In February 2012, a group of experienced skiers headed into the backcountry near the Stevens Pass resort in Washington State to look for untracked powder. It was a beautiful day, and everyone expected to have a great time skiing the popular Tunnel Creek section.

Minutes after the first skiers began heading down the hill, the snow cracked, setting off an avalanche. Several skiers were caught in the wall of snow, and after it came to a stop, rescuers discovered that three had been killed.

In an article that one of the surviving skiers, Megan Michelson, wrote for Outside magazine, she noted that “all of the warning signs had been there, glaring and obvious: heaps of new snow, terrain that would funnel a slide into a gully, a large and confident group with a herd mentality, and a forecast that warned of dangerous avalanche conditions.”

So what happened?

Read the rest of the article on The New York Times.

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