An avalanche tore across two ski runs at the La Flégère resort in Chamonix on Tuesday, sweeping three skiers off their feet and burying them up to their necks in snow. The slide covered roughly 330 feet of slope overlooking the top of La Flégère's ski lift, triggering a massive emergency response.
All three survived. A 60-person rescue party, including ski patrollers, mountain guides, instructors, and a high-mountain gendarmerie platoon, scrambled to the scene. Four dogs were deployed to scour the area for signs of life. According to local media, the buried skiers are all now safe.
They are the lucky ones.
The death toll across France, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria has already climbed above 60 this season alone, The U.S. Sun reported. In the French Alps, at least 27 people have died this year, including three British skiers killed in the past week. For context, the entire 2020 to 2021 season saw 40 people lose their lives in avalanches. This year is on pace to shatter that number, and winter isn't over.
Several ski resorts have been forced to shut as avalanche danger levels surged to the highest levels across vast stretches of the Alps. Significant snowfall in recent days, driven by a powerful storm, has made conditions exceptionally unstable. The mountain doesn't negotiate. It simply moves.
The pattern this season is grimly familiar: closed terrain, ignored warnings, and fatal consequences.
On February 17, Piotr Ortonowski, a 36-year-old Polish-British national, was killed in an avalanche in La Grave along with a friend. They were part of a party of five off-piste skiers and their instructor, skiing in an area of the slope that had been closed over safety concerns a week earlier. Their instructor was described as "irresponsible" for ignoring those warnings.
Ortonowski's heartbroken father told reporters his son had been skiing since he was just two and a half years old and was "very experienced." Experience, clearly, is no match for a mountainside that has already been flagged as deadly.
Days later, two more British skiers lost their lives. Stuart Leslie, 46, and Shaun Overy, 51, were part of a group of four skiers who were off-piste in Val d'Isère when a snow slide struck. They were swept down the valley and into a stream, where emergency services later found their bodies.
Off-piste skiing carries inherent danger. Every skier who ventures beyond groomed runs accepts a degree of risk that no rescue team, no matter how large, can fully mitigate. That is a reality the sport's culture sometimes downplays in favor of adventure and personal freedom.
But there is a difference between accepting risk and ignoring explicit closure orders. When resorts shut down terrain because avalanche danger has reached its highest rating, skiing into that terrain is not courage. It is recklessness with consequences that fall on rescue teams, on families, and on communities that have to recover the dead.
The three skiers buried at La Flégère walked away. Sixty others across the Alps this season did not. The mountains will still be there next year. The question is whether the people heading into them will respect what the snow is telling them.
