A skier died at Mammoth Mountain on Thursday following a fatal accident in full view of other skiers riding a nearby lift. It was the fourth death at the resort this season.
The skier, who has not been identified, was attempting a run called Dropout 2 — among the steepest marked trails in California — which descends from the summit ridge of the 11,000-foot mountain. The run falls about 1,200 vertical feet below a slow, three-person lift that ferries expert skiers to some of Mammoth’s most adventurous terrain.
The man fell hard enough to pop out of his skis in the steep, icy moguls near the top of the run before sliding headfirst for hundreds of yards, apparently unable to stop himself, according to witnesses who posted on Reddit.
“He then slid while unconscious about another 150 yards down the trail leaving blood … the entire way while the person he was skiing with was crying out and trying to catch up to jump on him to stop the slide,” one Reddit user wrote.
On Friday morning, Mammoth Mountain executives confirmed the death in an email to The Times.
Ski patrollers got to the victim at 1:04 p.m., about four minutes after the accident, according to the email. He was unconscious and unresponsive.
“Life-saving care was administered immediately, and the guest was quickly transported to the care of paramedics,” who took the victim to Mammoth Hospital, mountain officials wrote. “Despite these efforts, we are informed the guest passed away.”
No details about the victim’s identity have been released. “Notification of next of kin is still pending,” according to the email.
The first death of the season occurred on Christmas Day, after a storm dumped more than five feet of fresh snow on the previously parched resort. Raymond Albert, a 71-year-old regular known to fellow skiers as “Every Day Ray,” was spotted in a pocket of deep, fresh snow beside a well-traveled run.
He had popped out of his skis, which were behind him, and pitched forward, ending up with his head in the snow and his feet in the air, according to a written report of the incident provided to his family.
When ski patrollers arrived, Albert had no pulse. The patrollers tried CPR, but with so much fresh snow on the ground, they struggled to find a firm-enough surface. They finally used a bystander’s legs as a makeshift platform — to no avail.
The following day, a 30-year-old ski patroller named Cole Murphy was with a team of colleagues hurrying to clear the freshly fallen snow from a series of expert slopes known, appropriately, as the Avalanche Chutes.
That’s when an avalanche, deliberately triggered by someone else on the team, swept Murphy hundreds of feet down the mountain. He was trapped at the bottom under about a meter of dense avalanche debris — which starts out fluffy but can quickly harden to the consistency of concrete.
When Murphy’s desperate friends finally found him and dug him out after 18 agonizing minutes, he was blue and not breathing, according to witnesses. He was airlifted to a Reno hospital and pronounced dead days later — the second ski patroller in less than a year killed trying to clear the Avalanche Chutes so the resort could open ahead of a busy holiday.
On Jan. 16, a snowboarder who died of an apparent head injury became the third death of the season on Mammoth Mountain. Few details are publicly available, but social media posts suggest he was a beginner and was wearing a helmet.
Last weekend, a 12-year-old girl was caught on video dangling from a Mammoth ski lift dozens of feet above the ground. Mountain staff and bystanders scrambled to stretch a net and put padding beneath her, but when she fell, she missed, slamming painfully into the slope.
“It was an incredibly traumatic experience,” her mother wrote in the comments beneath the Instagram post. “My daughter miraculously walked away with no broken bones or major injuries.”
Mammoth officials declined to say how many deaths occurred at the resort last season, or provide the average annual number of fatalities over the last 100 years.
There have been “hundreds of thousands” of visitors to the mountain so far this season, they noted.
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