As he was hiking in Kyrgyzstan, he had two choices: to find shelter or to keep filming…
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00:00The safest thing I could have done would have been to get straight into the shelter,
00:04put my head down, close my eyes, stop recording and hope for the best and that would have been
00:10the safest thing to do at the time but absolutely I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to miss
00:15this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only see a massive avalanche like that but
00:21also record something like that as well.
00:37Initially when I started filming it was definitely not fear, it was more kind of excitement and
00:43almost like a wow I can't believe I've managed to film an avalanche you know.
00:47It wasn't immediately like terrifying because it was so far away that's what doesn't really
00:55come across in the camera is just how far away it was and so when it started first moving I was
01:00thinking this is so far away I'm perfectly safe and then obviously as it slowly started to get
01:04closer and closer that's when it dawned on me that actually yeah I am going to need to use
01:10this piece of shelter next to me and I think you can see the camera move at times and every time
01:15the camera moves that's basically me holding on to it with a different hand looking down to where
01:20I'm going to jump away to and figuring out what my next move is while still trying to get a good
01:27video. Basically when I ducked down into the hole the snow started coming overhead and it got quite
01:34difficult to breathe and yeah it got really dark as well and that was the moment where I didn't
01:41really know what was going to happen and obviously when that starts happening I thought it
01:46was just going to keep getting worse and more snow was going to come and that I was going to die
01:50basically so that was a bit of a difficult moment and then it didn't get worse it just suddenly
01:58turned really really windy and blizzardy and then basically just kind of came to a stop and I
02:05almost just like lifted my head up it was only a couple of inches of snow that covered
02:10me and it was just light powder it wasn't like the main body of the avalanche so I was able to
02:16easily stand up straight away and walk away from it thankfully. So afterwards I went rejoined the
02:22group one lady had cut her knee quite badly down to the bone another was on a horse when it came over
02:31and she fell off the horse bruised herself quite badly despite these injuries they were both
02:40just happy to be alive as was the rest of the group you know so everyone was really just
02:49laughing crying in tears hugging you know we took a survivor's photo events like this are just
02:56going to become more and more frequent yeah and you know it's something that I experience I'm a
03:01keen skier I won't go into the details on how frustrating I find that and the lack of action
03:06that's being taken but hopefully events like these are more of a wake-up call but I'm more of
03:13a pessimist and yeah I don't know but it would be great to bring light to that kind of an issue
03:20because it is a huge issue.