Wasilla man gets wake-up call after getting caught in avalanche at Hatcher Pass

"I was way overconfident, my ego was really big," said Ed Sallison after learning an important lesson about the mountains: that no ego is as powerful as mother nature.

A video posted to YouTube on Sunday showed Sallison's harrowing run: he begins a descent in a mid-sized couloir, makes two sharp turns, cracks appear in the top layer of snow, and then 50-foot slabs sluff off the mountain, consuming Sallison as he tumbles down the mountain, his body popping in and out of visibility as he struggles to stay above the snow.

A string of obscenities from the cameraman follow, but amazingly, Sallison stands up at the bottom, shouts and gives a thumbs up, and then continues to safety out of the line of the avalanche.

Looking back, Sallison acknowledges that there was a list of factors that led him to decide to take a dangerous line.

While he had previously dug a snow pit in the area - a standard practice for winter backcountry travelers that helps them assess the risk-level for slides based on how the snow and ice are layered - a successful day of riding on Saturday led Sallison and his group to decide to forego that step.

Weather conditions had changed overnight with wind packing parts of the face with a layer of snow that could be susceptible to a slide, it's a process called "wind-loading" which Avalanche.org calls a "common denominator in most avalanche accidents" since the wind can lead to rapid snow accumulation.

Moreover, wind-loaded snow is denser than free-falling snow, forming a more dangerous layer that also fractures easily.

On top of that, Sallison admitted several more mistakes that he now regrets: not checking radio batteries, not making a game plan beforehand, and not planning a line out to safety.

But Sallison did have one thing that may have saved his life, an ABS Airbag.

The airbag idea is relatively recent and was only introduced in the 1980s, but is now a standard for backcountry travelers. Travelers carry an inflatable bag with a compressed nitrogen cartridge that allows for instantaneous inflation.

When an avalanche hits, a traveler can inflate the bag and it makes him or her less dense than the snow and can let the user percolate to the top of the tumbling snowfall, saving them from suffocation as well as offering some limited protection to their head and neck.

As Sallison tumbled and started to sink into the layers of snow, he instinctively reached for the handle to activate the bag.

"At the one point there where I think you can almost see where my arm was coming out about armpit deep, and that's where I knew I was going under," he described.

Luckily for Sallison, his airbag did just what it was designed to do. Just Sallison's body begins to sink to where he is in danger of being buried, the bag inflates, and he rises back up to the top of the slid.

"I totally believe that my ABS saved my life yesterday," he said.

Sallison said that he's been caught in 14 avalanches in his over 20 years of backcountry experience, and that he's carried his airbag for the last five years. He said this is the first time he's had to deploy it.

Despite the dance with death, Sallison said Sunday's experience wasn't enough to keep him away from the mountains. He said he immediately drove to Anchorage to refill his airbag cartridge so he could get back out on Monday.

But when he looked at the conditions, a sense of caution kicked in.

"The way it's blowing really hard today here in the valley and raining and snowing, and I just think it would be safer to stay home," he said.