Alpine rescue team12/23/2023 ![]() Gear in hand, they piled into the chopper and Maret lifted quickly off the pavement. They had quickly grabbed from the hangar a stretcher, some shovels, beacons, collapsible snow probes, and an antenna that dangles from the helicopter's underbelly to facilitate the search for a transmitter's signal. The two had both been flying into avalanches and other calamities for Air-Glaciers for decades. As he fired the engine, a pair of rescue guides, Gérald Mathys, 50, and Pascal Gaspoz, 52, raced behind him. Seconds after receiving the call, Maret sprinted onto the tarmac and climbed into the cockpit of one of the base's two Écureuil AS350s. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. ![]() Then, crackling over his walkie-talkie, he heard the urgent voice of one of his companions With his hands by his face, a small pocket of air had been fortuitously preserved near his mouth, but breathing was already getting difficult. He was lying facedown on his stomach with his legs extended, unsure of just how much snow he was sealed beneath. Instinctively, Jaccard stuck his hands over his mouth. For the first time, he felt the cold rolling over him, beginning to encase him, choking off any access he had to air. The torrent was unrelenting and Jaccard could see the bright whites and blues of snow and sky now give way to darkness. He hoped the inflated device would carry him above the smaller bits of snow and ice, and keep him from being buried.īut it wasn't enough. The movement released 200 liters of compressed air from a steel cylinder, which ballooned a dual airbag system to life. As the snow gathered all around him, Jaccard groped for the cord on his airbag and gave it a ferocious pull just before he was fully engulfed. He felt the immense weight of the wave as it plowed into his back, tearing off his skis, fracturing one of his vertebrae, and pummeling him down in the direction of the ground. Jaccard scrambled atop a rise, but the avalanche, moving now at 60 miles an hour, quickly met him. If he found himself buried, Jaccard's radio transceiver-known in French as a détecteur de victimes d'avalanche, or DVA-was designed to help rescuers locate him. In his red canvas backpack he had stowed an airbag that, with the yank of a ripcord, could inflate during an avalanche, propelling him to the surface of the cascading river of snow. Poised on the ridgeline, Jaccard made a mental checklist of the equipment he carried: shovel, collapsible probe, walkie-talkie. ![]() Like many experienced skiers of the alpine backcountry, he took precautions. ![]() Of course, out here, Jaccard knew, things could always go wrong. Now he was eager to get moving he figured it would take them 30 minutes to reach the village. Jaccard and his two friends had trudged to this off-trail spot by taking a ski resort lift to the highest station and then carrying their skis uphill for another 15 minutes. It was a treacherous run, unsecured and unsupervised, suitable only for experts-the ultimate “free ride,” as he thought of it. Steep traverses, vertical crevasses, ice patches, and spines of black rock. With his gaze, he traced a path down to the village of Grimentz, more than 5,000 feet below, taking mental measure of the obstacle course before him. He took a long look down the backside of the mountain, studying the way the high slopes of Roc d'Orzival-a 9,400-foot arrowhead-shaped protrusion in the Swiss Alps-fell away beneath him. Joël Jaccard squinted hard in the bright light and shuffled in his skis. It was everywhere, spread across the face of the peak and down the rocky ridges like a thick layer of frosting on a cake and glittering against a cerulean sky. And way up here, high above the tree line, where the storm had wreathed the mountaintop, the only evidence of the foul weather was the snow that it had left behind. For days it had been snowing, but now the clouds were gone. ![]()
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