"A Wall of White:" Death by avalanche

"A Wall of White: The True Story of Heroism and Survival in the Face of a Deadly Avalanche"

by Jennifer Woodlief

Simon & Schuster, 243 pp., $25

Being swept under by an avalanche is its own special hell. "A person caught in an avalanche is not floating in a wave but pounded in relentless surf, shaken like prey in the teeth of the mountain," writes Jennifer Woodlief in "A Wall of White," a chronicle of the March 31, 1982, avalanche near Lake Tahoe that killed seven and injured many more.

The victim is often undone by the act of breathing itself, since exhaled air "will initially melt the snow but then it will freeze," she explains, creating a seal of ice around the mouth. Unearthing someone from this deadly cocoon quickly is the key: The chances of a person being found alive 35 minutes after an avalanche are 30 percent, Woodlief reports; after two hours, they drop to around 3 percent.

In early April 1982, rescuers at Alpine Meadows ski area beat those odds when, with the help of a particularly alert dog, they saved Anna Conrad, a ski-lift operator who had spent nearly five days in a small air pocket amid the debris of a destroyed building. (Conrad lost part of her left foot and a portion of her right leg to frostbite but continues to ski and is now an advocate for disabled athletes.)

Her dramatic rescue and the avalanche that necessitated it are the heart of "A Wall of White," but, unfortunately, the action doesn't break until the book is more than half over. That makes for a lot of anticipation.

Woodlief, a former CIA case worker and the author of a biography of skier Bill Johnson, does an admirable job of building the tension by re-creating the lives of those affected by the avalanche, but these stories are no match for the forces of nature that changed them forever.

Nora Krug is The Washington Post Book World's monthly paperback columnist.