get close you use it's essentially a tent pole it's just we call it an avalanche probe and you start probing into the snow you're poking trying to find something solid and they found something solid and they started to dig for it they dig very efficiently and they they did a really good job but thing was that probe strike went to my foot so it's about kind of the worst luck but there were two professional guides you know i wouldn't be here without them they were ninjas like these guys were surgical benton what happened with you the group of four of us two weeks prior had skied a amazing day in the teton backcountry so two weeks later things seem to be lining up for another very similar day so a little bit of new snow avalanche forecast is as slowly dropped down to moderate so we were feeling pretty good about the snowpack in general and headed out for a day to explore an aspect that we normally don't ski in the Tetons.

8:37Tetons generally faced east on the desirable ski terrain, and we were skiing a west face. We get to the top of our intended line. It's great. We pick our way down through the top, and my buddy Charlie decides to take the first pitch. He makes some turns through some trees, and so he goes down. We all had radios. It seemed like it was taking a little long, so I gave him a radio and asked him what the status was. He said, it's so good. All clear. Send the next guy down. So the three of us at the top look at each other, and we decide our friend Evan's going to drop. Right as we tell Evan to drop, we hear another radio call that says, I'm sliding.

9:12I'm sliding. We all kind of stop for a second, and we look at each other like, did he just say those words? And as you ski more in the backcountry, you get used to little calls like this and that. So we figured he got swept off his feet with a wind slab or something small. as we send evan down to check it out me and seth are left up top and pretty soon i see the biggest powder cloud and hear the cracking of trees that you see in textbooks and videos when you're in avalanche class from that point on i was pretty convinced that my friend charlie was dead under 20 feet of snow this whole side of the mountain was draining down to one single gully that eventually ended up with debris 20, 30 feet high.

9:54So we kind of launch into that. What do we do next mode? What's the plan? Who needs to do what? We had taken a private rescue course between all of us earlier that year. Luckily, about a minute after we saw the powder cloud, we got a radio call from our buddy Charlie that said, I'm okay. That's kind of when we had to jump into plan where, okay, he's good, but what do we do now? We're on the side of this mountain. He's probably hurt. how do we proceed from there? And even though we didn't have to use beacons or anything like that, it was really hard to find him. The avalanche was D3.5, D4, which is a destructive scale on one to five, with three being able to destroy a house.

10:36So navigating between different gullies, trying to find Charlie was tough. Luckily, we each had tracking watches on and I was able to figure out the elevation through his radio and eventually we found him. He has a GoPro footage as he's taken the ride. I've only watched it a few times, but it's pretty intense. He was never quite under the snow, but he was pinballing off trees, which can be just as deadly as being buried. You can see him move and move, and then a tree just snags him out of the air, and you see the rest of the snow flow by him. Wow. It was one of those avalanches you read about, and you do not expect anybody to survive.

11:12Fortunately, everybody did survive, and Benton and his friends were airlifted to safety by a local helicopter search and rescue service. We'll hear more from Benton, Corrie and JT in just a moment. I'm James Reynolds. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

11:35Our conversation so far has been about the physical impact of being caught in an avalanche. It continues now with Corrie, JT and Benton discussing the trauma they felt afterwards. JT, as we heard, was buried under the snow for six long minutes before being rescued. He later began to show what he now recognizes as symptoms of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It rattled me big time. In the short term, I had some trouble falling asleep. I had weird stuff going on with, I guess, guilt and kind of anger with myself, I guess. And then it was a couple of years before I could shovel snow without thinking about contorted dead bodies within that snow.

12:24And yeah, it was bad. Like even just talking now, like it's, it's, it's all right there under the surface. The way you describe it, JC, is so close. I just know that feeling aside from the actual final sort of entombment. And it's literally disturbing to hear you describe it. I can just place myself there and it's horrifying. I feel the same way, even though I wasn't the one in the avalanche. I can put myself back in those boots watching that powder cloud. I kind of dealt with it the next day. I sat down at work and I just wrote up in a report that I had seen in previous avalanche classes. I was actually taking a season-long Avalanche II class with one of the best guides in the Tetons in the country.

