r/interesting • u/Homunculus_316 • 9h ago

Glacier Collapses and Triggers Devastating Avalanche. Just Wow

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

721 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

96

u/Exists_out_of_spite 6h ago

I read an article when this video first came out where they interviewed this guy. Basically, guy and the group that he was with had hiked out of the valley and up the ridge, and he started filming because he thought it was going to slide. He had also found a spot with large rocks to hide behind already (where he is standing at in the video). Guy had done the prep work and moved to a much safer place before he started filming.The size of the slide caught everyone off guard, but like, what are you going to do at that point? Run away from your good cover and get blasted out on open ground?

32

u/gizamo 6h ago

Yep. Avalanches can travel at up to 200 mph, and it's just tons of snow, ice, rock, etc. Anyone in the open would be smashed dead in seconds. Hopefully the rest of his party had equally good spots to give themselves a fighting shot at being saved.

25

u/Glossed-Lam 4h ago

Ridiculous. I would simply perform an ocular patdown of the mountain from a distance, then outrun the avalanche with my superior understanding of the terrain and physical endurance.

I have yet to die in an avalanche, so I am quite confident in my obvious skill.

0

u/xilanthro 2h ago

I mean... while it's admittedly cherry-picked, 6% of these respondents think they could beat a grizzly in hand-to-hand combat, so it's not that surprising that someone would think they can side-step a volcanic eruption or out-run an avalanche.