IN FEBRUARY 2011, Brint Markle and three friends were skiing the uncontrolled back side of Mont Fort in Verbier, Switzerland. It was a great day for poor decisions: the powder deep, the sky blue, the stoke high. “I think our skiing experience was above our education,” Markle says today.
One of the skiers took an aggressive line. The slope ripped out. Markle watched, helpless, as the avalanche swept his buddy 750 feet down the mountain, siphoned him through a cliff band, and spat him out at the bottom, partially buried but unharmed. The group later heard that, shortly before the incident, another slide had occurred on a similar slope just a ridge or two away. “I just remember thinking, Gosh, had we known a bit more, we wouldn’t have been…
