Snowboarding
For the first time, Travis Rice explains what went down during the avalanche in The Fourth Phase.
Travis Rice and Victor De Le Rue stood atop a mint peak in Valdez, Alaska, under the clear skies of a bluebird day, strapped in for what should have been another dream powder run. De Le Rue went first, dropping in and stomping everything he threw, top to bottom. He turned back at the base, looked up to find Rice and saw him careening across a spiderweb of moving snow, attempting to outrun an avalanche he'd just triggered. De Le Rue watched Rice get swallowed by the mountain. He stood in silent shock, wondering if he’d ever see his friend alive again.
"I got dragged into the gut of it," said Rice. "Once you’re in with a lot of snow, there’s kind of nothing you can do. It’s a whiteout, you can’t see ... things got so aerated that I was breathing in snow." Nearly 300 people die in avalanche-related deaths every year around the world – Rice considers himself lucky to not be part of that statistic. He wants to promote the power of knowledge as much as possible when it comes to big-mountain safety.
To "know before you go" can be the difference between life and death. The KBYG moniker stands for an avalanche awareness program that spans across any and all big-mountain disciplines and it’s a code that any snow hound lives and dies by. As we saw in The Fourth Phase, no one’s safety is ever guaranteed.
In the clip up top, Rice dives deep into his memory of the avalanche that grabbed, buried, hurt and humbled him, as captured in the closing scenes of his film. In hindsight, he admits to having missed key factors in determining the avalanche risk before his descent in Alaska. Now, on the other side of it, having narrowly survived, Rice is dedicated to making sure he, and anyone else following their big-mountain passions deep into the wilderness, always "know before they go."
Buy The Fourth Phase now at TheFourthPhase.com.
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