A skier died in an expert race at Mammoth – with horrified witnesses watching from a chairlift

A skier died Thursday at Mammoth Mountain after a fatal crash in full view of other skiers riding a nearby lift. This is the fourth death at the resort this season.

The skier, who has not been identified, was attempting a run called Dropout 2 — one of California’s steepest marked trails — that descends from the 11,000-foot mountain’s summit ridge. The run drops nearly 1,200 vertical feet down a slow, three-person lift that transports expert skiers to Mammoth’s most daring terrain.

The man fell hard enough to pop out of his skis on steep, icy moguls near the top of the run before sliding headfirst for hundreds of yards, unable to stop himself, according to witnesses posting on Reddit.

“He then slid unconscious about 150 yards down the trail bleeding… the entire way the person he was skiing with was yelling and trying to jump over him to stop the slide,” wrote one Reddit user.

On Friday morning, Mammoth Mountain executives confirmed the death in an email to The Times.

Ski patrollers reached the victim at 1:04 p.m., about four minutes after the crash, according to the email. He was unconscious and unresponsive.

“Life-saving care was immediately administered, and the guest was immediately taken to the care of a paramedic,” who transported the victim to Mammoth Hospital, Mountain officials wrote. “Despite these efforts, we are informed that the guest has died.”

The victim’s identity has not been released. “Next of kin notification is still pending,” according to the email.

The first fatality of the season occurred on Christmas Day, after a storm dumped more than five feet of fresh snow on the previously parched resort. Raymond Albert, a 71-year-old regular known to fellow skiers as “Everyday Ray,” spotted a pocket of deep, fresh snow at the edge of a well-traveled run.

He was ejected from his skis, which were on his back, and fell forward, ending up in the snow with his head and feet in the air, according to a written report of the incident provided to his family.

When ski patrollers arrived, Albert had no pulse. Patrolmen attempted CPR, but with so much fresh snow on the ground, they struggled to find enough surface. They eventually used a spectator’s foot as a makeshift platform – to no avail.

The next day, Cole Murphy, a 30-year-old ski patroller, was rushing with a team of colleagues to clear freshly fallen snow from a series of specialist slopes known as avalanche chutes.

That’s when an avalanche, deliberately triggered by someone else on the team, swept Murphy hundreds of feet down the mountain. He was stuck in avalanche debris about a meter thick at the bottom – which starts out fluffy but can quickly harden to the consistency of concrete.

Read more: Avalanches kill two ski patrollers in Mammoth in one year. What is going wrong?

When Murphy’s desperate friends finally found him and pulled him out after 18 agonizing minutes, he was blue and not breathing, according to witnesses. He was airlifted to a Reno hospital and pronounced dead days later – The Second ski patroller killed in less than a year Trying to clear avalanche chutes so the resort can open ahead of the busy holiday season.

On January 16, a snowboarder died of head injuries on Mammoth Mountain, the third fatality of the season. Few details are publicly available, but social media posts suggest he was a beginner and was wearing a helmet.

last weekend, A 12-year-old girl has been caught on video Lift dozens of feet off the ground with mammoth skis. Mountain staff and spectators scrambled to pull nets and put padding under her, but when she fell, she was lost, sliding painfully down the slope.

“It was an incredibly traumatic experience,” her mother wrote in the comments below the Instagram post. “My daughter miraculously walked without any broken bones or major injuries.”

Mammoth officials declined to say how many deaths occurred at the resort last season or the average annual number of deaths over the past 100 years.

There have been “hundreds of thousands” of visitors to the mountain so far this season, they noted.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.