An avalanche hit a man on a snowmobile north of the skiing area in Hlídarfjall mountain near Akureyri, northeast Iceland, yesterday. The man is seriously injured and is being kept unconscious on a ventilator.
About 20 experienced snowmobile drivers were traveling in the area when the snow came crashing down. One of them was caught in the avalanche, burying him 100 meters down the mountain slope. Morgunbladid reports.
The man’s friends could see where he had landed and, with the help of avalanche emergency equipment, they located him quickly and dug him out of the snow.
“Otherwise we never would have found him soon enough,” Finnur Adalbjörnsson, one of the snowmobile drivers, said.
The man, buried two meters deep in snow, was unconscious when his friends found him. They performed CPR on him and shortly after a helicopter arrived and took him to the hospital in Akureyri.
Adalbjörnsson told Morgunbladid that the avalanche had been about one and a half kilometers wide. “The whole slope came falling down,” he said.
The group had been traveling north of the skiing area in Hlídarfjall, between the peaks Mannhryggur and Stórihnjúkur.
