Wicker and Wilde saw this and knew we had to share it with you for a Feel Good on the :50's. A few weeks ago, Francis Zuber was skiing through some deep powder in the back country of the Mount Baker Ski Area in Northwest Washington State when he saw a flash of color in the snow. He stopped as soon as he could and turned around to what appeared to be part of a snowboard barely visible in the snow. Fearing the worst, Francis clicked out of his skis and crawled through the powder back toward the board and soon confirmed that there was indeed a snowboarder still attached to it.
In a now-viral post to Instagram (below), video from Francis’s headcam shows him frantically digging at the snow to try to get to the man buried upside-down in the deep powder. He breathes a little easier when he finally gets far enough down into the snow to expose the man’s face and confirm that he is still alive. Francis then pulls a small shovel from his backpack and starts the work of digging the snowboard completely out.
Francis’s video on Instagram was viewed over 16-thousand times and has been shared hundreds of thousands of times across the internet. We later learn that the snowboarder is named Ian Steger and he’d been out with friends that day when he went headfirst into the soft powder at the base of a tree. Ian believes he’d possibly been there for 10 minutes when Francis discovered him and saved his life. Now the two snow-sport enthusiasts have become good friends.
Ian took to Instagram this week to express his thanks for his new friend. “Grateful to be back on the mountain and to get a day in with my new brother @franciszuber,” his post reads. “There are no words to express the gratitude that [my fiancée] and I have for you. Thanks for saving my life.”
