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For days it had been snowing, but now the clouds were gone. And way up here, high above the tree line, where the storm had wreathed the mountaintop, the only evidence of the foul weather was the snow that it had left behind. It was everywhere, spread across the face of the peak and down the rocky ridges like a thick layer of frosting on a cake and glittering against a cerulean sky.
Joël Jaccard squinted hard in the bright light and shuffled in his skis. He took a long look down the backside of the mountain, studying the way the high slopes of Roc d'Orzival—a 9,400-foot arrowhead-shaped protrusion in the Swiss Alps—fell away beneath him. With his gaze, he traced a path down to the village of Grimentz, more than 5,000 feet below, taking mental measure of the obstacle course before him. Steep traverses, vertical crevasses, ice patches, and spines of black rock. It was a treacherous run, unsecured and unsupervised, suitable only for experts—the ultimate “free ride,” as he thought of it. Jaccard and his two friends had trudged to this off-trail spot by taking a ski resort lift to the highest station and then carrying their skis uphill for another 15 minutes. Now he was eager to get moving; he figured it would take them 30 minutes to reach the village.
Of course, out here, Jaccard knew, things could always go wrong. Like many experienced skiers of the alpine backcountry, he took precautions. Poised on the ridgeline, Jaccard made a mental checklist of the equipment he carried: shovel, collapsible probe, walkie-talkie. In his red canvas backpack he had stowed an airbag that, with the yank of a ripcord, could inflate during an avalanche, propelling him to the surface of the cascading river of snow. If he found himself buried, Jaccard's radio transceiver—known in French as a détecteur de victimes d'avalanche, or DVA—was designed to help rescuers locate him.
But the chances of a disaster on Roc d'Orzival seemed to have diminished this morning. Hours earlier, Jaccard had checked the weather report provided by the Davos-based experts at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. The heightened avalanche warnings that had been issued just over a week earlier had been downgraded for the last few days. The 32-year-old mechanic, a skier since early childhood, wasn't too worried.
The first one off the ridge, Jaccard plunged into the powder and glided downward across a wide snowfield. His two friends followed at a safe distance, a few dozen yards behind. Then Jaccard turned his skis down the 45-degree slope and shot through a pass between hills. He skidded over ice patches and plowed through drifts, picking up speed, trying to suss out a route in the trackless snow. He made one turn, then a wider one.
Then he sensed trouble.
Up ahead, the wind had gone to work on the fresh powder that had been coming down all week, whipping the snow into an enormous drift—a huge pillow-like mound, known as a windslab, or plaque à vent. Jaccard had spent enough time in the mountains to apprehend the danger of this sort of drift. The new pile of snow, resting precariously atop the old, unstable snowpack, could break off and charge down the slope at the slightest disturbance.
Jaccard tried to slow himself; he swerved but couldn't avoid it. Suddenly, he was upon the drift, and then he heard an ominous, low rumbling sound. Turning his head, he saw behind him a fissure open in the snow, 40 yards back, triggered by his body weight. He watched as gravity took hold of the dislodged snow, sending it down the hill. The enormous white wall was sliding in his direction.
Jaccard scrambled atop a rise, but the avalanche, moving now at 60 miles an hour, quickly met him. He felt the immense weight of the wave as it plowed into his back, tearing off his skis, fracturing one of his vertebrae, and pummeling him down in the direction of the ground. As the snow gathered all around him, Jaccard groped for the cord on his airbag and gave it a ferocious pull just before he was fully engulfed. The movement released 200 liters of compressed air from a steel cylinder, which ballooned a dual airbag system to life. He hoped the inflated device would carry him above the smaller bits of snow and ice, and keep him from being buried.
But it wasn't enough. The torrent was unrelenting and Jaccard could see the bright whites and blues of snow and sky now give way to darkness. For the first time, he felt the cold rolling over him, beginning to encase him, choking off any access he had to air. Instinctively, Jaccard stuck his hands over his mouth. Then, finally, all went still.
