The skier buried by an avalanche at Hauteluce (les Contamines) yesterday has died of his injuries in hospital. The skier, a 31 year old French national living in London had suffered chest severe injuries. The avalanche risk was 3 at the time. This is the 27th fatal avalanche incident this year in France.

Late yesterday morning two French skiers were on the South of the Aiguille Croche when they were caught by a small surface avalanche burying one of the skiers under 150cm of snow. The man was located by his friend after 20 minutes under the snow using his avalanche transceiver but it was Pisteurs from les Contamines-Montjoie who recovered the victim and administered first aid.

The sector is well known to off piste skiers and can be accessed from Aiguille Croche chair. The descent is on the Hauteluce side of the mountain and offers 800 meters of vertical starting at 2400 meters altitude.

There has also been a fatal avalanche incident in Flaine. A young Parisian snowboarder was found by a search and rescue team on Sunday. He had been reported missing by his family on Saturday evening but the S&R team could not start searching due to the avalanche risk (4/5) and weather conditions.

They used his hands-free lift pass to get an idea of where he might be in the resort. After searching a number of slides they found his body in the combe de Gers shortly after midday.

Wow, I only just saw this article now as i’ve been down with the flu. Was doing some off piste in Les Contamines on Friday with 4 friends. We were some of the first to arrive at the top of Aiguille Croche, but decided to stick to the black beneath the chair lift, since it had not yet been skied much (awesome powder on N-NE slopes btw!!). I had a look at the south side around 10:30am, prob just before the avalanche, as I didn’t see anyone on the slope (Le Dauphine says the avalanche occured at 11am). No way we were doing that one today though! The sun was heating things up really fast, and there was about 30-40cms of fresh snow sitting on a very wet layer. So we headed over to the roselette chairlift where we spent the rest of the day doing some cornice jumping and powder skiing on not too steep north facing slopes.

Here’s a vid we made at 11:40am between the col between roselette chair and col du joly at about 2200m.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP0wA707eKo