Woman down

Sometimes things in life don’t exactly go as planned. Relating to my previous post, here is a reminder to be well prepared when the season finally kicks in. The chilling and captivating story below is told by my friend Mark Gallup (Mark, we need to make some action of the talk of catching up soon!). Mark is one of the pioneers of ski and snowboard photography, but none the less a nightmare to share hotel rooms and cabins with though. If snoring were an Olympic sport, Mark would win the gold medal any day of the week!

“We stationed ourselves on a 140-foot yacht at the end of British Columbia’s Knight Inlet. A very remote area, the inlet itself is one of the longest in Canada, reaching deep into the coastal range near B.C.’s tallest peak, Mt. Waddington. We knew the snow stability wasn’t great, but this crew of skiers had been waiting three weeks for a break in the weather.

The filmer and I hovered in the helicopter above Andrea as she dropped into the run. On her left was a series of cliffs, which she wanted to avoid by going down a small ridge, then dropping into a chute skier’s-right of the rocks. The slide broke loose on her first turn. She was immediately dragged into the middle of the biggest debris, heading straight for the cliffs! She picked up speed — the chute was amazingly steep — and fought against the flow. If she lost the battle, the outcome would be tragic! She hit the chute she wanted to ski at incredible speed; almost freefalling, all of her equipment exploded off. She cartwheeled down the mountain, and finally stopped. She came out of it with a blown knee. The crew pulled the plug on the trip, and we all went back to the yacht for some spring wakeboarding.”

I met Andrea Binning in Chamonix some time after the accident when doing a shoot with her super cool husband Stian Hagen, and by the look of things she had recovered very well! :-)