Idaho teen helps rescue avalanche survivor trapped 9 feet under snow
Rescue efforts concluded on Tuesday after an avalanche trapped inbound skiers at Silver Mountain Resort, Idaho.
Two people were killed but five were rescued.
Among those scouring the slopes as part of the rescue effort was 17-year-old Blaine Goodner, who along with his father and ski patrol searched for survivors in Idaho's first significant avalanche in nearly 15 years.
"Everyone was kind of calm about it -- like, they knew that they couldn't be frantic, and they knew what was happening. They knew how many people were there, and they just needed to come together and do what they needed to do to find them," Goodner told ABC affiliate KXLY in an interview.
Goodner said that during his search he came across a woman who was half-buried and said she was with three additional skiers.
"We probed with 10-foot poles and just did a line, up and down the avalanche until we found them all," Goodner told KXLY. "One of the people she was riding with was the last person we found ... 9 feet under, and was still alive and completely fine."
On the morning of the avalanche, the Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Center issued an avalanche warning for North Idaho mountains but the advisory didn't apply to ski mountains.
"Me and my dad talked while we were on our way [to the avalanche], we were like 'The odds of someone being still alive after an hour under there are pretty slim,'" Goodner told KXLY.
Silver Mountain remained closed on Wednesday, the resort announced in a Facebook post
