A skier died at Mammoth Mountain on Thursday after a fatal accident in full view of other skiers riding a nearby lift. It was the fourth death at the resort this season.
The skier, who has not been identified, was attempting a run called Dropout 2 — among the steepest marked trails in California — that descends from the mountain’s 11,000-foot summit ridge. The run drops approximately 1,200 vertical feet below a slow, three-person lift that transports expert skiers to some of Mammoth’s most adventurous terrain.
The man fell hard enough to get off his skis into the steep, icy moguls near the top of the run before sliding head first for hundreds of yards, apparently unable to stop himself, according to witnesses who posted on Reddit.
“He then slid unconscious about another 150 yards down the trail and bled … all the way while the person he was skiing with was crying and trying to catch up to jump on him to stop the slide,” wrote one Reddit user.
Mammoth Mountain executives confirmed the death in an email to The Times on Friday morning.
Ski patrol arrived at the victim at 1:04 pm, about four minutes after the incident, according to the email. He was unconscious and unresponsive.
“Life-saving treatment was administered immediately, and the guest was quickly transported to the care of paramedics,” who took the victim to Mammoth Hospital, mountain officials wrote. “Despite these efforts, we are informed that the guest has died.”
No details about the victim’s identity have been released. “Family notification is still pending,” according to the email.
The first death of the season occurred on Christmas Day, after a storm dumped more than five feet of fresh snow on the previously parched resort. Raymond Albert, a 71-year-old regular known to fellow skiers as “Every Day Ray,” was spotted in a pocket of deep, fresh snow near a well-traveled run.
He had gotten out of his skis, which were behind him, and thrown forward, ending up with his head in the snow and his feet in the air, according to a written report of the incident provided to his family.
When the ski patrol arrived, Albert had no pulse. The guards tried CPR, but with so much fresh snow on the ground, they struggled to find a firm enough surface. In the end they used a bystander’s legs as a makeshift platform — to no avail.
The next day, a 30-year-old ski patroller named Cole Murphy was with a team of colleagues rushing to clear the snow that had just fallen from a series of expert slopes known, appropriately, as the Avalanche Chutes.
That’s when an avalanche, deliberately triggered by someone else on the team, swept Murphy hundreds of feet up the mountain. He was trapped at the bottom under about a meter of dense avalanche debris – which starts out fluffy but can quickly harden to the consistency of concrete.
Read more: Avalanches have killed two ski patrollers at Mammoth in a year. What’s going wrong?
When Murphy’s desperate friends finally found him and dug him out after 18 agonizing minutes, he was blue and not breathing, according to witnesses. He was airlifted to a Reno hospital and was pronounced dead days later the second ski patroller in less than a year killed trying to remove the Avalanche Chutes so the resort can open before a busy holiday season.
On January 16, a snowboarder who died of an apparent head injury became the third fatality of the season on Mammoth Mountain. Few details are publicly available, but social media posts suggest he was a starter and was wearing a helmet.
last weekend, a 12-year-old girl was caught on video dangling from a Mammoth ski lift dozens of feet above the ground. The mountain staff and those who were nearby gathered to pull a net and put padding under her, but when she fell, she was lost, crashing painfully on the slope.
“It was an incredibly traumatic experience,” her mother wrote in the comments below the Instagram post. “My daughter miraculously got away with no broken bones or major injuries.”
Mammoth officials declined to say how many deaths occurred at the resort last season, or provide the average annual number of deaths over the past 100 years.
There have been “hundreds of thousands” of visitors to the mountain so far this season, they noted.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.