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Pro skier Jacob Wester sorta figured this one was coming. “Walking into this zone on a windy Sunday morning, we all knew things were going to get spicy, and yet we went for it instead of turning around,” he wrote in the post above. And things got spicy, as a thin, slabby avalanche broke away beneath him on a steeper section of the run, above. But with a head of steam, Wester stayed on his feet, outran the slide, and made it to the bottom unscathed.
He said he felt okay with the snowpack before dropping in: “The little fresh snow we had gotten overnight really only posed a problem if we suddenly decided to ski very slow, as the thin top layer of very cold and light snow really didn’t want to hang on to anything steep.”
Wester felt safe skiing relatively shorter, albeit steep lines. “Even if these mini avalanches do look quite dramatic they wouldn’t deposit enough snow to bury a person, rather just provide an embarrassing slide on one’s behind for a few hundred meters,” he said. Based on the video, do you agree with his risk assessment?
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