A skier at Maine's Sugarloaf Mountain was buried in snow up to his neck after a 50-foot-wide avalanche last weekend.
Nik Krueger told News Center Maine that he was celebrating his 27th birthday with a friend on Sunday and followed another skier down the mountain when suddenly a huge mound of snow let go, falling on the other skier.
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"I saw this big mound of snow and said, 'Well that may let go.' And no later than I could say it under my breath, I just watched the whole thing collapse in front of him," Krueger said. "I made my way down there and just started digging snow as fast as I could to get him out of there."
He said it took him about 10 minutes to dig out the other skier, who was almost completely buried, with only his head sticking out of the snow. Fortunately, the skier was uninjured.
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The skier who was buried by the avalanche, Nathan Sanborn, described the terrifying incident in a post on Facebook Sunday night.
"A few lessons learned. The biggest is never to think an avalanche can’t get you. In bounds. At an east coast resort. in a spot within the trees where you’ve skied countless times before," he said.
"Respect the mountains friends," Sanborn added. "They are a wonderland but they won’t hesitate to bite. Hard."
Sugarloaf said in a statement that avalanches are uncommon but can happen when the snowpack becomes unstable. They said the 37 inches of snow that fell over a four-day period "presented the perfect environment and conditions" for the avalanche.
“This was 100% the product of Mother Nature," said Roddy Ehrlenbach, Sugarloaf's assistant ski patrol director. "On the East Coast, the most common types of avalanches are wind slab, which the conditions we had that day — with 2 feet of snow and high winds the night before — kind of set us up perfectly for that type of avalanche problem."
Ehrlenbach, who has worked at Sugarloaf for almost three decades, said there have been about a dozen avalanches during his time there, but only a handful that have actually carried a skier.
Heavy snow and strong winds on Sunday led the ski resort to hold some ski lifts, closing access to some areas of the mountain.