He was lying facedown on his stomach with his legs extended, unsure of just how much snow he was sealed beneath. With his hands by his face, a small pocket of air had been fortuitously preserved near his mouth, but breathing was already getting difficult. Then, crackling over his walkie-talkie, he heard the urgent voice of one of his companions
“Joël, do you hear me?”
The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn't answer. He couldn't move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black.
Over the mountain, in the Rhône Valley town of Sion, Gérald Maret was spending that morning in a small office building at the local airport. It was 11:30 on January 24, 2021, when an urgent dispatch came in: Avalanche. Roc d'Orzival. One person, equipped with airbag and DVA, missing.
Maret knew the drill. The 53-year-old had flown helicopters for two decades for Air-Glaciers, one of the most storied mountain rescue squads in the world. Since 1965, the renowned helicopter service has patrolled the high mountain passes of Valais, one of the largest of Switzerland's 26 cantons. Sprinkled across six alpine bases, the outfit maintains a fleet of 16 high-altitude-ready helicopters and is perhaps the most effective unit of its kind in the world; certainly it's one of the busiest. Air-Glaciers flies about 2,500 missions a year (augmenting its operating budget by selling Rescue Cards that entitle its 80,000 or so subscribers to receive financial coverage for all rescue costs not picked up by their insurers). The group's roster of seasoned pilots prides itself on being able to reach even the most forbidding spots in Valais in mere minutes.
Seconds after receiving the call, Maret sprinted onto the tarmac and climbed into the cockpit of one of the base's two Écureuil AS350s. As he fired the engine, a pair of rescue guides, Gérald Mathys, 50, and Pascal Gaspoz, 52, raced behind him. The two had both been flying into avalanches and other calamities for Air-Glaciers for decades. They had quickly grabbed from the hangar a stretcher, some shovels, beacons, collapsible snow probes, and an antenna that dangles from the helicopter's underbelly to facilitate the search for a transmitter's signal. Gear in hand, they piled into the chopper and Maret lifted quickly off the pavement. But before they could plot a course into the mountains, they had a quick stop to make.
Maret zipped over the Rhône, banked low, and brought the helicopter down in a quiet residential section of Sion. Pierre Féraud, a 55-year-old Air-Glaciers physician, climbed aboard. He'd been passing the day at home; on vacation officially, but the only doctor available.
Seven minutes had elapsed since the alert.
Aloft again, Maret roared southeast, skirting the Château de Tourbillon, a 13th-century turreted castle perched on an outcropping above Sion. He gained speed, reaching 150 miles an hour as he guided the chopper over glacier-carved valleys and gorges, blanketed in brilliant new snow. Maret, who'd been flying in the Alps and the Canadian Rockies for years, was used to the vicissitudes of high-altitude flying—the ice fog that can obscure ski lift cables and hide canyon walls, the tricky winds that can send a chopper careening. Today, however, was cloudless and the air was nearly still. The visibility was perfect and he could see, just over a mile ahead, the looming jagged peak of Roc d'Orzival.
Twenty-two minutes had now passed since the call reached headquarters.
Down below, the fantastically imposing terrain of Valais spread out in all directions. A ski mecca, the French-speaking region in the corner of southwest Switzerland is dominated by the iconic Matterhorn. The area is buffeted in winter by blasting winds that pile unstable drifts on steep mountain inclines. This has helped it earn a reputation as one of the most treacherous and avalanche-prone spots in the Alps. Since 1936, an average of 24 people have died per year in avalanches in Switzerland; Valais routinely accounts for a sizable portion of the toll.
