This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
An avalanche caught four people and completely buried one of them in White Pine Canyon.
On Friday, five people were riding snowmobiles through the powder of a relatively small slope below White Pine Lake, a few miles northeast of Logan. Four of them were on the slope when the avalanche rushed down, according to a report from the Utah Avalanche Center.
The 250-foot-wide slide caught all of them and completely buried one of them.
"Luckily, the fifth rider was below the avalanche and saw it occur," the center's report reads. He knew about where his companion was buried and rescued him from under the snow.
Besides minor injuries, everyone was OK, according to the report.
"This is a pretty significant avalanche," said Paige Pagnucco, a specialist out of the center's Logan field office, standing in the calm aftermath of the slide. In an online video documenting the incident, Pagnucco hikes to the crown of a nearby, related slide and digs her hand into where the new powder piled onto the older layer of snow.
"This is all the old snow that is sitting on the ground. It's really moist," she said, as she looked for any graupel — pellets that form when water freezes on falling snowflakes — which increases the risk of avalanches, like Friday's. The dangerous pellets were quite widespread when a storm first blew in earlier in the week.
There had been a moderate risk of avalanches in the mountains on Friday. The same holds true for Sunday in the mountains around Salt Lake, Provo, Ogden, Logan and in the Uintas.
"The fact that four riders were caught at the same time, with one being fully buried, serves as a reminder to all of us to only expose one person at a time when we are in steep terrain," Pugnacco adds in the video.
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