We had a group of 16 people scheduled to be picked up on the glacier on July 1st. The weather was forecast to be awesome and we were relieved to see that it was going to work as scheduled. The night before the pickup, the team called on the sat-phone to inform us they had not made the pickup point because they had gotten into slushy snow, and they had set up a staging area at a higher elevation and just 1.5 miles to the East. I always prefer to choose the staging areas because there is much that can’t be determined from the ground. It’s easy for a mountaineering team to camp in close proximity to huge crevasses that are invisible from the ground and a serious concern to me from the air. I reluctantly agreed to pick them up at the new location, and told them to give us a weather check in the morning.
We awoke to clear skies and calm winds. I launched first to checkout the new landing site, and as I flew up the glacier I was busy taking photos of the contrasting whites and blues and thoroughly enjoying the view. As I rounded the corner on the glacier I was distracted by a scenic image to the East. I took several pictures and then I looked back towards the South where the original landing zone lay at the base of the ice fall. I was so stunned when I saw the cloud of snow I don’t think it registered what was going on. As things slowly began to “click” I realized that the area we originally planned on using was currently getting hammered by a massive avalanche. I watched in disbelief as the snow cloud rushed across the surface of the glacier at 200+ miles per hour. I got on the radio and asked the team on the ground if they were watching this. There was a long pause, and then a simple, “ya'”. We were all in shock as the avalanche plum blew snow thousands of yards across the surface.
The team of climbers was just out of view to the extreme left of the avalanche image, and the original pick up point is directly underneath the snow plum. I have landed in the original pick up zone dozens of times, but I never thought we were within reach of an avalanche. This little avalanche blew the alpha angles right off the mountain, and left us all a bit more humble. So … long story short, I was real glad they had, “gotten turned around in slushy snow”.