The danger is felt even by those who don't venture onto the slopes. Disaster sometimes comes down from the mountains, as it did on August 30, 1965, when two million cubic meters of ice and debris broke off the Allalin Glacier in Valais, swallowing up a dam project and crushing 88 workers, the worst avalanche in recent Swiss history. Five years later, in the darkness of a February morning in 1970, while the village of Reckingen slept, 1.8 million cubic meters of snow broke away from the Bächji Alp and tumbled toward the town. Thirty people were killed, including 19 army officers sleeping in an army barracks. And in 1999, a dozen people in the town of Evolène were lost when a huge mass of snow between the peaks of Sasseneire and Pointe du Tsaté detached and rocketed down the mountain.
But the vast majority of the region's avalanche deaths, some 90 percent, involve people in uncontrolled terrain, such as skiers in hors piste runs, that is, skiers using unmarked or unprepared routes. These powdery, untrammeled runs often can be found on the back side of established resorts, in areas unmanned by ski patrols and unprotected by other standard safety measures—such as regular detonations of explosives that touch off controlled avalanches and keep the mountain clear of precarious accumulation. Not surprisingly many rescuers—often exceptional skiers themselves—tend to regard the untrained and unsafe off-piste amateurs with little admiration. Their dismay has simmered for years.
Now the danger that lurks on these runs is intensifying. The effects of climate change—for instance, variable winters in which long periods without snow are followed by huge accumulations—are making Alpine conditions harder to predict. As temperatures rise, warmer, wetter air is creating fiercer storms that drop snow in fitful patterns. Fluctuations in weather and wind influence how the fresh powder interacts with old snowpack. In 2019, the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research reported that approximately two to three times more snow than normal had fallen in the Swiss Alps that January. As the weather grows more erratic, and as the popularity of winter sports nudges skiers and snowboarders further from the crammed routes and into the backcountry, the risks are mounting. Over a four-day period in January 2021, off-piste skiers and snowboarders set off eight avalanches that left eight free-riders dead. “Valais is the center of it all,” Pierre Féraud told me.
The threats may be changing, but the region's place in the annals of rescue lore goes back centuries: Valais is the very place where organized mountain rescue is said to have begun. In the 1700s, monks at the Grand St.-Bernard monastery, perched on an 8,000-foot pass between Switzerland and Italy, began employing Saint Bernards to help sniff out travelers lost in the snow on the treacherous mountain pilgrimage route referred to as the White Death. (Barry, the all-time rescue champion, saved 40 people between 1800 and 1812.)
Later, Swiss military pilots pioneered airborne mountain rescue in 1946 when they fitted skis to a plane and landed atop a glacier in the Bernese Oberland, saving the passengers and crew of a crashed American plane. But it would be a trickier rescue mission that would ultimately inspire the need for a full-time professional service like Air-Glaciers. In 1963, Hermann Geiger, an alpine guide and helicopter pilot from Sion nicknamed the Flying Saint Bernard, responded to an emergency call to assist an injured guide who'd been climbing a glacier. Geiger flew his small Bell 47 chopper to the scene, but was prevented by vicious winds from landing. Stretcher-bearers were forced to make the arduous climb to reach the man, who survived with a broken femur.
The incident galvanized Geiger to revolutionize alpine rescue. With the help of two fellow guides, Bruno Bagnoud and Fernand Martignoni, he persuaded a Swiss bank to lend the money to purchase an Aerospatiale Alouette III, a powerful jet-engine helicopter that could reach high altitudes. The same year, the men founded Air-Glaciers. The partners soon bought more aircraft, hired experienced pilots, and expanded their operation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the risks they took on, two of the three founders met premature ends: Geiger was killed in 1966 while performing a routine instruction flight in his Piper J3C; Martignoni died in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps 16 years later. Bagnoud, who is now 86, once harbored hopes that his son would carry on Air-Glaciers' daring work. Indeed, François Xavier Bagnoud was 20 when he became the youngest helicopter rescue pilot in Swiss history. But like so many in his family's circle, he died tragically. In 1986, not long after he joined the fraternity of rescue pilots, his helicopter crashed in a sandstorm in the Sahara Desert while he was surveying the running of the famed Paris-Dakar rally, an accident that also claimed the life of the race's organizer, the noted French motorcycle racer Thierry Sabine.
