Thread: Bad News at Valhalla Powdercats

Hey folks,

I thought that the maggots would like to know that there was a fatal avalanche at or near Valhalla's operation today. I just spoke to a buddy a few minutes ago and he said that he had heard this today. The story below says it was in the park but it appears to be mistaken. Apparantly one person missing and presumed dead and two injured. A real bummer to be sure. My condolences to all involved.

Skier missing in avalanche
WebPosted Jan 30 2004 05:36 PM PST


NELSON, B.C. - Police and search and rescue teams are looking for a missing skier in Valhalla Provincial Park near Nelson in southeastern B.C.

The RCMP received a call just before noon on Friday that an avalanche had hit three skiers about 25 km west of the Kootenay community.

Rescue teams were dispatched to the scene, and located two of the three skiers.

They were taken to hospital where they're now listed in stable condition.

There's still no sign of the third skier, and police say poor weather conditions in the area are hampering searchers.

There's no word on where the skiers are from.

play safe out there kiddies. its looking shaky from the rockies to the coast so lets all err on the side of caution.

remember - "there are old rockies skiers and there are bold rockies skiers, but there are no old, bold rockies skiers"

I heard that today. The news report mentioned a bowl. Starts with R -- Russell Bowl or something like that.

Yah snowdog it is Russell Basin.

major bummer.

Some more info at Jim Frankenfields SiteCSAC Reports

Very sad news for a community that has seen far too many of these tragedies in recent years.

yes very sad Not a good weekend to be in the bc (at least in avy terrain)
There are several natural avalances here on the resort... one is a class 3, it ran the entire length of the lizard bowl.... most of the resort is closed due to high avy danger.
Let's be safe out there people, you don't want to be a statistic.

Some more info, they are still saying it was in the park, but clearly it is not.

One missing after avalanche in B.C. park


Canadian Press


Friday, January 30, 2004




NELSON, B.C. -- One person was still missing Friday evening after an avalanche roared down on backcountry skiers in southeast British Columbia.

Three skiers were caught in the slide just before noon in the Russell Bowl area of Valhalla Provincial Park near Nelson.

The other two were found by a search crew and taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.

RCMP said they were in stable condition.

The slide was approximately a kilometre in size.

A dog team was brought to help search for the missing male skier, but rescue efforts were called off at nightfall.

RCMP said the site was considered unstable and that experts would be brought in Saturday to stabilize the area before the search resumed.

Cpl. Grace Arnott of Nelson RCMP said it was believed no one else was in the area at the time of the slide.

"We seem to be feeling pretty confident that we still have one missing only," she said.

Arnott was reluctant to comment on the possibility of survival.

"One has to stay and remain positive, but I don't know."

She said the skiers were not locals, but would not provide any other identifying information.

Family members had not been notified yet of the accident, she said.

The concern about avalanche hazards impacted several major highways on Friday, including the Trans-Canada Highway.

It was closed from Sicamous through to Revelstoke and Golden, as well as east of Golden to 10 Mile Hill, and in the Fraser Canyon from Yale to Lytton.

The Nelson slide happened on the same day as a private memorial service was planned to honour seven Alberta students killed during a school skiing trip in the B.C. backcountry near Revelstoke.

Some of their parents are pushing for the B.C. coroner to reopen an investigation into what went wrong last February 1.

At least 20 people were killed last winter in avalanches in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.

© Copyright 2004 The Canadian Press

Search goes on for Calif. man trapped in slide

Bob Keating
Special to The Province

February 1, 2004
http://media.canada.com/idl/vapr/200...2631-18058.jpg
Searchers prepare to head to the avalanche zone in snow 'cats yesterday.
CREDIT: Bob Keating, The Province

Searchers and RCMP dogs spent the day probing a remote avalanche path in the B.C. wilderness looking for a 36-year-old California man believed to have been buried in the massive slide.

The avalanche thundered down a mountain Friday around noon just outside Valhalla Provincial Park, about 50 kilometres from Nelson.

