She Learned About Avalanches the Hard Way

Anna Maria Conrad is 7 years older and a whole lot wiser than she was on March 31, 1982, when an avalanche buried her at Alpine Meadows.

Seven others died, and Conrad was given up for dead until rescuers found her 5 days later in a 2 x 5-foot pocket under lockers in the ski lift terminal building. She thought the building had exploded.

Because of frostbite, she lost her right leg below the knee and part of her left foot in a series of operations, but that hasn’t kept her off the slopes.

“I’m skiing at the level I was at before I lost my leg,” she said. “But I still want to improve--especially when my husband is an instructor.”

Conrad, 28, is now the skier safety coordinator at Mammoth Mountain. She married local resident Brent Allen, a welder and ski instructor, a year and a half ago.

She wears a prosthesis. Asked if her husband makes allowances for that, she said, “ I don’t make allowances.”

She recalled the fateful day in ’82 when she and a friend, Frank Yateman, went to Alpine Meadows. Because the roads were intermittently closed, they skied cross-country.

“I called the ski area and asked them if the road was open again,” she said. “They said yes, it was. With my education of avalanches at the time, I thought that when they reopened an area that meant it was stable.”

What she didn’t realize, she said, was that “it was stable enough for cars but there was difficulty with skiers out in the open.”

When she arrived at the ski area, mountain manager Bernie Kingery told her of the danger. Kingery and Yateman were among those who perished. Conrad was in another part of the building, temporarily unconscious.

Trapped in darkness, she tried to keep track of the days by listening to the avalanche-control explosions nearby.

“They did it every morning,” she said. “I didn’t know where I was at first, and when I came to I was able to hear the blasting that I could hear at my house. They didn’t blast one of the days because the storm was so bad they couldn’t get up to the ski area. So I was off by a day.”