As Olivier Gardet piloted the drone around the mountain, his colleague, who was looking through goggles connected to its infrared camera, could see the avalanche clearly: a long tongue of debris, visible from 2 kilometers away. Then he noticed the heat signature of a person moving across it, digging frantically in the churned up snow. “I got on the radio,” Gardet remembers, “and I said to dispatch: ‘There must be someone alive under there.’”
As an experienced pisteur in the French ski resort of Val Thorens, it’s Gardet’s job to keep the slopes safe. But that day he had his work cut out. “It had been snowing heavily the evening
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