13:12And he had written a similar report on a close call. So that kind of encouraged me to get it down and get it out there. Because when something happens, people want to ask questions to the people that it happened to, but they don't know how to always. at least in the immediate aftermath of how I was able to deal and cope with it was like dealing with it head on and putting a report out and being the kind of spokesperson for our group on what happened why did this happen do you think that was helpful in like processing the trauma in the immediate aftermath for you for me it was I think at the beginning I probably thought it was more just a logical thing of his parents are going to ask what happened they're going to ask what happened.

13:53And like, I just didn't want to keep answering those questions. So I knew there was a logical part to it, but I could tell by halfway through it that it was, it was helping me begin to process it, even though it was less than 24 hours. So like, how could I even really begin to process it? Teton County Search and Rescue does podcast on rescues. I think eight weeks later, we did a podcast. It was right when Charlie was back, cleared to ski again. So even then it's funny looking back because it felt like so much time had passed when we did that podcast. And now looking back three years, It's things that have even felt different and progressed in a different way since then.

14:26But I do think kind of taking it head on was my way of coping. It took me 12 years to write about it. You know, it was the first chapter in my book and it wasn't like a report, but it took that long for me to wrap my head around kind of what happened. And even looking back, I feel like to the point of PTSD, you know, it's very interesting how this stuff affects some people and doesn't affect others. Like, I don't think my two partners had any repercussions afterwards. And on the flip side, like, it completely changed the course of my life. And there's what I feel guilt about is the fact that on their side, it seems sort of no big deal.

15:06But on my side, it was such a big deal. And then that makes me question my own reality as if I'm like, I'm sort of gaslighting myself. 100%. I don't trust my own experience because their experience was so different. And it makes me feel, how do I say this? This is the first time I've really articulated this. I haven't hit on this point, but it almost makes me feel inauthentic. Like I'm lying about it somehow, even though that's very true to me. Does that make sense? Yeah, you're reading my mind on that, Corey. I think I've experienced a lot different than my three partners. not to judge anybody's risk tolerance, but it became very apparent that they were different in the last two years with me and my partners following this.

15:52And there's at times where, like Corey was saying, like, am I making a mountain out of a molehill here? Like, how have I arrived at this conclusion that maybe I need to step back and really think about how much time I spend in these type of terrains to then see my partners kind of last season opening up lines in the park, doing things that i just couldn't imagine doing anymore maybe events like this exacerbate the difference between you and your partners and risk tolerance and how things happen and when things are going good and you you nail good days and have have a good mountain partnership maybe that prince isn't shown as much but what you articulated that i feel 100 cory jt has it affected your appetite for risk my experience triggered zero behavior change really yeah cumulatively every experience that i have in the mountains forms my behavior and my decision making but in this case nothing changed i took a few days off let that storm cycle kind of pass and the snow becomes safe again and i was right back out in the backcountry and there's a couple ways to look at that.

16:59One is an alcoholic can have a horrible experience drinking alcohol and they go right back to it. But abusing alcohol is a bad thing and being out in the mountains and hiking and skiing and doing what we do in somewhat dangerous terrain is not a bad thing. So perhaps that is not a good analogy. You could also look at it like a businessman or an investor. You might have one business endeavor or one investment that goes really badly and a whole bunch that go extremely well. It's all of those experiences and those endeavors that form your decision-making going forward and make you arguably a more wise businessman or investor.

