Still, Briant Wells and Steve Ryan struggled through the loose snow up into Cornice Bowl. Powder to their knees and steep. They climbed in downhill boots, skis balanced on their shoulders.
Both men knew Mammoth Mountain. Residents of Mammoth on the east side of the California Sierra, both were accomplished mountaineers and had taught at the ski school there. They had discussed the danger the night before.
Reitman<, I've been caught three times — two of them partial burials, the third one I was lucky enough to have my ski cutting partner right there to get me out. Those things we don't brag about. They're mistakes and shouldn't happen. It's a frightening experience to be caught and do all the self-survival techniques that you were trained to do . . . you go through with them. After so many years, they become instinct, really, to save your hide. But we get paid for it. We get paid to take the chance. The customers that are up here are paying our wages to take the chances. And we do so. We control the avalanches. We make the areas safe as possible, and if they ski within our bounds, stay out of our closed areas, then they're not taking chances."<
On Sunday, November 4th, Mammoth Ski Area had not yet opened to the public for the season. A couple of department heads and cat operator were pushing snow around by T-Bar 2, hoping to open one slope that afternoon. Twenty-five to thirty centimeters had fallen at the 3000 meter level on Saturday. That fell on an ice layer created by rain. Slopes up high were pretty unstable. Down at T-Bar 2 everything looked good.
At 1130, a mountaineering skier raced downhill to the lodge. He reported a big avalanche in Cornice Bowl with two people caught. Gary Reitman was in the patrol room collecting first aid gear and toboggans for the T-Bar when he got the radio call. Grabbing a hasty search pack with probes, shovel, and rope, he started up the mountain on a Skidoo. Unconsolidated snow and boulders prevented motoring right to the scene, so he hiked the last 300 meters. Up over the lip from Gremlins Gulch, Gary approached a Class 4 avalanche — mixed hard and soft slab, probable hiker release — that had swept an area 200 meters wide and about one kilometer long from its 45 cm crown near the top of Cornice Bowl to the base of its snow deposition. One victim was lucky. As the avalanche released, Briant Wells was carried several hundred meters down the fall line below the fracture and buried under 20 cm of snow with snow boulders pinning his back and legs. Witnesses had already dug him out alive when Reitman arrived at the site. Distributing probes and getting
