Anchorage Daily News

An Anchorage skier who triggered an avalanche and was swept 1,500 feet down a mountainside Saturday afternoon was lucky to survive, a trooper spokeswoman said Sunday.

Rory Stark, 36, was airlifted to an Anchorage hospital with a compound leg fracture after he rode a slide that carried him from just below the ridgeline of Silvertip almost all the way to Sixmile Creek, spokeswoman Megan Peters said.

At one point, the avalanche stopped and buried Stark under snow, Peters said. Then it regained its momentum and as it roared down the slope, Stark was tossed free.

"He told the trooper that when it stopped it was almost like concrete, and he was under the snow and couldn't breathe," Peters said. "Then it kept going and it spit him out on top. So he was very lucky."

Stark, an outdoorsman who was a co-winner of the 2005 Alaska Wilderness Classic, was backcountry skiing with friends in Chugach National Forest.

The skiers recognized the potential for an avalanche as they began to ski down Silvertip and decided that they were descend one at a time, Peters said. The first skier made it unscathed, but Stark's attempt triggered the giant slide.

In a recorded avalanche report Sunday morning, Lisa Portune from the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center said the avalanche started small but got bigger and bigger, ultimately taking out the entire drainage area.

Portune's report said recent conditions in the Turnagain Pass and Girdwood valley have resulted in at least five human-triggered avalanches in the last week.

A weak layer of surface hoar, formed during a mid-month cold spell, is buried under 2 to 4 feet of snow, making conditions dicey for skiers and snowmachiners. Surface hoar can be one of the most dangerous weak layers in a snowpack.

"Skiing and riding steep slopes with a deep slab instability like we have right now is similar to playing Russian roulette," Portune said in her report. "Human-triggered slides are likely on slopes greater than 30 degrees."

Saturday's slide happened on a slope of about 45 degrees.

The avalanche deposited Stark in terrain difficult to reach, Peters said. Troopers on snowmachine were able to get only within 400 feet of Stark, who was on the other side of a steep gully.

Even if the troopers could have negotiated the gully, getting the injured man back across it on a sled "would have been next to impossible," Peters said.

The Rescue Coordination Center sent a Pave Hawk helicopter, which hoisted Stark -- who had bone sticking out of his leg -- and took him to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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