17:39You could even make the point that it was that failure that really gave that person the valuable experience to be more capable moving forward, not less capable. Whichever way you want to look at it, zero behavior change. But in both of those, reading between the lines, it sounds like, and tell me if this is wrong it sounds like you haven't fully reckoned with it is that fair i don't think i agree we don't use the word reckoned as much as you guys do if you want to elaborate on that i'm happy do you feel like you've properly faced it and i know to use sort of therapist speak unpacked it yeah yeah i've unpacked it yeah i've unpacked it and then repacked it and this is what the therapist would call compartmental compartmentalization.

18:27People say compartmentalization is not the way to deal with things. Okay, fine. But there are times in life where compartmentalization is exactly what you want. When you're buried underneath four feet of snow and your mind tries to think about dying, compartmentalization is your best friend. You need to put that thought somewhere else and not revisit it. You need to put it deep, deep down inside and you need to stay positive. And that's what I did underneath the snow. And when I got out, I probably did that for a while. I did do therapy. I was very surprised at how effective it was. But in the end, it had to go back into its compartment.

19:09People are going to deal with it differently, right? Like there's very specific functions that happen in the brain specifically to protect it and they're marvelous coping mechanisms. you could argue that PTSD in and of itself is a marvelous adaptation that our brain takes on because what we're trying to do is avoid the potential of dying again, right? So the memory gets locked, and obviously it's not as linear as this, but the short story is it gets locked in the hippocampus where our memories are, and then it's just communicating with the amygdala and triggering us constantly. So then our prefrontal cortex and our logic center, our rational thinking, goes basically completely offline, which makes it all seem irrational.

19:51But what it's trying to do in that short circuit hypervigilant loop is keep us safe, right? So PTSD in and of itself is a pretty amazing mechanism that the brain takes on. And in the same way, like JT's talking about, compartmentalization is another beautiful adaptation that allows us to move on. And it doesn't necessarily mean you haven't unpacked it. It just means that you've looked at it and then you've put it off to the side, right? And you've said, okay, I don't need to be defined by or live and die by the story of X, whatever your trauma happens to be. And I think, you know, if we use these experiences as sort of an avatar for what we see in culture right now, there's sort of an over-indexing on identifying with our trauma and learning about it and knowing that is really good.

20:43But at the same time, when we get stuck in the story, we're actually staying chained to an experience that then is informing the rest of our lives. That's not good. Compartmentalization in and of itself is not a bad thing at all. It's really great. It's just how and when we use it. JT, and I guess Corey too, I mean, with your, more so your careers being tied to this, you know, I'm a recreational skier, a kid from Tennessee, and I've skied more backcountry than I ever thought possible. So it was a little easier for me at times to maybe step back and say, I don't need to do this on this frequency.

21:17I still love it. I still do it. But it felt a little easier without having my professional identity tied to it. But I'm wondering if maybe that lack of change in behavior or just the felt like you had to compartmentalize it having to do with being a pro skier. But I do think that maybe it was easier for me to face head on and view a change in my pattern because it wasn't tied so much to my professional identity and finances. I know what you're saying. I get it. And I've felt that in the past, not with this exact experience. But I had a friend die in 2009. And we were doing very hardcore stuff.

22:01Wingsuit ski base jumping. I was 29. He was 39. And at the time I set a goal for myself that I didn't want to have my livelihood attached to my risk taking endeavors. Totally. I want to risk my life because I want to, not because I need to. And so I set that goal for myself to disconnect the light my hair on fire from the money coming in. And I didn't achieve that goal in the 10 years I set out for myself, but I achieved it in about 12. If you roll a dice, you got a one in six chance of any outcome and nothing changed, right? Gravity didn't change. Snow coming down didn't change. The way things adhere to the mountains and to other layers.

22:52So nothing's different because my experience, I could roll a six again the next time. You know, it's zero difference. So I just took the, you know, learn from it and move on, sprinkled in a hefty dosage of that compartmentalization. JT Holmes and Benton Hedges in the US and Corey Richards in South Africa, speaking to my colleague Luke Jones. Our thanks to all of them for sharing their extraordinary experiences with us. I'm James Reynolds. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.