What are the three most important things on any day with avalanche danger? Terrain, terrain, and terrain. Ryan and I did a really good job on all three counts.. right until we fucked up. We skinned up Argenta to the top of Kessler Peak and traversed over to check out the possibility of skiing the Argenta chute. On the way up we had eyeballed them and decided that the one further to the north looked reasonable if the snow told us good things. We got to the top and dug a pit that had some iffy things going on but nothing unmanageable. We decided to start down through the trees and skip the narrow, steep top of Argenta to get in lower where it had good exit points and was more reasonable.
What we didn’t know is that we weren’t north of the northern-most chute as we thought. We were actually between them, so when we traversed back to the west, we ended up in the wrong slot. The skiing was the best of the year. No doubt about it. Knee deep powder on every turn. We experienced a very little bit of surface sluffing, but nothing to get worried about. As we neared the bottom, things just seemed off. We looked down at the exit, and it seemed a little on the manky side, but neither of us spoke up.
I went to a safe island just above the exit to shoot pics of Ryan skiing the last few turns, and he came down to a narrow chute directly to my left. We looked at the terrain below and both decided to bail to the right instead of risking the shallow, rocky chute. I put away my camera and got ready to move while Ryan dropped down to the point just above where he planned to bail, did a jump turn, and the slope, which was now only a little over a foot deep, broke to the ground.
I saw it fracture about five feet behind him and yelled “fuck!” be he hadn’t felt it start to slide and was already making his turn back to the right which he thought would lead him out of the chute. Instead the snow pushed his skis into some rocks, tipped him over, and sent him head first down about 20 feet of 50-degree rocks. He fell from my sight and I watched the snow go blasting out of the bottom without any sign of my friend. After five very long seconds he reappeared on the left side of the debris cone paddling for the trees. Amazingly, when he finished his ride, Ryan found that he had his Avalung in his mouth despite it not being there when the slide started.
When he stopped I yelled “Are you OK?” and he yelled back that he was alright. The whole thing took about 10 seconds from the time that he started sliding to the time he stopped. He traveled just over 100 feet and says he was completely buried for a small portion of that, but fought back to the top and was able to completely free himself without any help. Both skis released and were later recovered, but we only found one pole. After the slide, we hugged, laughed slightly uncomfortable laughs, gathered up gear, and Ryan said “Man, I can’t believe you didn’t get pictures of that.”
This incident had very little to do with actual avalanche hazard and had everything to do with the terrain. While our route-finding error was unfortunate, it would not have been dangerous if we were only smart enough to exit to the right before the couloir pinched down to much and the snow got too shallow. Watching Ryan slide through that chute and disappear from sight was longest 10 seconds of my life. Words cannot describe how thankful I am that my good friend was still there drinking PBR in the parking lot with me at the end of this day.
