Avalanche Sweeps Cars Off Colo. Highway
Experts: Avalanche Danger Remains High (Please exercise caution at ALL times.)
BERTHOUD PASS, Colo. -- Eight people were swept away by an avalanche in Colorado last weekend while they were driving in their cars -- and they all lived to talk about it.
It happened in Berthoud Pass, Colo., which is west of Denver.
"I think we tumbled, flipped, three, four times," said Dave Boon, who was driving Saturday morning with his wife and a family friend.
They were heading to the Winter Park Ski Resort. Boon said he was coming around a curve when he first saw the avalanche to the left of the straight road ahead.
Three-hundred-feet wide, the avalanche broke into three sections. The biggest one sent a 15-foot mountain of snow crashing into a van and Boon's car.
"It was like a freight train hit us from the side," Boon said. It blew in his window and filled the car with snow. It then lifted the car up and over the guardrail and sent it rolling down the slope.
The car flipped three or four times and tumbled 200 feet down the mountain. It hit a small tree, which snapped off, stopping the car upside down in 15 feet of snow with only its wheels sticking out of the snow.
The van carried five members of an Iowa Church. "As we were rolling, I just said, 'Lord, please protect us,'" said survivor Darren Johnson. "He truly did because we're all alive."
An avalanche rescue team happened to be training nearby. And experienced back-country skiers, who had avalanche gear with them, were among the first to arrive.
"Me and my buddy were going up for a day of back-country skiing, so we had avalanche probes, beacons, shovels, all with us," said skier Michael Murphy.
All eight of the avalanche victims were rescued. They were bruised and battered, but none had life-threatening injuries.
The snow has for the moment stopped falling at the pass, but the avalanche danger remains high. Experts told NBC News that it's just a matter of time before the snow slides again.
