CARRABASSETT VALLEY, Maine — This weekend's snow and strong winds were a mixed bag for ski areas in Maine. The combination caused one scary situation for some skiers at Sugarloaf Mountain on Sunday.
One man was buried in the snow up to his neck after an avalanche 50 feet wide slid him about 30 feet down the mountain.
“There was a lot of snow that was moving around the mountain," Nik Krueger said.
Krueger was celebrating his 27th birthday with a friend when they met up with other skiers headed down the same trail.
"We were all kind of staring down this shoot and said, 'Well who’s going to be the first one to point our skis straight and go down and ski it?'" he said.
He followed behind another skier who led the way and things quickly took a turn for the worse.
"I saw this big mound of snow and said, 'Well that may let go.' And no later than I could say it under my breath, I just watched the whole thing collapse in front of him," Krueger said. "I made my way down there and just started digging snow as fast as I could to get him out of there."
Krueger said the adrenaline took over, making his sense of time a bit blurry. He estimates it took about 10 minutes to get him out.
“This was 100% the product of Mother Nature," Sugarloaf's Assistant Ski Patrol Director Roddy Ehrlenbach said. "On the East Coast, the most common types of avalanches are wind slab, which the conditions we had that day — with 2 feet of snow and high winds the night before — kind of set us up perfectly for that type of avalanche problem."
Ehrlenbach has worked at Sugarloaf for 29 years and said there have been about a dozen avalanches in that timeframe. However, this incident is just the second or third time one has actually carried a skier.
"The majority of East Coast ski areas don't have the terrain necessary to propagate avalanches," Ehrlenbach said. "Very few ski areas on the East Coast have a continuous slope that sustains a 30-degree pitch, so they're very, very uncommon but they are possible with the right recipe."
The resort had some ski lifts on hold Sunday due to the strong winds, which closed access to some areas of the mountain.