'Luckiest' Alps avalanche survivors recount deadly ordeal

Two men dug out survivors and dead comrades for an hour and a half until help arrived.

SALLANCHES // "I'm gonna die now", Danish mountaineer Thomas Vybro thought as he was swept away by an Alpine avalanche that crushed the life out of nine of his companions.

Vybro, 30, his friend Alex Peterson, 29, and their guide Daniel Rosetto, 63, were lucky to be caught just by the edge of the sheet of snow and ice that crashed down on the party early Thursday, killing many more experienced climbers.

"It was really steep, we were climbing with ice axe, crampons on the boot," Vybro told AFP Friday from his hospital bed in Sallanches.

The two climbers described themselves as beginners, whose main feeling on the pre-dawn climb was frustration at the bad weather which prevented them from reaching the top of Mont Blanc, western Europe's highest peak.

Instead they had to settling for the slightly lower Mont Maudit, which means Cursed Mountain in French and still rises to 4,465 metres (14,650 feet).

Then, the avalanche struck close to them, "a lot of ice and hard snow", said Vybro, who works in life coaching in Copenhagen.

"I just think: if that hits me I would really be hurt. A split second after that it just hit us. After one or two seconds, I feel I can't stop, I hear my friend shouting and I shout back 'stop, stop, stop'."

The devastating snowslide, thought to have been caused by too many people being on Mont Maudit, the massif's third-highest peak, killed three Britons, three Germans, two Spaniards and a Swiss.

Twelve others were injured, including the two Danes and their guide, as the wall of snow tore off their ice axes, glasses and torches.

"That was terrible, I thought I would die, I really thought 'I'm gonna die now'. Because I'm sure I would hit something, that would kill us or we would go over a cliff. We were going so fast."

The two friends landed on top of each other and managed to dig themselves out of the snow and disentangle themselves from their rope. "Alex only had dislocated arms," said Vybro.

"Everybody says we are the luckiest people in the avalanche. We could dig ourselves out."

The pair then made their way to Rosetto, who had suffered a broken rib and a disclocated shoulder.

They heard people screaming and ran over to where the sounds were coming from, clawing their way with crampons through the snow and ice for an hour-and-a-half before emergency services arrived.

"I had a hard time breathing. I thought it was because of the altitude but it was because I had ice in the lungs," he said.

Of the six climbers that Vybro helped to dig out of the snow, two were already dead.

"The worst thing of course was to see these people we dug up were dead and other people were very bad, with broken legs, it was horrible," he said.

"We used the crampons to dig. It was only one metre but it was very hard to dig. The snow was very hard, it was very crazy."