An experienced backcountry snowboarder had a very close call with an avalanche he triggered near Juneau’s Eaglecrest Ski Area on Saturday. It slid, rolled and bounced him hundreds of feet through a gully, though he was able to walk away from it.
The slope is known as Showboat.
“Front and center, right in front of the parking lot but it’s well outside our ski boundary,” said Brian Davies, who directs snow safety and the ski patrol at Eaglecrest.
Davies interviewed the backcountry snowboarder, who Alaska State Troopers identified as Ryland Buller, 28, a day after the avalanche.
Heading into the weekend, there had been several days of snow, with lots of nice, light powder accumulating.
The day of the avalanche, the skies were clear and cold.
“People think, ‘Oh, there’s no avalanches, it’s a bluebird day.’ But wind is the architect of avalanches,” Davies said. “It can move snow even when you’re not thinking about it and subtly create more hazard.”
All that light snow was “very portable,” Davies said,and as a leeward slope, snow naturally accumulates on Showboat.
Davies described Buller as an experienced backcountry boarder who got caught up in the excitement of the day and made some bad decisions.
“Going out, out of bounds is definitely a personal choice,” Davies said. “It’s a choice that comes with lots of responsibility. Knowing what the conditions are, having been educated about how to assess the conditions.”
“Having the proper tools, you know, beacon, shovel, probe, a pack to carry it in, emergency gear in that pack,” he said. “It’s always good to go with at least a partner, if not a couple of people.”
Davies said Buller had the right gear and even managed to make his own 911 call after coming to rest in a gully. But as he tumbled down, he had lost a lot of the gear from his pack.
“It sounds like where he was terrain wise, that he might have fortunately rolled up on the side of the gully, and the bulk of the snow went past him,” Davies said. “He was never totally buried or fully enveloped in the snow, but he did have snow moving around him.”
The path of the avalanche was almost 1,000 vertical feet, and Buller thinks he got caught in about half of that.
Buller was very lucky, Davies said. When searchers got to him, he was injured, but “ambulatory enough” to be escorted out.
The avalanche beacon, which helps others with similar devices locate each other in the snow, doesn’t do much good without a partner.
Buller was by himself, but had fortune of being spotted by ski patrol members and others from afar.
“He realized in the midst of that when it was happening, that, ‘Oops,’ yeah. Just a chain of decisions that ended up not going his way,” Davies said.
It was Buller’s second run down Showboat that day.
The snowboarder had actually unwittingly cut a slide on his first run, too, Davies said.
Buller was very humble about it, and wants to share his story in the future so others can learn from it, Davies said.
Davies, who’s worked with the ski patrol and snow safety for three decades, said someone was flushed into the same gully by an avalanche about 6 years ago and was also very lucky. He said the last time someone was caught and completely buried in an avalanche near Eaglecrest was in January 2008, just beyond the East Bowl Chutes boundary.
Eaglecrest Ski Area has shared this video about backcountry decision-making, and a checklist on its website for backcountry skiers.
Correction: An earlier version of this story conflated two separate past avalanches in the Eaglecrest area that affected skiers as if it were a single incident and has been corrected.
