Jonny Copp Tells AN EYE Avalanche Story in Outside Magazine

Nov 20, 10:14 PM | An Eye At The Top Of The World

Outside – November, 2007
By Jonathan Copp

THE FIRST AVALANCHE hit at midnight. The walls of our two ultralight tents collapsed, and we awoke to ice and snow squeezing us in the darkness.

It was late September, and we were deep in the Kumaun region of the Indian Himalayas to climb 22,510-foot Nanda Kot. I was with American mountaineers Chuck Bird, 41, Sarah Thompson, 28, and Pete Takeda, 42.

During our first attempt on the peak, we were hit by a severe north-blowing storm that, we would later learn, killed more than a dozen people.

Temperatures dropped to below zero, and heavy clouds dumped more than six inches of snow per hour. We’d taken shelter by chiseling our tents inside a crevasse that sloped downward into a seemingly bottomless pit. The orientation of the opening protected us from the full force of the avalanche, but the snow still poured in fast and deep.

As the cementlike mass pushed us farther into the crevasse, I fought to keep an air space in front of my mouth while tearing through the tent and pulling up frantically. When the slope finally settled, my head and one arm were above the surface. I started digging and found Sarah trapped near my knees. I burrowed until her hand grabbed mine. Pete heard the avalanche before it hit and grabbed an anchor we had set in the crevasse wall. He caught Chuck’s arm just as their tent was crushed. Miraculously, everyone survived.

I found a headlamp, and we began digging for our boots in the ten feet of debris. There would be no way down the mountain without them. After six hours, we had dislodged everyone’s boots, our ice tools, a stove, and four canisters of fuel. As the sun was rising, we cooked some dehydrated noodle soup, and we were sitting on our shredded tents when a second avalanche hit. I jumped up to standing and braced. It was 6:30 a.m., but suddenly it was dark again.

One headlamp popped on, then another. We were trapped in a 10-by-20-foot space. Pete and I dug a 15-foot long tunnel through the wall and poked our heads out into a raging storm. There was no way we could have survived out there. We decided to stay in the chamber until either we ran out of fuel or the storm surrendered. But this was just the lesser of two evils. The crevasse’s unstable wall looked like it might collapse under the weight of the avalanche debris and new snow. And we were unroped. A fall into the abyss below would be fatal.

As the cementlike mass pushed us farther into the crevasse, I fought to keep an air space in front of my mouth.

On the second day, we came up with ways to distract ourselves—building chairs out of snow, playing 21 questions. But by the third day, we couldn’t escape what was on our minds: We are going to die here. But the storm suddenly lifted on the fourth day, and the slopes began to stabilize. We tunneled out and spent the next 12 hours rappelling and downclimbing 6,000 feet.

Expert Analysis: The crevasse probably saved their lives. But this is a desperate choice, as a crevasse is a classic example of a terrain trap, something we are always taught to avoid in an avalanche context. —John Kelly, operations manager of the Canadian Avalanche Centre