Heinz Mueller knows how an avalanche can kill you. He nearly didn’t survive after spending two and a half hours buried under about 30 feet of snow in 1993 during an avalanche in the Swiss Alps.
“The whole slope came down and covered the valley, including us,” said Mr. Mueller, a mountain guide in the village of Andermatt, Switzerland. He said he was buried along with two other people.
He survived in part because colleagues had seen it happen and were trying to find them. But because they were so deep, Mr. Mueller said, they could not hear the searchers looking for them.
“It feels like you are in concrete. You can’t move a millimeter,” he said, adding, “You can barely breathe. You have tons of snow above you. It’s panic.”
At least eight backcountry skiers were killed by an avalanche during an expedition on Tuesday in California, near Lake Tahoe. Six people from the group were rescued, and one remains missing and presumed dead.
Rescuers said weather conditions forced them to leave with the six survivors before they were able to locate the final member of the group. Officials in a news conference on Wednesday said they did not expect the conditions were survivable.
The main dangers when buried under snow and ice, Mr. Mueller said, are suffocation and freezing to death. “If you are buried in an avalanche and you are still breathing, the hole you are breathing in starts to form ice,” he said, “and then it’s the same like you are breathing in a plastic bag.”
He managed to make a larger breathing hole to get enough air, but by the time he was rescued, he was close to death. His body temperature had fallen to 29 degrees Celsius, about 84 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normal body temperature is 36 Celsius, or 98.6 Fahrenheit.)
One colleague trapped under the snow with Mr. Mueller, whose hand was touching Mr. Mueller’s leg, also survived. A third, who was a short distance away, did not.
In Europe this season, 90 people have died in avalanches already, according to the European Avalanche Warning Services, which tracks deaths annually. That is 20 more than died during all of last season.
An average of 27 people died in avalanches each winter in the United States over the last decade, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. The recent high was in 2021, with 37 deaths.
Sabrina Tavernise is a writer-at-large for The Times, focused on political life in America and how Americans see the changes in Washington.
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