‘I felt the mountain move.’ Pocatello man buried in avalanche over the weekend lives to tell his story

WYOMING — A Pocatello man who miraculously survived being caught in an avalanche over the weekend is hoping his story will bring awareness to other snowmobilers.

Billy Seibert, 60, describes himself, his wife, Jennifer, and the group of people they typically ride with as “avid backcountry riders.” When there is snow, they are gone snowmobiling every weekend, sometimes twice a week, either in Wyoming, Montana or Idaho.

“A mountain with no tracks on it, a fresh mountain, is almost like a drug and we’re addicts,” Billy said.

On Saturday, Billy, Jennifer and their group — which consisted of Tina and Kenny Chapin, Kim Beebe and Donny Davis — decided to go to Hoback, Wyoming.

“This was my third time to this spot,” Billy told EastIdahoNews.com. “It was an off-the-grid place. Not many people know about it. There’s only a hiking trail up to it. It’s not a groomed trail at all. … You ride a ridgeline … about a 15 mile trail to get back into the bowls. That’s where we were.”

The avalanche

They were riding around on a flat area with mountains on both sides. Billy, Kenny and Kim decided to go up one side of the mountain. Billy had been up the mountain once already but only went halfway up because “it looked really sketchy.”

“We had no business being on it,” he recalls. “All the red flags were there. … First of all, you could tell it was unstable. Second of all, never more than one person goes up at a time, and all three of us took off in a race to see which person could get the highest, but it was wrong.”

Kenny and Kim were slightly ahead of Billy when he said “more than likely” one of them triggered an avalanche.

“It just came down on me,” Billy explained. “I knew it was coming because I felt the mountain move.”

Kenny and Kim were able to “ride it out” and escape but Billy got knocked off his sled. He doesn’t remember if he didn’t have time or if it didn’t cross his mind to pull the cord on his avalanche bag that was attached to his body.

The way he described an avalanche bag is that once the cord is pulled, an air canister in the backpack will blow a big bag above the rider. Because people are “much more dense in the snow so you sink,” the avalanche bag is suppose to help you float and keep you on top, he explained.

Billy ended up sliding about 140 feet and was completely buried in the snow.

“I could move my right wrist and my right hand fingers,” Billy said. “There was nothing else I could move.”

He was trying to dig with his fingers to create a vent where the carbon dioxide he was breathing out could escape from the small space around his mouth. He didn’t realize at the time that he was actually digging down and not toward the surface.

Trapped in the snow

Billy tried not to panic because he knew that would use what little oxygen he had and he’d start breathing harder, which would create more carbon dioxide.

“In avalanche training, you have 18 minutes,” he said. “If you can’t get air to that person in 18 minutes, they’re probably going to die. Not from lack of oxygen. That’s not what kills you because the snow has oxygen in it. It’s not being able to vent that carbon dioxide out. That’s what kills you.”

Everyone in his group had the safety gear they needed, had attended avalanche classes and received training on how to retrieve somebody caught in an avalanche. But it got to a point where Billy was convinced he was going to die.

“I just wanted it to go quickly,” he remembers thinking. “I knew I wasn’t coming out, and once I felt that, I had regrets of not loving my wife better and not being a better person. Not saying I’m a bad person but you want to be better. You want to go back and do things different.”

Jennifer, Tina and Donny had seen the three ride up the mountain and Jennifer remembers watching the avalanche, seeing her husband’s sled roll and not seeing Billy resurface. They immediately starting yelling on the radio to Kenny and Kim that Billy “went under.”

“It was the most horrifying experience ever,” Jennifer said. “We started our sleds and took off over to where it happened. When Tina and I got there, the guys were digging and started yelling, ‘We need shovels! We need shovels!'”

The tip of the ski on Billy’s sled was sticking up so everyone was frantically digging there, assuming that’s where he was. A beacon, a device that allows avalanche burial victims to be located from a distance, was reading his location there too.

After digging his sled out — which took about five minutes — and rolling it over on its edge, Billy wasn’t there.

“It hit you like, ‘He wasn’t there. He wasn’t under his sled. What are we going to do next?'” Jennifer said. “Right after we got his sled out of the hole and he wasn’t there and there was no sign of him, I thought it was hopeless. He is dead. How are we going to find him if he’s not under his sled?”

She remembers seeing the look in people’s faces that “it’s been too long” and “there’s no way he’s still alive.”

The group then started getting a different reading on the beacon about five feet above his sled. Kenny pinpointed Billy’s exact location with his beacon in search mode and the group began digging. About five minutes later, Billy was found.

Finding Billy

Billy was discovered about three feet from the surface. The first thing uncovered was part of his vest, according to Jennifer. She said Kenny and Tina uncovered his face and the second they did so, he took a breath in. Tina yelled, “He’s breathing!”

Billy does not remember any of this but Donny asked him if he could hear them and to blink his eyes, which Billy was able to do. Jennifer called this the “the biggest blessing ever.”

“A lot of us were praying,” Jennifer recalled happening when they found Billy alive. “The only thing I could say was ‘Thank God! Thank God! Thank God! Thank you! Thank you! And everybody else!'”

Billy’s face was white and his lips were blue. His wife and friends continued to work at clearing the snow away from his body.

The next thing Billy remembers is sitting up dry-heaving and trying to catch his breath while dealing with a terrible headache from carbon dioxide poisoning. However, he had no broken bones and said he didn’t need a medical helicopter to come. He ended up riding his sled out himself about an hour later.

“My friends and my wife did everything absolutely textbook perfect … with an avalanche recovery,” Billy said. “They found me. They got me out.”

Moving forward

Billy is grateful for his wife and friends who saved his life but he’s struggled with feeling “a lot of shame” for what happened.

“I was mad at myself for doing something I knew as an experienced backcountry rider that I shouldn’t have been doing and for putting that fear into everybody,” Billy said.

He added, “This slope we knew was a dangerous slope. We knew the avalanche conditions were extreme for a slide and it’s one of those things you gamble. … 99% of the time it’s a great ride and you make it and everything works out but that 1% of the time, something goes bad. I lived to tell about it.”

Billy said this experience will “absolutely not” stop him from riding but from here on out, he will “do it as right as possible.”

He hopes his story influences other backcountry riders to get trained, get the proper equipment for a retrieval and follow the rules of backcountry riding.

Billy encourages all backcountry riders to have the proper gear — from beacons, avalanche bags, shovels, a GPS and a way to communicate to search and rescue — and know how that equipment works. He also recommends attending avalanche classes.

“And then, practice with the beacons. Have someone hide a beacon and then you take your beacon, and go find that beacon. Learn how to read those beacons,” Billy stated. “Just a couple of minutes can make all the difference in the world. There is no doubt if it had been one more minute, I wouldn’t have been here. They got to me at the last second.”