The snowboarders were so close to getting home alive. They were less than two kilometres from the top of the Crackenback chairlift where there was food and shelter. Thousands of cross-country skiers have gone past the place where they perished. Many have camped there.
It may be early to speculate but a fairly common pattern with these sort of events is that the snowboarders, skiers, hikers, divers or whatever do not recognise the danger they are in until it is too late.
These snowboarders dug in and apparently did nearly all the right things. When you get hit by a blizzard while skiing in the mountains it is important to make an early decision whether to dig in or make dash for it. When you see, in summer, the places where people have died in winter it is hard to fathom why. So near yet so far, and unless the batteries went flat their GPS would have told them just how close. But in a blizzard with visibility down to less than a metre with cold and snow it is difficult to do everything right. You just want to get warm. The cold makes you inactive.
You could imagine these snowboarders successfully digging a hole, crawling into it, eating whatever cold food was available (they probably didn’t have the energy or willpower to cook), and shivering in their sleeping bags waiting for morning when they would climb out and head home. They would not have realised the danger creeping up.
When they chose the spot for their snowcave they would have sought a place out of the wind. Though the right and reasonable thing to do at the time, that had dreadful consequences. The wind would have howled over the ridge carrying horizontal snow and as soon as it hit the lee the snow would have dumped and built up several metres in a very short time. Snow drifts like these build up on the eastern side of ridges in the main range and last well into the summer, just as this one did.
In the case of these snowboarders the build up of snow probably caused their deaths because unless they had an airhole and maintained it through their first night they could easily have died of carbon dioxide poisoning. They would simply have run out of air and died in their sleep.
An airhole is an essential part of a snowcave. It is usually dug as a small horizontal tunnel with a bend and with an exit point on the lee side to prevent wind entering the cave, but in the conditions that these snowboarders found themselves on their first night it would have been a difficult task to keep an airhole open.
*Crispin Hull has cross-country skiied in the Snowy Mountains for 25 years.