The missing man was in a party of 15 "Cat Skiing" in remote bush with Valhalla Powdercats, a new backcountry ski firm. They had just completed a run in an area known as Russell Bowl when the avalanche started from 500 metres above. It has been rated a

Class 3.5 avalanche out of five.

"It's seldom someone will survive a Class 3 avalanche," said search manager Craig Gutwald.

Everyone in the party was buried to some extent, but most of them managed to free themselves. One woman was encased in snow 11/2 metres down.

Using transceivers, which send out an audio signal and are standard equipment in the backcountry, the rest of the party found her and frantically dug her out. Three people were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

The group could not pick up a signal from the snowboarder from California. An RCMP dog brought in Friday failed to find a scent and the search had to be abandoned as darkness fell.

Yesterday, 32 well-equipped search-ers from all over the West Kootenay, along with more dogs, were taken to the avalanche site on the very same "'cats" that ferried the skiers in.

"Efforts with the transceiver have failed" said Gutwald. "Now it's basically a very methodical grid search with probes."

The search area is about one kilometre square, but the snow and debris that came down in the slide hardened in cooler weather, hampering search efforts. "It turns into cement, it just bonds and turns into one big block of ice," said Gutwald.

The avalanche rating at the time of the slide was "considerable" in the Valhalla range. It has been snowing all week and six roads in the Interior were closed Friday because of the threat of avalanches.

"Some parts of the Kootenays have received a phenomenal amount of snow, up to 120 centimetres in just over a week," said avalanche forecaster John Kelly.

The searchers have found the missing man's snowboard, but there is no sign of a body. The searchers are expected to go back to the site today. The man is from the San Francisco area, but police have not released his name.

Friday's slide came on the first anniversary of a tragic slide near Revelstoke, which killed seven Calgary teens on a school trip.
© The Vancouver Province 2004

holy shit.

i really don't want to think about how a snowboard gets "removed from a body"...

Originally posted by gonzo
holy shit.

i really don't want to think about how a snowboard gets "removed from a body"...

If he's using "clickers" it's not as bad as you might think.

I wonder if the desire to ski open terrain rather than the tight BC trees might have led to a judgement error in snowpack stability. I know there is always the desire up there to get some open turns in, especiall with skiers that are not great in tight trees. I'm sure we'll here about it when we're @ Retallack in a month. Very sad.

Since you're going to Retallack:

Fromt The Pique (Jan 29, 2004):

Local dies on skiing trip

By Adam Daff and Clare Ogilvie

Whistler has lost one of its most industrious businessmen to a skiing accident in the Kootenays.

Local real estate developer and father of four Wayne Phillips, 43, was killed last Monday, Jan. 26th while cat skiing near the Retallack resort.

The Retallack resort prides itself on pristine powder skiing and according to several sources Phillips skied there ever year.

The Kaslo RCMP and the local coroner are handling the investigation into Phillips’s death and the results of the autopsy are expected today.

Condolences for the Phillips’s family have already begun to flood in. The outpouring of grief does not surprise Keith Auchinachie, who knew Phillips for over a decade and worked with him in the building profession.

"One thing he never did was fail to pay us on time and well, and that in itself makes him a gem in this (building) business," Auchinachie said.

Phillips was a small-scale private developer who built and then sold his own homes. He also contracted his building expertise on a freelance basis.

In addition to his skills as a builder, Phillips was also involved in the entertainment industry.

Every year he travelled to Vancouver for the duration of he Pacific National Exhibition to look after part of the family business, Conklin Shows, which runs rides, games and other entertainments at the fair.

As well as being a sound businessman, Auchinachie said Phillips was also fun to be around socially.

"He was always very fond of his red wine and he fancied himself a bit of a wine connoisseur," he said.

"I remember he had a pretty neat wine cellar put in his house."

Phillips’s funeral will be held on Saturday, Jan. 31 at the West Vancouver United Church.

HOLY SHIT - sad news, indeed. And both fatalities occured at places that my wife and I skied last winter.

R.I.P.

Let's stay safe, friends.

The Retallic accident was not an avalanche death. As I understand it from talking to a buddy, the guy was just found face down in the snow and not buried in any way. My pal said that they weren't sure what had happened but thought it could have been a heart attack, head injury or some other medical problem which brought him down.

