Rescue workers have spent the entire day looking for a missing Spanish snowboarder at les Deux Alpes which opened this weekend. The snowboarder went missing in poor weather Sunday afternoon. The 18 year old man had called his friends to say he was lost somewhere off piste. The rescue services have apparently triangulated his last call to have an idea which area to search.

The snowboarder appears to have been descending to the resort when he got lost (not the first time we’ve heard this). He was found this morning by rescue workers in a state of severe hypothermia and taken to hospital in Grenoble. Good result.

Update, it seems the young Spanish border, after spending the afternoon alone in the fun park, skied down towards la Grave where he was found this morning at 11am. He had spent 44 hours out in the open in very poor weather conditions. He had phoned his friends at 16h on Sunday to say that he was lost and scared but was trying to make it to a road he could see down the valley (RN91).

He was spotted by the Civilian Rescue helicopter at 1400m altitude after having negociated 1800m of descent through cliff bands and avalanche zones according to the police. He was found just opposite the la Grave -> Bourg d’Oisans road (AFAIKS in the Mesitel valley which is the first big gorge off the glacier in the photo above). Lying on the ground he was no longer able to move and was apparently “awaiting the end” when he was recovered. He was unable to give the police any information and remains in a very serious condition.

He was lucky that the weather was relatively mild and it was raining rather than snowing, a couple of degrees colder and he would have been buried under 50cm of snow. In the mid-1990s a skiing couple got lost in this valley and their bodies were only recovered in the late spring.

When the snowboard arrived at hospital in Grenoble yesterday his body temperature was 26 degrees C. Reheating the body from that temperature risks a cardiac arrest so the doctors connected him to an ECMO machine to reheat and oxygenate his blood supply.

ECMO is an acronym for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. As the name implies, it refers to the delivery of oxygen by “extracorporeal” measures, and literally means by mechanical bypass that takes place outside of the body. Toward that end, an ECMO machine is a medical device that performs this task. In fact, it is very similar to a heart-lung machine that is used to continue the supply of blood and oxygen while the heart is stopped, such as during open heart surgery. ECMO therapy, however, is intended for patients whose heart and lungs cannot normally function on their own.

The procedure took 8 hours to bring the body temperature of the snowboarder back to normal. It is a technique widely used at Grenoble hospital for this kind of problem, in particular for avalanche and crevasse victims. The hospital hopes that the snowboarder will recover without any long term effects from his adventure.