In the mountains of northern Utah on Christmas Eve, a man saved his brother after an avalanche buried him under several feet of snow. The siblings were sledding Tuesday in the Franklin Basin, near the Idaho border, when one of them triggered an avalanche at 9,000 feet of elevation.
One of the two men reported seeing the slope ripple around his sled before he quickly rode to safety. He watched as his brother was carried 150 yards by the avalanche and “completely buried” under the snow.
The man who had avoided the avalanche used a transceiver to locate the general area where his sibling was buried. Then, he saw a few fingers of a gloved hand sticking out of the snow.
The man quickly dug his brother out of the snow, and both were able to ride out of the backcountry. The brother who had been caught in the avalanche suffered only minor injuries.
Avalanche forecasters warned that conditions were ripe for avalanches across northern Utah and southern Idaho at the time.
On Thursday, weather officials issued avalanche warnings for high-elevation areas in Washington and Oregon as an atmospheric river brought heavy snowstorms to the Pacific Northwest.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, avalanches claim the lives of an average of 28 people each winter in the U.S., with fatalities often resulting from suffocation, trauma, or hypothermia.