Since those early days, Air-Glaciers has become famous in Switzerland for its rapid deployments in Alpine disasters. They've extracted the injured from deep crevasses and carried them down from towering ledges on high mountain walls. In March 2012, rescuers raced into action after a school bus crashed inside a tunnel deep in the mountains near Sierre, killing 22 children, four teachers, and two drivers. Six years later, they helicoptered into the Pigne d'Arolla in the Pennine Alps after 14 cross-country skiers from Italy and France lost their way in fog at 12,000 feet. Air-Glaciers guides searched for the lost hikers for 18 hours, saving the lives of all but five, who had frozen to death overnight.
The skills to respond to such a wide variety of high-mountain disasters are honed by the Air-Glaciers rescuers through intensive training that begins with a three-year Swiss-mandated course in alpine guiding. That's followed by months of specialized practice and a yearlong paramedic course. Every 12 months, just before ski season, each of Air-Glaciers' rescue guides and pilots must also complete a weeklong proficiency course designed to refine their skills in everything from post-avalanche searches to high-altitude extractions.
During their most-recent training mission, before this winter's ski season, I choppered with a team to a mountaintop not far from Sion, where I joined 30 guides and 30 pilots from across Valais who'd come to renew their certification. On this November day, the simulated mission involved evacuating stranded passengers from a crippled chairlift as it swayed above the slopes of a ski resort. I was invited to play the part of a hapless skier in need of helicopter help.
It was a beautiful day to imagine a disaster. From my perch on the stalled lift, I could make out the snow-encrusted Matterhorn looming over the brown alpine foothills. I watched as an Écureuil rotored into view, dangling two rescuers secured to a 65-foot-long cable below. Soon, two yellow-helmeted men landed on the edge of my chair, each wearing a harness and carrying a second, along with coiled ropes and a dozen carabiners. I held still as one of the men expertly secured a harness around me, clipped a carabiner to the cable, and wrapped his legs around my waist. Then the chopper hoisted us up and away. After an exhilarating one-minute ride, we were gently deposited in a landing zone where I watched the pilots and the guides repeat the exercise again and again over the next several hours—practicing with cables of various length and envisioning, all the while, the wind and the snow and jeopardy they would no doubt be called on to confront later that winter.
While the Air-Glaciers squads might train to face all manner of alpine calamity, it's the threat of avalanche that haunts the high slopes of Valais with special significance. Every recreational skier and rescuer who has ever swooshed through Swiss backcountry lives in dread of them. “You hear that crack and the silence while nature holds its breath, waiting for the mountain to go,” one expert alpinist, who has lost several friends in avalanches and narrowly avoided being killed herself, told me. “Even the birds go quiet. You can feel your breath thundering in your ears.” Féraud shared with me a video captured by an off-pister's helmet camera in 2020 as an avalanche roared over him: It showed swirling granules of snow, flashes of sky, then darkness, accompanied by moans of pain and screams of terror. The skier had somehow managed to avoid being buried, but he'd inhaled ice into his lungs and was spitting blood.
“Avalanche… Je ne peux pas réspirer,” he cried over his cellphone to the emergency dispatcher. I can't breathe. An Air-Glaciers helicopter-borne crew arrived minutes later and saved him.
Joël Jaccard had been buried for nearly 30 minutes when Gérald Maret whirled his chopper across the ridgeline of Roc d'Orzival and spotted, from high above, the telltale mess of the avalanche zone. He circled for a better look, looping the helicopter wide across a field of broken ice and snow roughly 200 yards wide and 600 yards long. Jaccard's two friends stood at the top of the churned debris, just beneath the jagged edge that marked where the slab had torn loose. They were trying desperately to pick up Jaccard's DVA signal with their own digital beacons.
