Boy Dies After Falling Off Cliff at Ski Resort

His younger brother, 10, survived in French Alps accident; man dies in separate incident
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 26, 2018 7:07 AM CST
Boy Dies After Falling Off Cliff at Ski Resort
Two people were killed in separate ski accidents in the French Alps over the weekend.   (Getty Images/wingmar)

Two separate ski vacations, two separate tragedies in the French Alps over the weekend. The first involved a boy said to be 12 or 13, who died after falling off a cliff at the Avoriaz ski resort, report the BBC and Mirror. Per LCI News, the boy and his 10-year-old brother had taken a ski lift up the mountain on Saturday, with their dad and 6-year-old sister by their side, but when they got to the top, the father opted to take the little girl down and let the boys descend on their own. It's not clear exactly what happened after that, but the boys seem to have gotten lost, taken off their skis, and wandered into the woods; at some point they both plunged 500 feet off a cliff hidden by trees. When they didn't show at the resort, the cops were alerted, and they were found at the bottom of the cliff early Sunday.

The older boy was dead at the scene. His younger brother, whose fall was apparently softened by tree branches, survived with a broken pelvis and is being treated at a nearby hospital, with a local police official calling his survival a "miracle," per the BBC. The Telegraph reports on a separate incident at the Oz en Oisans resort, where on Saturday a British man died after he and two friends, all said to be in their 20s and good skiers, went off a marked ski run and got lost. A member of the mountain rescue unit says as the men tried to make their way back to the marked slope, they climbed a part of the mountain that was "very unstable, made up of ridges and a mixture of snow and rocks." All three fell at different points of their ascent, between 325 and 650 feet, and one man "died instantly." One of his friends walked away unhurt, while the other suffered just minor injuries. (More France stories.)

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