A Canadian skier died in the Haines Pass last week after being swept over a cliff and buried beneath more than three feet of snow, an Atlin Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable said Tuesday.
Maxim Arsenault, of Whistler, B.C., was skiing on a slope near Pleasant Camp with a film crew on Wednesday, April 20, when he triggered a snow slide around 10:30 a.m. Yukon time.
“He was skiing down the side of a mountain and as he was carving, he triggered a snow slide which ended up sweeping him down the side of the mountain and forcing him off a small 30-foot cliff. The snow slide subsequently buried him,” said Atlin RCMP constable Pat Russell.
Arsenault, 36, was wearing a locator beacon, an AvaLung breathing device and an avalanche airbag, but didn’t have time to deploy the airbag during the slide, Russell said. “He was prepared. He had all the gear necessary for that kind of extreme skiing,” he said.
Because of the nature of the accident, it likely wouldn’t have made a difference if Arsenault had been able to deploy the airbag, Russell added.
“Given the circumstances it didn’t seem like he had the ability to use it. Snow was coming from directly above, as opposed to from underneath his feet,” he said.
The group was not heli-skiing and had snowmachined into the area, Russell said.
Fellow skiers were able to partially dig Arsenault out, but he was already dead, said Philippe Brient, president of the Atlin Search and Rescue Society.
Atlin RCMP was notified of the accident by an international emergency response company, which uses GPS coordinates and an SOS messaging system to coordinate search and rescues. The abbreviated message the RCMP received was “crevasse…one dead…send help,” Russell said.
“We understood we were responding to a fatality on the mountainside,” he said.
The Atlin RCMP contracted with Atlin Search and Rescue which worked with Discovery Helicopters to fly a three-man team in to locate the surviving skiers and recover Arsenault’s body.
“The victim wasn’t actually in a crevasse but in a concavity (terrain trap) at the bottom of a small 30-foot cliff from which the victim had fallen while skiing,” Brient said.
The Haines Avalanche Information Center listed Haines Pass conditions for April 20 as “considerable,” which means human-triggered avalanches are likely.
“Dangerous avalanche conditions,” the site read. “Careful snowpack evaluation, cautious route-finding and conservative decision-making essential.”
Russell said dangerous conditions caused by mild weather recently led heli-ski outfit Atlin Heli Sports to shut down for the remainder of the season.
“They’ve shut down due to the treacherous conditions. They don’t want to risk it,” Russell said.
According to Powder Magazine, Arsenault “first earned recognition in the ski world beyond Whistler in 2013, when his heavy metal and cliff dropping edit earned a slot in the TGR Co-Lab. However, well before he earned a national spotlight, the Québécois was known to many as a dedicated and talented skier with uncontainable energy and spirit.”