Introduced to the market in 1971, these transceivers, which emit an ever-stronger signal as one approaches a buried victim, were hailed as revolutionary when they came out. The technology is not without its limitations, though. Using the devices typically takes practice—and overcoming some difficulty. With a range of between 40 and 80 meters, they often require searchers—sometimes shocked and exhausted avalanche survivors themselves—to cover vast distances through heavy snow, while precious time is slipping away. “They're inexact, like a blind minesweeper, and they take tons of practice,” the veteran off-piste skier who's lost several friends in avalanches told me.
Inside the cab of the circling chopper, the rescue team could tell from Jaccard's friends that his location was a mystery. Every moment felt crucial. Pascal Gaspoz, a rangy ex-cop from a village in the Val d'Hérens, was assessing their options. Among the first guides to join Air-Glaciers after the Swiss government terminated its own police-rescue operations and turned the responsibility fully over to private companies in 1995, he'd been involved in hundreds of avalanche rescues over three decades; he knew, more than just about anyone, just how crucial their next moves would be.
“Gérald, what do you think? Do we need the dogs?” he shouted into his microphone to Gérald Mathys.
Clearly, the beacons on the ground weren't working; perhaps, Gaspoz figured, a more traditional technique could. Air-Glaciers maintains a database of 45 trained rescue dogs and handlers in Sion and the surrounding valleys; at least four teams are always on call. Although modern detection technology has improved dramatically in recent years, the comparatively old-school help that a canine can provide remains remarkably useful in a giant avalanche zone. Dogs, which can smell through between 12 and 15 feet of snow and can work for an hour before requiring a replacement, are still among the world's most reliable and durable sensors. Typically, after a rescue team has been deployed, another chopper is dispatched behind it with a handler and a dog (very few, it turns out, are Saint Bernards; the canines pitching in nowadays include mostly German and Belgian shepherds, Labrador retrievers, Golden retrievers, and Schnauzers).
As Gaspoz and Mathys discussed whether they might need the dogs, Maret scanned the ridges, searching for warning signs of the biggest threat to first responders: a second avalanche. A danger with which Gaspoz was tragically familiar.
Twenty years earlier, as six mountain climbers were ascending an ice column in heavy snow above Zinal in the Val d'Anniviers, an avalanche surged over the group and swept a young woman away. Air-Glaciers rushed a dog team and 23 rescuers to the scene—among them, Gaspoz's older brother Nicolas. As they worked, another slide roared down on them. “It came too far and too fast for us to hear it. It was panic. I heard screams,” one survivor told the local press.
The avalanche buried six rescuers. Four were quickly pulled out alive. But two men—Edouard Gross, 24, and Nicolas, 36—couldn't be located. Pascal had been working with his brother earlier that morning before being called away to another rescue. “I was back at the base on standby, and then the second avalanche came and swept him off,” he told me. Rescuers found Gross's body later that day. At nightfall, they called off the search for Nicolas. Two hundred rescuers came to the mountain the next day. They discovered his body at the bottom of the avalanche field at noon. The event was one of the most tragic in Air-Glaciers' long history.
As Maret flew over the avalanche zone, he pinpointed the spot where the slab had detached from the snowpack before shooting down the mountain. He studied the long serrated edge that had been left and determined that the risk of a second snowslide was low—there was no more fresh powder to fall. He looked for a place to put the chopper down.
Mathys, meanwhile, had busied himself trying to determine what rescuers refer to as the missing skier's “history.” After decades of rescues, he'd come to realize that his most useful tool was often his eyes. Scouting the scene out the window, he followed the skier's trail just above the disaster area, calculating his route, and then scanning the surface of the avalanche field, trying to spot a clue in the debris—a glove, a backpack, a protruding appendage, any trace that stood out amid the sea of whiteness.
A few years ago, Mathys arrived by helicopter at the scene of a massive day-old avalanche in the Valais; a search for a missing skier had been called off the previous night because of darkness and the danger of a second slide. As he circled above the zone, something caught his attention. “I suddenly saw a face sticking out from the snow,” he recalled. The skier had lain entombed throughout the frigid night, but his head had stayed above ground. Mathys dug him out, cold but uninjured, and transported him to the hospital.
