Three people were feared dead after they were swept away in an avalanche while on a helicopter skiing trip outside Anchorage on Tuesday, officials in Alaska said.
The skiers were caught in a large avalanche around 3:30 p.m. local time near Girdwood, Alaska, a popular skiing destination about 40 miles southeast of downtown Anchorage, the Alaska Wildlife Troopers said in a statement.
The avalanche occurred in the west fork of the Twenty Mile River. The group was traveling with guides from a commercial heli-skiing operation, which escorts backcountry skiers via helicopter to the tops of mountains that are otherwise inaccessible.
The guides immediately tried to locate the skiers using avalanche beacons but determined that they were buried beneath 40 to 100 feet of snow and could not be reached, officials said. Because of “significant avalanche risk” in the area and limited daylight, “no further recovery operations were conducted” on Tuesday, officials said.
“Based on the information provided by the operator, unfortunately, we do not believe that any of the three missing persons survived the avalanche,” Austin McDaniel, a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers, said in an email on Wednesday.
If weather conditions permit on Wednesday, Mr. McDaniel said “troopers plan to assess avalanche conditions from the air and determine recovery options with individuals that have experience making avalanche recoveries.”
On Tuesday morning, the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center, which monitors activity in Girdwood, reported a weak layer of surface snow in the area where the avalanche later occurred that it said was “tricky to assess.” “The safest option,” it said, was “to avoid steep slopes, especially wind-loaded terrain.”
The center warned that the avalanche danger was “considerable” at middle and upper elevations, and that the two-foot layer of snow was “still guilty of causing human-triggered avalanches.”
The center said on Wednesday that avalanche danger in the area “will likely increase today” and reported that there had been “multiple human-triggered avalanches” the day before.
The current ski season has proved to be a deadly one. Four people were killed in avalanches in one week in February alone in Colorado, Oregon and California.
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