Tree Wells-Please be careful

WOW, that is scary....Say your prayers and do your good deeds....It is a very dangerous place to find yourself or anyone else. Good work, that's what Dads are for!

YIKES!!

Praise be, that your son is OK and that your lungs - and the power of adrenaline - were strong enough to get you uphill that fast. (more impetus to make me give up stogies!) I had a similar experience w/ my own son last year, when he was 13 years old. That experience caused we too, to reexamine our protocols for inbounds off piste skiing. We settled on the decision for my son Connor to drop in before I did and to ski only so far as my ability to maintain a visual on him. Even though I was often uncomfortable w/ him skiing a slope which might rip loose, as inbounds has done recently at Snowbird, I preferred to ensure my ability to ski down to him quickly in the event of a tree-well mishap as happened to Scotsman and Stewart. Once again, happy to learn of an acceptable outcome from a scary experience. Good work for the heads up monitoring of your junior ski partners!

thanks for the reminder and glad everyone is ok.

Thanks for all your kind words.
Here's a picture of Stewart later in the day, injesting powder again but standing up!

Scary stuff Scotty -- glad Stew's okay. Making me jealous of all that snow...

Nice work making fast progress back up-given all the dangerous elements of the scene you  described, the process of going uphill for extrication is one of the places where once your partner is in the well bad luck or response time can be the difference. Kudos to him for having the presence of mind to manuever as best he could to stay out. I had a similar experience in the Alpental BC, in Snakedance, and once your in and that fine powder is flying down your nostrils and throat it exponentially raises your breath rate, hence your ingestion of snow and unfortunately the feeling of asphyxiation. Thinking about that several years later I can still feel a taste of the panic-closest I've ever come to drowning.

This may be old hat for most of you, but Baker patrol (I believe) has a excellent tutorial on tree wells.  www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/

Did you drop your skis and boot up, or touring gear used?

They have had drownings independent of tree wells in the last few years, I believe.