Now Mathys was looking down with the same intense gaze. And suddenly, there it was: a shock of orange in the snow 200 feet below. His first thought was that a high-visibility vest had been torn off the skier. Then he realized: It's an airbag. A piece of the latex balloon that Jaccard had deployed before being swallowed by the snow was now poking through the surface.
“Airbag!” Mathys shouted excitedly through his microphone.
Maret guided the Écureuil down to the snowy surface and gently put the helicopter's skids on the ground. Mathys leaped out, ducking low beneath the spinning rotors, and ran toward the airbag. Jaccard's companions, who'd been searching up the mountain, raced 300 yards down the hill to meet the rescuers.
“Pull the shovel out of my backpack,” Mathys screamed at them.
Mathys had done the math; he knew the stats. He realized that in all probability, after 30 minutes under the snow, the man was likely dead. But his experience also told him that the rescuers might have a chance. They had to start digging.
In the minds of the rescuers that day, a ceaseless stopwatch had begun running as soon as the emergency call reached Air-Glaciers' headquarters. After all, when it comes to who lives and who dies, it's time that often predicts. Research on Swiss and Canadian avalanche victims has shown that those buried for up to 18 minutes have a 91 percent probability of survival; but for those buried longer, the survival rate drops precipitously. Of those who, like Jaccard, have been snowed under for up to 35 minutes, the likelihood of surviving is 34 percent. Beyond that point, according to the researchers, the survival rate declines to less than 20 percent then flattens out. That's because as hypothermia kicks in—about 35 minutes into such an ordeal—bodily functions slow and oxygen consumption decreases. As Féraud, the Air-Glaciers' physician pointed out to me, the chances of surviving an avalanche remain roughly the same whether one lies buried in the snow for 35 minutes or for an hour and a half.
Of course, Féraud and the Air-Glaciers teams had also seen cases that defied physics and biology—extraordinary incidents where victims simply got
lucky. In January 2005, Féraud helicoptered to the scene of a massive avalanche in the Verbiers ski area that had swept away the caretaker of a ski mountain lodge. The man wasn't equipped with a DVA. A team of 120 rescuers searched for three hours, probing the debris field with their long collapsible poles. Meanwhile, five dogs fruitlessly sniffed at the snow with cold noses as darkness fell. When night set in, Féraud and the others had lost all hope. “We were certain that he was dead,” Féraud recalled. The physician trudged to the ski cabin to warm up after the dispiriting search, when the lodge's phone rang.
A woman there picked up. “It's for you,” she told the doctor. “It's the avalanche.”
Féraud grabbed the phone. He heard a muffled voice.
“What are you waiting for to pick me up? I'm freezing!”
“But where are you?” Féraud asked.
“I'm under the avalanche! I'm cold!”
“But where under the snow?”
“I don't know… It swept me away… You must find me. I'm very cold!”
Féraud got on his radio. “He's alive!” he shouted. “He's somewhere under our feet!” Rescuers raced back to the debris field and began listening in the dark for sounds. A rescuer dialed the buried man's phone and told him to yell out his name, Marcus, and then to keep shouting. Before long the elated rescue team zeroed in on the muffled cries rising from the snow. They began digging furiously and soon plucked the 35-year-old out, amazed he'd survived. The frigid temperature—6.8 degrees Fahrenheit—had allowed the powdery snow to maintain permeability, facilitating the flow of oxygen and allowing the man to survive for three hours buried beneath the cold. When he emerged, he was freezing but unharmed.
