Two French men are dead following an avalanche caused during a heli-skiing holiday in Wells Gray Provincial Park in British Columbia near Valemount on Saturday, March 20.

According to Valemount RCMP, the avalanche occurred when ten skiers and two guides were descending a run in the Azure River Drainage area of the Cariboo Mountain Range when the class 3 to 3.5 slide – big enough to bury a car, crush a small building and break a few trees – let go. The slab was 300 to 400 metres wide and careened up to 800 metres and buried three men in the snow.

One man was rescued without injury, but two men, aged 65 and 19, were buried alive. They were located with the assistance of their avalanche location beacons, but were unconscious once rescuers located them. They were later pronounced dead.

The B.C. Coroners Service is conducting an investigation into the deaths of both men.

Both dead men are from France. The other eight members of the party, some relatives of the two dead men, have all returned to Europe since the accident. The families have asked for privacy.

According to Marty Von Neudegg, director of CMH Heli-skiing, the company that was guiding at the time of the accident, his guides had been taking people down the run two days earlier with no incidents that would indicate an avalanche was looming.

“We’ve skied that run every year for over thirty years now”  without a fatality, said Von Neudegg. “Things can just change so quickly on small pieces of ground.”

He said it would be speculating to guess about what caused the avalanche, but added that his guides had more than 30 years of experience between the two of them. He said his guides would never take people into an area they thought was avalanche prone and that they conducted themselves safely and properly. He added his guides were very familiar with the area and one has been skiing the Valemount region for over 22 years.

He said this has been an interesting and difficult winter for predicting avalanches and that avalanche conditions can change from run to run, even if the runs are right beside each other.

The deaths of the two men follow an increase in the number of Western Canada back-country avalanche deaths over the past month. So far this winter there have been nine avalanche deaths (the average for a Canadian winter is 14) but the conditions appear to be getting worse.

The Wells Gray avalanche occurred a day after 31-year-old Kelly Reitenback died in an avalanche caused by snowmobiling on Eagle Pass Mountain, near Revelstoke. Snowmobilers were travelling up the hill, in a practice known as high-marking, when they triggered a class 4 avalanche, a slide strong enough to destroy a railway car and buildings or mow down a forest up to four hectares in size.

There is currently debate about whether Reitenback was one of the high-marking snowmobilers or simply a bystander at the base of the mountain.

Earlier that week, two men died in another snowmobiling avalanche near Revelstoke, caused during a snowmobiling festival attended by more than 150 people. Local authorities there said that the only factor that stopped the death count from rising significantly was luck.

The Canadian Avalanche Centre has released numerous warnings over the past several weeks about the dangerous avalanche conditions in northern sections of the Rocky Mountains.

The CAC called the frequency of such warnings “unprecedented” in a March 4 news release and stated that the frequency of dry snow and the lack of heavy snowfalls as prime reasons why the avalanche conditions have been so brutal.