Heli-skiing guide Jerry Hance took one step forwards and the ground collapsed. The group of five skiers behind him—four clients and a second guide, Adrian Ballinger—was sliced in half as a 40-foot section of the snowy overhang they had been set down on a few minutes before broke away. Kevin Edwards, busy taking photographs on the safe side of the break, turned around to see his friends were gone. David Cole had one foot on solid snow, the other dangling in thin air. Furthest away from safety, Ballinger tumbled into the abyss.
Instinctively, he reached across to his left shoulder to pull the handle on his Backcountry Access backpack. Larger objects rise to the surface in an avalanche, and fully inflated the airbag inside would help ensure that when the snow finally came to a rest, Ballinger would be on top. But he couldn’t find the trigger. Grasping aimlessly with both hands he cursed the manufacturer for making the handle so small, forgetting that the mountain had given way before he’d even had time to put it on.
After a second or so of free fall, Ballinger hit the first of the rocky cliffs below. His helmet and right shoulder took the brunt of the impact. This isn’t going to work, he thought, this is really bad. He was thrown into a tumble, crashing repeatedly against several hundred feet of snow, ice, and rock, then rolling rapidly down a steep snowy incline.