The whirring rotor blades of the Écureuil drowned out Mathys. He shouted again—“The shovel!”—and gestured to his pack, strapped tightly to his back. Flying snow and icy wind whipped up by the helicopter stung Mathys's face. One of Jaccard's friends grabbed the large-bladed tool and handed it to the guide. Gaspoz jumped out of the helicopter and Maret lifted the chopper up and away, maneuvering the Écureuil to a safe distance on a patch of even ground 100 yards away. Féraud hopped out and was preparing his equipment—including a defibrillator and tubing to provide endotracheal intubation. “In most cases, he would be dead,” Féraud told me, “but I thought he had a chance.”
Back at the spot they'd found the airbag, Mathys dug one foot deep…two feet…three feet through the packed snow. Then, after 60 seconds of digging, he looked down at the exposed head of Joël Jaccard.
“I see him!” he shouted.
Jaccard lay limp and unresponsive. Gaspoz and Jaccard's two companions joined the rescue. Shoveling methodically, the four men cleared snow for another two minutes until they had uncovered the skier's entire body. Lying facedown in the snow pile, legs extended, he was almost perfectly horizontal. He was also unconscious—and he wasn't breathing. Mathys rolled Jaccard onto his back and shook his shoulders, attempting to wake him. Then he began chest compressions, watching intently for any sign of response. Nothing.
With his face to the sky, Jaccard remained motionless, not breathing. But then Mathys noticed something hopeful: a slight flicker of the eyelids. Quickly, the rescuers slid him onto a stretcher and contacted Maret, who was watching nearby with the chopper ready. On command, the pilot smoothly floated his helicopter back across the avalanche field, alighting next to Jaccard's body as it lay prostrate in the bright snow.
In an instant, the rescuers lifted Jaccard into the aircraft. The rotors roared overhead, but the team was unperturbed, moving in calm synchronicity. They zipped back to the landing area, where a waiting Féraud placed an oxygen mask over Jaccard's nose and mouth. Gaspoz grabbed the defibrillator and the intubation equipment. Just then, Jaccard's eyes opened. Féraud gasped. He's alive.
Somehow, despite running out of air three feet beneath the snow, Jaccard's bloodstream had retained enough oxygen to keep his heart beating for 30 minutes. Yet the carbon dioxide coursing through his body was poisoning him. If Mathys hadn't spotted the flash of his airbag, Féraud estimated Jaccard would have had about “five or 10 minutes left to live.”
The team stowed its gear and steadied Jaccard on the stretcher. In a flash, the helicopter rose, found its heading, and then sped across the Alps, reaching the hospital in Sion in 15 minutes. “It was one of the greatest rescues that we've ever done,” Féraud would recall nearly one year later, as we sat together inside the Maison de Sauvetage, or Rescue House, the Air-Glaciers' headquarters at Sion airport. It was also a reminder that for all the safeguards introduced in recent years to lower the risk of death by avalanche, it's the expertise of the rescuer—the ability to analyze a scene in the chaotic aftermath of a disaster and react efficiently under stress—that often determines whether those lost can be found in time. “More than the medicine, more than the technology, it was the guide who saved him,” Féraud said.
Joël Jaccard's final memory from the mountain that day was being immobile beneath the snow with his hands over his mouth, listening helplessly to his friends' frantic voices on the walkie-talkie. The next thing he remembered was lying in a hospital corridor, pain pulsating through his back from his fractured lower vertebra. It took him months to get over the effects of the accident. But eventually his spine healed and the pain of that harrowing morning faded.
When I asked him what lessons he'd taken from that near-death experience, he told me that his only mistake was rushing out on the first morning of good weather and failing to give the accumulated snowfall a chance to settle. “We should have waited a couple of days.”
As we spoke, the new ski season was just beginning in the Alps—and Jaccard seemed undaunted by last year's brush with disaster. He said he was looking forward to his next off-piste run. He'd even bought a new airbag, to replace the old one. He was expecting a busy winter in the mountains. Just like Air-Glaciers.
Joshua Hammer is a frequent contributor to GQ who wrote last about a rash of European jewel heists for the September 2021 issue.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2022 issue with the title "Angels of the Avalanche Age."