16 dead in Swiss Alps

[zion zig zag]

Including large part of a group frozen to death on the Haute Route, did I miss this thread somewhere else here?
http://pistehors.com/4-deaths-on-cha...e-25418532.htm

[buttahflake]

Holy shit, that’s just awful.

[yeahman]

Brutal.

[t-the-east]

“The other skiers decided to stop and shelter as best they could, they were only a few hundred meters from safety. Their cries for help were heard early in the morning.”

Brutal indeed. Awful way to go


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[mtnbiker/boarder]

Just awful to read and then to see the pic at the end of there first day as group was truly heart breaking. Horrible and vibes

[2FUNKY]

How horrible and sad. RIP

[garyfromterrace]

I've skied a couple of weeks at Arolla the last couple of years. Massive terrain there. My heart goes to the victim's families but also to the locals (It's not a heavily populated area), they must have been involved in some of the recovery operations and knew there was people up there in trouble and they couldn't get there.

[The Duke of Hurl]

Staggeringly tragic. The title of the piece implies that it was one incident but in reality there were seven incidents this weekend, throughout the alps. Spring storms can be devastating.

"It was was a catalog of errors, we should never have set out when we knew bad weather would start at 10am, we were lost four, or five times, I was the only person with a working GPS but we eventually reached a point where we could no longer move due to the visibility and the storm, night arrived and we found ourselves on a ridge, that was a huge error because in a storm you don't stop on a ridge, you need to be lower down where you can make a snow cave and shelter. I tried not to fall asleep because in those conditions if you sleep, hypothermia will kill you. Thinking of my wife kept me going." The group were stuck on rocky ground so were unable to make snow caves and sheltered as best they could among the rocks. They were well equipped. "At that point I knew that most of us would die, we did not know the tour was long and hard because no-one had told us. Whether you survived was down to our individual fitness, experience and where we could find some shelter, all my friends are dead."

Many lessons here for the rest of us. Here's hoping that they and their loved ones will eventually find peace.

[Angle Parking]

Beyond tragic. The simultaneousness is almost hard to believe.

[Jong Lafitte]

Wow. RIP and vibes. Tragic.

[Iluvmoguls]

Wow. Sometimes we forget just how dangerous what we are doing really is. On a completely different level, this weekend the mood changed dramatically when my dad lost a ski (pre-ejection) near the top of left gully at tux. Just realizing how serious the danger is and how important being prepared and double-checking is hits hard.

After the ski was reattached my uncle shredded and turned the mood back around.

But again at the bottom some serious refrigerator sized ice chunks tumbled down the right side of the bowl into lunch rocks. The power of the mountains then becomes multiplied by the weather. Be safe everyone.

[old goat]

Staggeringly tragic. The title of the piece implies that it was one incident but in reality there were seven incidents this weekend, throughout the alps. Spring storms can be devastating.

"It was was a catalog of errors, we should never have set out when we knew bad weather would start at 10am, we were lost four, or five times, I was the only person with a working GPS but we eventually reached a point where we could no longer move due to the visibility and the storm, night arrived and we found ourselves on a ridge, that was a huge error because in a storm you don't stop on a ridge, you need to be lower down where you can make a snow cave and shelter. I tried not to fall asleep because in those conditions if you sleep, hypothermia will kill you. Thinking of my wife kept me going." The group were stuck on rocky ground so were unable to make snow caves and sheltered as best they could among the rocks. They were well equipped. "At that point I knew that most of us would die, we did not know the tour was long and hard because no-one had told us. Whether you survived was down to our individual fitness, experience and where we could find some shelter, all my friends are dead."

Many lessons here for the rest of us. Here's hoping that they and their loved ones will eventually find peace.

This sums it up. When you're lost in a storm get out of the wind and if possible out of the cold before you're exhausted. Hard to believe a group with guides (?how well trained) would not have stopped and hunkered down sooner. They had shovel to dig a cave if they weren't on a rocky ridge. When lost or overcome by bad weather stop.

A friend and I climbed a gully on Mt Washington, when we topped out--soaked from water under the ice--we were pinned down by winds clocked at 100-140MPH. We headed for the closest trees on our hands and knees (the wind had already blown me 10 feet through the air clear of the ground) but we immediately found an overhanging rock that sheltered us from the wind and sat it out. We were never in danger of dying, despite high temp of --10F and low of --30.

Staying awake is not going to keep you from dying of hypothermia unless you move in place to generate heat.

"We did not know the tour was long and hard because no-one told us." Wow. I asked a Chamonix guide I had been skiing with about the Haute Route. He told me to forget about it.

[Jack Burton]

Thoughts for families of the deceased. Bad reminder to pack the safety puffy and rope