Swiss police on Sunday hailed as “extraordinary” the survival of a young skier who was buried by an avalanche for 17 hours and pulled from the snow with only mild hypothermia.
The 21-year-old man was swept away by a 50m wide snowslide while skiing off-piste in the Evolene region of the Alps on Saturday.
But, despite the slim survival chances of anyone trapped by an avalanche for more than an hour, an air pocket enabled the man to keep breathing while buried beneath 50cm of snow, police said.
“It’s extraordinary. We occasionally have people surviving after [being buried for] several hours, but after that is pretty much unheard of,” a police spokesman in the southern canton of Valais said.
When the Swiss skier was rushed to hospital in Valais, his body temperature was still about 34°C, only three degrees below normal and he was suffering only mild symptoms of hypothermia.
“It is just as surprising that he was not in a much more critical condition,” the spokesman said.
The man, an experienced off-piste skier, was reported missing by his family at 4:30pm. Rescuers involved in initial attempts to find him reported seeing the tracks of a skier disappearing into the path of a 50m-wide, 150m-long avalanche.
The search had to be abandoned in the early hours of yesterday morning due to concerns for rescuers’ safety. At dawn the search began again and rescuers spotted an area of snow that was moving and appeared to be a different shade from the surrounding white.
“It was his helmet that could be seen from the helicopter,” the police spokesman said.
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