Originally posted by gonzo
holy shit.

i really don't want to think about how a snowboard gets "removed from a body"...

I do believe the group was at the bottom pick up waiting for the cat, so he had prolly taken it off already. Heard from a source that one of the guides was still skiing down, when he was hit by the blast from the powder cloud and was blown 5 meters into the air. My contact said it was amazing that only they lost one preson, as the slide was massive (3.5 I believe).

Originally posted by JR
The Retallic accident was not an avalanche death. As I understand it from talking to a buddy, the guy was just found face down in the snow and not buried in any way. My pal said that they weren't sure what had happened but thought it could have been a heart attack, head injury or some other medical problem which brought him down.

True, but the coroners official cause of death was suffocation. Apparently they were skiing in the buddy system and his "buddy" never saw him go down and continued down to the cat pick up, where it was discovered that he was missing. By the time they did another lap and found him, it had been 45min or so. He wasn't in a tree well or in a slide as you said. There were two doctors in the group, who worked on him and had him revived, but he died enroute to the hospital.

Shit! Really bad news. I feel for everyone involved, the missing person's family, the people searching along w/ the guides. It has to shake a person up to have this happen on your watch.

Originally posted by powderpyg
True, but the coroners official cause of death was suffocation. Apparently they were skiing in the buddy system and his "buddy" never saw him go down and continued down to the cat pick up, where it was discovered that he was missing. By the time they did another lap and found him, it had been 45min or so. He wasn't in a tree well or in a slide as you said. There were two doctors in the group, who worked on him and had him revived, but he died enroute to the hospital.

The buddy system is really only usefull if you keep within 3-5 turns of each other, otherwise you end up too far below your buddy to really be able to help. Skiing is dangerous, and even more so in remote settings off piste. This is sad news, but in my opinion, it is part of the game we choose to play. You seem to incinuate that the guides should have gotten to him in less than 45 minutes, perhaps, but it's tough to say what went down in those trees that day. Knowing how thickly wooded some of the terrain is there and how much ground a run can cover, I think 45 minutes is pretty quick, though too long to save someone in many cases. This is just one more sobering reminder of the risks we take.

Originally posted by truth
I wonder if the desire to ski open terrain rather than the tight BC trees might have led to a judgement error in snowpack stability.

Sounds like they may have made a good call on terrain selection that they skied/rode, (skiing trees), but perhaps they didn't consider start zones as the article said the slide started 500 meters above them, which could have been in an adjacent bowl. Not knowing the terrain I can only theorize. Either way, sad for sure.

Originally posted by powderpyg
I do believe the group was at the bottom pick up waiting for the cat, so he had prolly taken it off already. Heard from a source that one of the guides was still skiing down, when he was hit by the blast from the powder cloud and was blown 5 meters into the air. My contact said it was amazing that only they lost one preson, as the slide was massive (3.5 I believe).

if this is true, why do they have a cat pick-up in a slide path?

Wanted to offer condolances to the boarder, and also to our amigos at VPC. I have only the fondest memory of our day there.

Originally posted by truth
The buddy system is really only usefull if you keep within 3-5 turns of each other, otherwise you end up too far below your buddy to really be able to help. Skiing is dangerous, and even more so in remote settings off piste. This is sad news, but in my opinion, it is part of the game we choose to play. You seem to incinuate that the guides should have gotten to him in less than 45 minutes, perhaps, but it's tough to say what went down in those trees that day. Knowing how thickly wooded some of the terrain is there and how much ground a run can cover, I think 45 minutes is pretty quick, though too long to save someone in many cases. This is just one more sobering reminder of the risks we take.

I wasn't incinuating anything, just stating that they had to do a lap and it took about 45 min to find him. I don't believe anything I said had anything to do with blaming anyone, which I am definately not. I know the risks of the backcountry and accept them when I choose to be there.

Originally posted by homerjay
if this is true, why do they have a cat pick-up in a slide path?

It was 1km wide, so they might not have been, I can't say.