Skier Partially Buried by Avalanche at Mammoth

An avalanche sent a wall of snow cascading down an upper slope of Mammoth Mountain in the Sierra on Thursday, partially burying a San Diego man and raising fears that other skiers might be trapped beneath its smothering weight.

A spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service said Robert Burnett, 18, was shaken but unhurt after being knocked down by the rush of snow that covered a 300-foot stretch of Dropout 3, a ski run that begins at an altitude of 11,043 feet and is known to regulars as “Wipeout.”

“He was only partially buried and was able to get up by himself and walk down the hill, where he was picked up by a Mammoth Mountain employee on a snowmobile,” said Mammoth-June Ski Resort spokeswoman Mary Shoshone.

U.S. Forest Service and resort officials expressed doubt that anyone else had been caught in the path of the slide. But searchers continued to probe the heavy snowmass with long aluminum poles through the afternoon, and special dogs were brought in from Lake Tahoe to sniff the area for other possible victims.

“Nobody saw anyone else in the area,” Shoshone said. “The upper run--Dropout 3--is intended for advanced or expert skiers, and we had opened it for the first time this year at 12:30 this afternoon. The slide came at 1:22. So you can see why not many people would have been up there yet. . . .”

The avalanche came just five days after the snow-starved ski resort opened and two days after cloud-seeding operations sponsored by the Los Angles Department of Water and Power, which has been concerned over subnormal snowfall in the Sierra this season.

The snowpack, which provides more than two-thirds of Los Angeles’ water, has attained only about 25% of the thickness considered normal at this time in the season, and DWP spokesman Doug Gillespie said cloud-seeding--a tactic not used by the department in about a decade--was ordered in an effort to redress the deficit.

But he said there was no connection between cloud-seeding and the snowslide.

“We certainly don’t believe there’s any connection,” he said. “Even in a winter, when we don’t do cloud-seeding, avalanches are still a common occurrence, a natural phenomenon.”

Molly McCartney, spokeswoman for the Mammoth Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service, said avalanche danger was considered moderate--meaning that there were areas of unstable snow, and avalanches were possible on steep slopes and gullies--in the area above 8,000 feet on Thursday.

Resort officials said routine safety measures had been taken.

“We do avalanche control maneuvers every morning during snow season,” Shoshone said. “The idea is to get any potential slides out of the way before we open the slopes to skiers.

“This time, the snow just didn’t slide when it was supposed to. But nobody thinks the cloud-seeding had any effect one way or the other.”

Nonetheless, Tom Henderson, president of Fresno-based Atmospherics Inc., which conducted the seeding earlier this week, said all such operations have been canceled--at least for the next few days--but pointed out that seeded snow is no different from other snow once it is on the ground.

In Los Angeles, National Weather Service spokesman Peter Wilensky said Tuesday’s storm had left at least five inches of new snow at Mammoth Mountain.

And forecasters said there might be more during the weekend.

Cary Schudy, a spokesman for Earth Environment Service, a private weather service based in San Francisco, said another weather system should be working its way down the state from the north by Sunday, bringing showers to San Francisco Bay and perhaps a few more inches of snow to the mountains.

Schudy said Southern California might see a bit of high cloudiness today. But an upper-level system forming over the desert Southwest, he said, should set the stage for strong Santa Ana winds that could reach 40 m.p.h. or so in the mountains and deserts and raise Orange County temperatures to between 65 and 73 by Saturday afternoon.

High temperatures in Orange County Thursday ranged from 59 in San Juan Capistrano to 65 in Santa Ana. Lows were in the 40s except for an unusually chilly 35 at San Juan Capsitrano.

Forecasters said temperatures should warm a degree or two today.