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National Geographic : 1982 Sep
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AVALANCHE! "I'M OK, IMALIVE!" BY DAVID CUPP PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANNY JOHNSON AND ANDRE BENIER W HEN THESE WORDS from Anna Conrad, a ski-lift opera tor, drifted out of the wreckage of the ski-lift terminal building at Alpine Meadows, dreams be yond dreams became reality. After five days of icy entombment under tons of snow and debris, Anna was alive. Workers stripped away the rubble, and the young woman was lifted out (facingpage). Little did she suspect the ordeal to come when, ten days earlier, snowflakes began to fall. But the snowfall became a blizzard with winds gusting to 125 miles per hour. Snow pounding out of the skies packed into perilously unstable masses. Avalanche dan ger soared. On March 30, 1982, Alpine Meadows closed its mountain; the next day it ordered most of its employees home. In spite of the extreme hazard that after noon, Anna Conrad and visiting friend Frank Yeatman decided to ski the half mile from her house to the ski area. As they ap proached, mountain manager Bernie Kin gery watched grimly, then called Anna into the ski-patrol office and lectured her on the incredibly dangerous thing she had just done. When Bernie finished, Anna went back to the locker room, looking for Frank. It was at that moment-on the afternoon of March 31-that the avalanche thundered down the mountain. Shock waves hit first. Massive steel beams flexed, bending and twisting as if made of rubber. As snow-laden wind shrieked through, the structure ex ploded. A third force, rampaging snow, destroyed almost everything still standing. When the avalanche struck, a row of heavy wooden lockers crashed down on Anna, injuring her head. Instead of crush ing her, however, they fell across a wooden bench, forming a five-foot-long, two-foot high space in the snow. Anna awoke to find herself wrapped in a cocoon of snow and wood. "It was black; I had no idea where I was or what had happened." She also had no way of gauging the passage of time. For perhaps 24 hours she drifted between unconsciousness and agonizing periods of wakefulness. Sometime on April 1, she found some matches. Lighting them, she discovered names on the lockers above her. Finally she knew where she was. But, more important, she had discovered a defense against the cold. "I kept pulling clothes out of the lock ers whenever I felt chilly." When Anna was rescued, she had on three pairs of ski pants. Her diet, though, had been meager-snow. The effort to rescue Anna and the others had begun on March 31, when dogs were brought in to help 150 searchers. Bridget, a German shepherd, caught Anna's scent and led a search party to her tomb on Friday, April 2. "I heard voices yelling, 'Anna, Anna, are you down there?' And I yelled back, 'I sure am.' But they never heard me," she recalled. Then the voices stopped, and Anna could hear the muffled crunch of snow as the searchers walked away. Unknown to Anna, the snowstorm had turned vicious again, increasing avalanche danger and aborting all rescue efforts. Two 282
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